- A touching and occasionally searing portrait of grief through the lens of post-punk techno.
- If you've been following Mika Hallbäck—AKA Rivet, or sometimes Grovskopa—for any period of time, you're probably familiar with his French bulldog Lilo, whose image was as synonymous with the name Rivet as Hallbäck himself. The Swedish artist's second album, L+P-2, features a snoozing Lilo flamed by glorious sunlight. It's an appropriately angelic image, because the album is both a dedication and a reckoning with loss. First, before starting the album, Hallbäck's friend and mentor Peter Rehberg (of Editions Mego fame) died, followed by Lilo at the end of 2022. Shaken by these two deaths, L+P-2 is a mournful and occasionally hectic portrayal of grief written in the language of weeping synths and electronic drums. It's gripping in its moments of emotional ambiguity and rhythmic flare-ups, and eerily still at others.
If I were to describe the Rivet project as anything, it would be techno and post-punk. Hallbäck prefers three-dimensional drum sounds arranged in unusual patterns instead of the gridded thump of so much of clubland. But when I say post-punk, it's not in the way that Regis or an artist on Dais Records might do it. There's nothing retro about Rivet or L+P-2. In fact, the music's rich timbres, minor-key melodies and outré drum sounds align better with timeless records from Coil or Psychic TV. This comes out best in the album's multi-part suite, "Tilt To Turn," originally conceived as an extended piece for live dance. On L+P-2 it's presented fractured and incomplete, as if shattered by the shock of grief. "Part 3" features one of the LP's most techno-adjacent beats, midtempo but thrilling, while "Part 1"'s bold synths purr like a quivering bottom lip. The slow, foreboding "Part 4" features a lashing of vocal that feels a bit like keening. (There is no Part 3.)
Some tracks are mood pieces, like the Akira Yamaoka-esque horror atmospherics of "Sarcoma" and the pulsating sequencers and vocal pads of "Ten Blind Doors," where hope and despair interact like oil and water. The more banging "Rōsh" and "Le Kland" offer something close to dance floor fodder, though the metallic loop that emerges on the latter is lopsided, like a stuck gear. "Rōsh" is more Nine Inch Nails than Chris Liebing. The album ends with its funeral lament, L.T. Fisk moaning over some of Hallbäck's lushest, most human electronics, the synths squished and curved to sound anguished—what someone means when they say a musician can make their guitar cry.
Though L+P-2 is a snapshot of a specific and painful period of the artist's life, it's also something of an expanded universe. A month after the original LP came a collection of remixes, including an exceptional Hodge edit and a rework by Hallbäck's alter ego Gravskopa, which puts a dance floor spin on Rivet's downtrodden electronics.The Bandcamp download version of L+P-2 comes with a live, 17-minute version of the full "Tilt To Turn" suite. Here, the composition is sweeping and epic, sadder yet also more triumphant than the pieces on the album, presenting an alternate but no less compelling story of grief. Swinging between moods, textures and even versions of its own narratives, Rivet's latest work represents not only the pain of loss, but the way it distorts and creates reality in its own image—and how you can move on.
Tracklist01. Tilt To Turn 1
02. Tilt To Turn 3
03. Ten Blind Doors
04. Sarcoma
05. Rōsh
06. Le Kland
07. Tilt To Turn 4
08. Lilo's Lullaby
09. Hukat feat. L.T. Fisk