Stefan Roigk – Suffering For The Promised LP

Stefan Roigk – Suffering For The Promised LP

Being in the making – or un-making – for the past 14 years (2004-2016), Stefan Roigk's »Suffering For The Promised« has gone through many stages, from being finished, revoked, left untouched, reworked, discussed to finally getting banned onto vinyl in its ultimate and irrevocable form. An atmospherically intense but yet utterly fragile piece, combining concrete sounds, field recordings and devotional vocal fragments to an eclectic and highly intimate composition, consolidating Roigk's position as one of the top players in the game.

„Suffering for the promised“ combines "concrete sounds, field recordings and devotional vocal fragments". It is not easy music. Maybe it is the brief length of this that made me play this over and over again, sometimes getting distracted and not paying too much attention, and seemingly something I get lost in. Maybe it's an omen that, just like Roigk, it took me so much time to get into it. The whole thing is a collage of sounds, moods, textures, impressions, instruments and maybe even words. Surely the devotional aspect is something that plays a big role here. With occasional wordless chanting and humming, a stroke on a bell and some additional reverb there is a delicate religious (quasi or otherwise) approach and works well.
Every time I played this I seemed to be noting something new in the music and as such these sixteen minutes surely contain a rich wealth of information. Musique concrete is probably the best term to say what it contains. It is, I think, Stefan Roigk's best work to date. (Frans de Waard for Vital Weekly)