Kenneth Karlsson begins his booklet text with a reminiscence of how he felt when this Cage project was starting: “It is never going to work…” Well, he was contradicted by a surprising reality, and here the CD is, fresh, innovative, and a splendid addition to the flourishing Cage phonogram catharsis of our day.
Initially, Karlsson had his doubts as to whether he was going to get a clearance to insert screws and bolts and nails into the Steinway at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He was calling the piano tuner, Jan Haghus, and when the tuner received the inquiry he got off the phone and into an argument, but when he picked up the receiver again it was with a reluctant okay!

It was by no means obvious that Cage was going to be chosen for the release of a new contemporary CD by Albedo. Kenneth Karlsson says that he sort of had drifted away from Cage’s “backpacker-zen-attitude” (I love that expression!) after the 1970s, but that he had become fascinated again by Cage, as the years had passed. The pieces chosen were written by Cage between 1936 and 1958. Cage really was an arrow into the future, out of the creativity of some ancient shamanism, no doubt!

As the musicians began dipping into the music, they had an ambition not to be seduced or framed or blurred in any way by former interpretations, so they decided to really begin from scratch, with the scores, and build the sounds from the scores, without any side-glances. This, of course, is tough with a composer like Cage, whose scores you often have to interpret yourself, to the best of your knowledge. This means that a Cage piece can sound very different, depending on who’s interpreting it, which’s translating the score into sound.
They started to rehearse, quite ambitiously, but more often than not found themselves cutting down on the rehearsals in benefit of coffee sipping at a nearby coffee shop!
However, during this time, they gradually got more accustomed to the Cage atmosphere – that thin air transparency and, perhaps, that “backpacker-zen-attitude”… and they got off to a good first concert with this music, feeling as though they performed the music of a great classical composer – which they, certainly, also in fact did!

As far as the recordings for this CD goes, they musicians ran into some unexpected problems, which they, with straightforward ingenuity, soon outwitted. It appeared that the piano preparations for Amores affected the damper positions, which hampered the damper. One of the percussionists of SISU, Tomas Nilsson, had to stoop into the piano to assist the damping with his hands! Even though there still were some audible rattling artifacts in the fourth movement, they decided to keep it – so listen for it!

When Credo in US was to be recorded, there was some difficulty in receiving shortwave transmissions in the hall, so the shortwave ingredients had to be mixed in later. Even in the studio, it was a tough feat to get good reception, so, using Kenneth Karlsson’s father’s old radio, they ran around the building of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), seeking out the best position! The best space was found in a second floor smokers’ room.

Isn’t all this improvisation around the project Cageian in itself? I think the Maestro would have smiled broadly at all this!

In fact, from then on the booklet account of what went on at the recording sessions outwits me completely. I don’t really understand what they did and how they did it, concerning Aria and subAria, but it involved Hilde Torgersen studying the score silently, occasionally staring out a window, and after scrapping some wild ideas of combining parts of Etudes Australes with Aria for solo voice (which may, according to Cage, be combined with Fontana Mix and Concert), they decided – it seems… - to combine the piece with their own ideas (it is not explained exactly how), and call it subAria, to indicate that they maybe had removed the piece some distance from Cage’s intentions. However, considering the score for Aria, which looks like colorful children’s drawings, one wouldn’t really know what to expect; especially since the group’s aim was to begin everything from scratch, not caring about earlier interpretations.
They decided to do just one take of Aria and Imaginary Landscape, and they really did, but Kenneth Karlsson says that he doesn’t know for sure if they would have stuck with that idea if the result had been lousy.

The above information is extracted from a text by Kenneth Karlsson. Tomas Nilsson also participates in the booklet with an interesting. The overall impression of this set of musicians is one of highly skilled individuals with a lot of humor and unpretentiousness, which makes the listening even more exciting; you feel the joy, the sense of exploration and the enthusiasm. This is not very common these days.

Credo in US is the introductory piece. The shortwave is magnificent at the outset, really Stockhausenesque, but the percussion that hits rhythmically is Cageian with full might, rhythmic, bouncing, hammering, feverish, in a tempo that you find in A Book of Music for Two Prepared Pianos or Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos. It is full of vibrant life, overwhelming but still structured, like a swarm of barbed wire spider webs clashing at full moon! The prepared piano and the percussion and the alarm clock and the voices on the shortwave hits home, I tell you! This will be played numerous times on my stereo, probably driving neighbors nuts! You name it, we like it!
At some instance short insertions of Arabic music on the shortwave broaden our senses, directly followed by a kind and gentle solo melody on the higher pitches of piano preparation; the most beautiful little musical gesture, a little like something out of the Italian recording on Cramps Records with Cage himself playing Cheap Imitation. You know; nice, poetic, rippling, transparent!
I wouldn’t expect to ever hear another recording of Credo in US that could replace this one. I am truly enthusiastic about how well this is worked through, and how persuasive the group’s creative ideas come across. I buy this, one hundred percent! When shortwave voices in Swedish with a heavy Finnish accent start, I crack up! It is simply hilarious! The very last seconds sound like the instrumental part of some Om Kalsoum song.

