Track 1. – [00:07]
Track 2. Frustrating [2:48]
Track 3. Small Vessel [0:18]
Track 4. Bastard Eyes [3:45]
Track 5. I Threw A Wobbly [3:05]
Track 6. Under Certain Things [4:35]
Track 7. Bubblehead [2:27]
Track 8. – [0:06]
Track 9. Ruddy Spark [1:53]
Track 10. The Small Percent [3:39]
Track 11. Slate [1:27]
Track 12. Depth Perception Lack [3:17]
Track 13. Human, Annoyed [1:40]
Track 14. – [1:02]
Track 15. What Happen’d? [4:15]



photo: anticon records

And this is what I love the most about our carbon based flow through the mind sphere: these sudden occurrences that shoot like deer across the road on a nocturnal bike ride, flashing past in the photon flow from your head lamp. One of these sudden surprises that I couldn’t have foreseen was SJ Esau’s CD Small Vessel, which appeared to me while visiting good friend arborist Zoë in Crewkerne, Somerset this past summer, when I spent a week with her right in between two adventurous and exhausting Lapland mountain hikes. Her name shows up in the gratitude list on the cover, so she’d gotten a copy from the source; Mr. Samuel Wisternoff, and some promo copies as well. Quite causally she slipped the CD into her player right there in Stonehaven, Nut Tree, Haselbury Plucknett, North Perrott, in her small apartment on top of a tea importer’s garage – and I was immediately captured by what I heard. It hit me right off as a cranky, grouchy, poetic surge of flaky and tumbling little moments in a timelessness machine; an unlikely swell of a cosmic ocean in the bleak light of erratic sparks from shortwave static and the Northern Lights; communication and ex-communication; venomous candy floss spun around rusty barbed wire in the mist of a country dawn, where yawns squeak like the old hinges of barn doors through the back of your mind, through the dreamy realms of amnesia that soothe and soar. The sonics of this CD alleviated my Somerset visit – on the doorstep of Dorset – like the multi-layered frequencies of Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen interferences; ill-will grinding coarsely against high hopes in the enchantment of sine-wave generators: poetry and technology intertwined: poison and star shine cranking new worlds ajar!

I brought the promo copy back to Sweden with me, and after I came back from a second Lapland hike, crampons and all, I listened to Samuel Wisternoff’s Small Vessel off and on, now and then, between bike rides and workdays at the police station. The music kept on growing on me, beginning to color my atmosphere, really starting to mean something to me, more than the causal identification of something genial and loose. Small Vessel – it can’t be helped – was also associated with my experiences of Somerset, a bus trip to Glastonbury, a coffee shop in Wells, bike rides into Crewkerne, walks with the read haired wonder of a woman Zoë on public footpaths and so on; a pleasant feeling for me, who believe I lived my last life somewhere in southern England.

As time passed, though, the music became itself in a new way, stripped of much of the initial associative imagery, and for the first time I began to hear the sounds in a more pure way, as they – I realized this – really stood their own ground.

Track 1. – [00:07]

I didn’t at first consider this a track, but the beginning of a track, and perhaps it can still be viewed that way. It immediately raised an eyebrow; mine, that is! It came on like crumpling John Cage paper and a small child’s voice actually saying the words “small vessel”. John Cage at times liked to work with “small amplified sounds”. This goes into that bag. The remainder of these few seconds disappear in a gush of saliva and rushing breath – perhaps; and the percussive impressions of too close a contact with a microphone and just a few of those non-seconds, those zero timelines that usually pass you by, unless you’re looking for them, the way I sometimes take my camera to go out and find zero places, like never visited spots under motorway overpasses, or in abandoned industrial lots and so forth. Recently in Stockholm, on my way to Fylkingen to record Lene Grenager rehearsing with The Great Learning Orchestra, I found a zero place under a bridge, where the hobos go to shit. That was a zero place full of shit. I got nervous in my sandals and started thinking of jaundice…

Track 2. Frustrating [2:48]

This begins like Björk’s all vocal ravings Medúlla, which tore me out of my armchair the other year, into a joyous gigue across the floor. So does Frustrating. These guy and doll voice samples, cut-up and rhythmically dispersed, clearing throats and spinning tubes of vocal chord audio up your acoustic ducts, are hurled wildly and thorny, just like they ought to! After these hoquetus beginnings, while the music roars off in a whirlwind of opportunities, Mr. Wisternoff dashes off into a text line that reads

“I have been frustrating,
that’s what I’ve been doing.
Scratching at the surface,
Until the surface is ruined.

Ringing Pavlov’s bell till the dog dehydrates.

Close examination,
of irritating tapping.
Tapping at your window,
in case there’s something happening.
Peeling back the layers,
destroying what is in there.
I’m tapping at your front door,
until there’s no more fingers.

Ringing Pavlov’s bell till the dog dehydrates.”

