The Cikada Ensemble is a renowned Norwegian ensemble, famous for its in depth interpretations of - for the most part – new art music.

This CD – sporting an illustrious, jokingly outrageous layout – is a mix of Swedish and Norwegian art music pieces, in a (hopeless?) struggle to reconcile the good-natured differences and rivalries between the two neighboring countries that once were one nation (up to 1905).

On this compilation we first hear Asbjørn Schaathun’s “Our Whisper Woke No Clocks” (1993), which emerges like a classical piano piece with a lot of room reverberation. Kenneth Karlsson is a masterly pianist, and it’s a pleasure to dwell inside the vibrating tones of his touch. After a while, as you’re drifting into the impressionistic reflexes of the piano, Cikada hurdles down with all its might, breaking it all up into pieces of flying wood and strings… As the dust settles, the piano, spiraling along, re-enters, fresh and reborn, and a brush fire of Cikada intonations engulf it – but like the three men in the burning furnace the piano stands its ground, cool and collected, bluish in color, revolving on a stage set in heaven, or some similar place, and it’s not long until lamaistic monastery rattles spread their shrill sounds across the dry-aired highlands of Tibet. This piece is a time/space-machine!
In fact, the sub-title of the piece is “From Twelve Songs, song IV, poem by W. H. Auden” (1936) – so there…

Shrill sounds of strings move on in when Rolf Wallin’s “Solve et Coagula” (1992) enters the laser-box ride. However, as these gnawing auditions progress, little sprinkles of percussion join in, and a flute of a Greek god paints pleasurable motions across the cloudless Mediterranean horizon, where the houses hide in the colors of the clay.
The title means “dissolve and coagulate”, and of course this is a pretty good description of what this transforming, receding and re-emerging music does. It’s a beautiful array of sounds here as well – not only interesting. There’s something of the story of “Tristan and Isolde” here, hidden under the idyllic feeling of blue and gold. Mostly it’s just pleasure, though, in the sounds, almost erotic pleasure!

Åke Parmerud is one of Sweden’s most prolific and well-known composers of electroacoustic music, which he masters perfectly. “Mirage” starts with a solo piano, though, slightly out of tune, plying the chords a little off, making them much more interesting, as they blend with the electronic manipulations, in a swirling dance across the plains of the unheard, the un-suspected, where we always enter every day without noticing, since that which is totally different looks just the same, until all of a sudden, in a dream…
This almost calls to mind some insane piano adventures by Ross Bolleter in outback Australia, where he recorded a worn-out, forgotten old weather-torn bar-piano out in the shed on a merciless day, though there is absolutely no haste here. Parmerud takes his good time to build the image, the… mirage! Parmerud has succeeded in blending the electro-acoustics with the piano very well, and Cikada shrouds the soundscape with insertions too, making this a very hallucinatory piece, out of Indian reservation peyote and mescaline highs of olden days.

John Persen participates with “xEx” (1993). This is full force right off, but soon after that a splendor of rhythmic colorations hurries on by, getting you get caught up in the Stravinskyesque modulations, soon entering the kind of evolving, accumulating Baltic minimalism of the likes of Osvaldas Balakauskas – and even Arvo Pärt might dwell somewhere deep inside the tonal web, yes, even Philip Glass, looking like a giant Goofy leaning in over the keyboard, banging his big hands rhythmically across ebony and ivory. The string parts sound at times like the Kronos Quartet interpreting Terry Riley and his good medicine quartet parts of the ancient Hopi prophecies. I guess you get the picture! Good stuff, easily digested and fun, yet intricate and re-listenable!

The last piece on this very much purchasable CD is “Magnified Fragments of a Melody” (1995) by Henrik Strindberg, Swedish enfant terrible! Again it’s Kenneth Karlsson and his piano that sets the pace, joined by flutes and beautiful percussive strokes of a xylophone (maybe?), and this moves in the sparse/dense vicinity of mineral water compositions by Brian Ferneyhough; super-structuralistic, super-intellectual, yet somehow unpredictable and bird-flock-like in movement, semaphoric in tendencies, getting the message across from hilltop to hilltop, and we all roll our thumbs over at the asylum…

The Cikada Ensemble does one hell of a job here, with an artistic grace that outshines the glare of the reflection from a window across the yard, swinging in the wind…