The short A Flower comes in at 2nd track. If ever that “backpacker-zen-attitude” earned its reputation, it’s here! Hilde Torgersen, with a voice kept precariously low-pitched, absentmindedly seeps through some consecutive tones, like a child playing with bucket and sand or pinecones… yes, pine cones!
She assembles the absentmindedly colored tones with her voice, and builds a little pine cone mound of them, while, sparsely and fingerish, the percussion drops some circling measures of time, the seconds dripping unevenly, time stretching and contracting hither and thither, as time tends to do when you’re preoccupied with the feat of gathering pine cone tones and letting your vocal cords vibrate pleasantly…

The well-known and often recorded Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (What a title!) is next on Hilde Torgersen’s, Cikada Duo’s and SISU’s CD.
Torgersen inhales and delivers the text high up near the thin roof of white veils of clouds, silently passing jets leaving crisscrossing streaks of white exhaust through her short rendition of the song, James Joyce’s text from Finnegans Wake outlined like a not to ominous skyscape message from within an Irish mystery…
The text is adapted from the Isobel passage (did anyone think of Björk?!) of Finnegans Wake, Page 556, lines 1-22. It is written for voice, using three pitches and closed piano, the percussive effects – those dry but still hollow sounds, resulting from that tapping, while Torgersen manages to render the piece a sense of ritual, of offerings given with a light heart, bowing to necessity of age-old traditions of the ancestors…

The text:

Here is the section from which Cage took his text, with all the surrounding Joyce text. The text Cage actually extracted and used are shown in purple. Note that the title of the Cage piece is found here in Joyce’s text, though omitted for the song:

(The information on the text above was tracked down at Allen Ruch’s great site THE MODERN WORD, the Web's largest site devoted to exploring twentieth-century literature)

Forever and Sunsmell on track 4 is built on a text by e e cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894-1962). The composition consists of two parts (the first dramatic, the second lyrical), connected by an unaccompanied hummed interlude. The work follows the phraseology of the dance by Jean Erdman.

This also – maybe quite naturally, considering the utilization of solo voice and percussion – opens a ritual sequence, in my mind placed at some charged area, like Ales stenar (The Rocks of Ale) in Skåne, in southernmost Sweden (not far from Dag Hammarskjöld’s Backåkra), or Stonehenge, or that indian burial site in Little Elm, to the northwest of Dallas, Texas, where I once biked, dodging all the speeding watchdogs out of the roadside farms...

Before the percussion kicks in it is a meditative but – in a withheld way – charged vocal monotony. As the singer jumps and inches herself up onto a much higher and more intense monotony, a rattling, almost sacral Tibetan percussion (you know, deafening and metallic) permeates the song, though with instrumentally withdrawn and silent parts inserted. As Torgersen gets into the intermittent humming solo, all is very peaceful. This is only for a short breath, though, and when she comes back in the more lyrical part, the percussion walks beside her like attentive and serving dwarfs around Snow White, or, perhaps, more threatening, like the wolves circling the camp of Jack London in Alaska, sniffing, stalking, the voice of Hilde Torgersen simply a benevolent spirit visiting London in his dreams, the smoke of an almost died-down campfire still rising in a thin streak above the endlessness…

