After his last time touring the United States in support of 2009's Dear John, Emil Svanängen returned home to Sweden and began to play shows with chamber orchestras throughout the country.

To successfully accomplish this feat, he was forced to revisit his earlier material -- re-writing and re-arranging these older songs for performance on a grander scale.

This experience had an indelible influence on the writing and recording of the appropriately titled Hall Music, an expansive record that finds Svanängen closer to creating the type of orchestral music he has always sought to bring to life on stage (whether he's actually playing with an orchestra or not).

Above all, Hall Music is a study in merging contrasts, an album of impossible pairings. The pacing is simultaneously fast and slow, with gently weaving harmonic structures propelled forward by quickly moving notes. The instrumentation is orchestral and synthesized; organic and invented. A church bell paired effortlessly with horns and an analog keyboard.

Though at first listen it occupies your ears for just over a half-hour, it is an all-consuming sonic affair. It is intimate music that effortlessly fills vast, empty spaces -- in your head, in your room, in your life -- with a grip so delicate yet unyielding that you can't (and don't want to) escape it.

Drawing from both of the emotional states it joins together -- joy and darkness, Hall Music creates its own unique expanse -- one you'll surely want to re-visit again and again.