Amores is a longer piece, divided into tracks 5 – 8.
Here the magnificence of the prepared piano gleams and glows with all its ingenuity, eastern mystery and western technique, eastern skies and western bedrock – and the light wind of the spirit of Cage touching my cheeks, moving my hair; a faint movement of the window curtain… a light smile moving through the timbres…
The percussion relieves the piano in a crowded but very silent conversation, like the musicians were all gathering in a far corner of a coffee shop, pouring over some secret interpretation of life, whispering and mumbling intensely…
In track 6, the soft and kind of hollow timbres of the percussion, low-pitched, without the need to persuade or lure, manage to massage my tympanic membranes, sending a tickling feeling into my head and down my spine, in a lustful sensation that glows like a tingling vibration in my fingertips, and I can sense an aura around myself, attuned to the harmony of the ether by this percussive act of healing! Magnificent!
Track 7, the third part of Amores, is a slow-motion locust, sitting idly on a leaf in Nebraska, summing up his impressions in a clicking locust daydream, the giant combine harvesters of Man soundlessly climbing along the wheat horizon like alien dor beetles…
At the last part of Amores the might and glory of shimmering overtones send all the colors of the rainbow in crystal sharp wave-patterns across the soundscape, rising loudly and closely miked out of the preparedness of the piano. After the inward daydream clicks of the Nebraska locust, this massive might of the piano and its prepared properties all but overwhelms you with radiance and beauty, in the peculiar mix of floating timbres and hard-on percussion which is the identity of a good piano preparation.
I have seldom heard such good piano preparations as on this CD. The initially unwanted, extraneous rattling sounds in the fourth part of Amores that Kenneth Karlsson talks about in his booklet text, just gives the piece more character, as the musicians also felt, which is why they kept them. The presence of these sounds is just a nice bonus!

Trio, allotted three tracks – 9, 10 and 11 – is written for three percussionists, and has a duration of just less than 5 minutes.
Tomas Nilsson of SISU writes in his commentary that the musicians weren’t aware beforehand of the composition Trio. The simplicity of the score triggered their curiosity. They sensed that the piece maybe wasn’t as easy as it looked, and they discussed the matter in depth.
They arrived at the conclusion that it would be good to use as light sounds as possible. They tried out toy drums and other cheap instruments, but felt they needed a different sound quality. They didn’t want the bright piccolo woodblocks to be too heavy or dull, so they bought small mallets with plastic handles and small wooden heads. They weighed a mere 20 grams, and produced an elegant sound.
When time came to record Trio for this CD, the mallet question was raised once more. Some still thought they sounded too heavy, and some of the mallets had been worn down. However, when sifting through their assortment of instruments, they found a number of toy drums that they had bought at IKEA for another project half a year earlier. These drums were played with really tiny mallets made of plastic. They weighed less than 5 grams apiece!
At the recording session it was at fist hard to play those mallets, since they were so light, but the musicians soon got a hang of it, and the result was good.

Again I get insect associations at movement 1 – Allegro -, tiny bugs sitting in a bamboo groove, chatting loosely. The light, almost finger snapping percussion, is airy, spacious, simply marking time and position, it seems, in a geometric insect measurement in the groove; black dots spread out in four-dimensional white space.
Track 10 – the 2nd movement – is more brutal, heavier percussion joining the tiny and light layer of prickly insect audio. It gets heavier rhythmically too, and the movement is indeed called March.
The third and last part is Waltz, which is a light and lighthearted miniature, the tiny bugs performing a dance in a sudden homo sapiens outbreak, humorously or sarcastically portraying the dangerous crown of creation… sharpening your attention in the process!

Aria occupies track 12 with ten minutes.
It is a piece for solo voice, and Hilde Torgersen gives it a thorough run-through, expediently varied, tumbling, swaying from style to style, from innovation to innovation, holding her hand before her mouth, and then at times sounding like a melodramatic Russian singer from the beginning of the 20th century, sometimes like Maria Callas, sometimes like Diamanda Galás: yes, it’s infinite, bewildering, fun like a violent ride on a roller coaster; no time to think! She talks, sings, talk-sings, screams, pleads, caresses, growls, breathes!
The percussion adds color, dynamics, perspective and a relentless humor!

Imaginary Landscape IV sits at track 13. It’s a spellbinding 24-radio shortwave encounter, recorded four times and mixed. The radios were borrowed from Jens Haftorn at the Norwegian Radio Historical Society. This is technically quite authentic, since the radios are old, and were made at the time of the composition of the piece.
All this really gives a kind of cross-section of the world, of human life, at one short instance, a slice of world time recorded and entrusted to the binaries of the CD. Amazing! Completely bursting with life and more life, seeping out through the static. I am very enthusiastic! I could cry, feeling all this human life in that faint blue hue around the planet, transmitted and received, transmitted and received, transmitted and received!

The very last work on the CD is subAria at track 14. It’s a work which started with the rehearsals of Aria, but which got too much of the musicians’ identity and too little of Cage’s score, which is why it got its title.
You might get an idea of the circumstances at the recording by this Kenneth Karlsson quote from the booklet:

Well, this magnificent flurry of Cage whim and SISU-Cikada-Torgersen ingenuity all adds up to a whimsical pleasure of intellect, spirit and itching anatomy; a worthy conclusion of a CD that John Cage would have treasured!