Half way through the main course the crumpling beginnings reappear a little deeper inside the layers of consciousness, taking off into a rattling backyard Waxahachie, TX rock n’ roll distortion of time frames, old grandpas cutting wood in the wink of an eye, your mind cat scanned in tight vibrations, the cat scanned and sucked into the vertigo of wonder void on the middle age horizon of events – and I keep this startling piece on repeat, gladly! The thumping drum and bass provides a sturdiness over which glary guitar and rainbow part-singing dance lightly and squint-eyed, feet stumbling, fingers clawing, an occasional cat caught… I turn the volume UP!

I receive the lyrics on-line as I’m writing (you can’t always readily make all of them out on the CD), and as I flip and browse I realize the extent of hilarious ingenuity that falls out of this swirl in the universe called SJ Esau; and incredibly happy-go-lucky, flimsy, carefree stumble out into the terrain of linguistics, random poetry and indeterminacy, slapping you in the face like a good Zen guru or the chill of a winter wind as you fall out of your door in February to do your duties in Scandinavia! This is happy and absolutely necessary creativity at its farthest outpost, in the same league as Dylan’s Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread or Million Dollar Bash, or, for that matter Christian Morgenstern’s (1871 – 1914) Gallows Songs (1905) – but freer, more air in between the downbeats, less lenience with dictators and butchers and people who’d rather get you down in the whole that they’re in than come up any higher (‘scuse me, Bob!). The air is so fresh and breathable inside the lyric havoc of these lyrics. The contents are strictly breathables on the Small Vessel CD. The sonorities are rushing up your nostrils, down your windpipe, out in your lungs, through your entire circulatory system, eventually, transformed by your frame of mind, leaving your anatomy in a crackling spark from your nose tip! Hurray!


photo: anticon records

Track 3. Small Vessel [0:18]

The first second sounds SJ-Esau-avantgardeous, but the remaining few seconds move in a soft, rubbery pop march worthy of Mungo Jerry of 1970, with a hideous accordion shadow play in your right ear. If you put this eighteen-wheeler on repeat, you will, you will, you will go mad! We like it!

Track 4. Bastard Eyes [3:45]

Bastard Eyes, cunningly, hits it off with a sweetly rocking summer laziness echoing The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon or Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song – but this deceivingly honey-flowing progression carries the wonderful venom of these lines that bring to the fore the staggering ghosts of Lenny Bruce and James Joyce:

“Someone or thing stuck some hands in.
A minute change which screwed the pooch.
A clumsy fist, a shift and why
Do you have to
Bastardise?

Bastard eyes.
You bastard.

Messed with the delicate balance.
One nudge and then the thing’s besmirched.
Secretly switched and now
It’s parallel but worse.
You Bastardise.

Bastard eyes.
You bastard.

It’s a different version
Even worse than the first one”.

I fall in love with the circumstances of time and space that make this kind of cultural point blankness possible! An obvious observation is that you indeed have to have the text before you to enjoy the full mastery of this SJ Esau hit: Bastardise (verb) versus Bastard Eyes (noun)! Yeah!

I waddle along with the music, until the breaking (like waves) lyrics begin, uttered in a wavy kind of motion that comes to rest in a long breath called bastard eyyyyyyes or bastardiiiiiiise… eventually poured into a pool of words that flow round and around in an enamel tub, observed from a spiritual position under the ceiling; the surface oily with greasy words that climb onto each other like horny tortoises. I get the urge to change the letters in words around to sneak upon the secret of this Sam Wisternoff music, in the vein of sound poet and visual artist Öyvind Fahlström, who could insist on exchanging all u letters for y letters, for example. This way I could get closer to the beautifully twisted significance of Sam Wisternoff, who labors through the philosophical trenches of well-hidden linguistic warfare in his works, kicking unaware asses ajar, stuffing the stinking blasphemous oral cavities of the ignorant hordes of Western societies with all the mysterious syllables they can’t take! Bastard eyes: bastardise!


photo: anticon records

Track 5. I Threw A Wobbly [3:05]

SJ Esau gets into a frenzy in I Threw A Wobbly, mangling time units into a tense chain of steel links, while semi transparent layers semi-hide the process of hard reality, from the blacksmith’s forging business in an ancient awareness to the sound of steel chains against steel hulls as anchors are being hoisted: sea gulls; salty sea; onshore wind.

Sam Wisternoff fills the sound space to the rim, reality bursting at its seams like Scrooge McDuck’s safe-deposit vault, but full with trembling punk funk skunk sounds instead of money. However, there should be money in Wisternoff’s switchblade audio too, the way it has converted my senses down to the last smidgen of perception!

I Threw A Wobbly hits it real hard, then breaks into vocal comments inside a relative and slow silence, as if from inside the eye of a hurricane – where after the hurricane hits again, from the other direction, and oooofffff you go; I Threw A Wobbly! Some furniture falls into place, it seems, in a Florida senior citizen’s bungalow… and then…. I Threw A Wobbly! I Threw A Wobbly! I Threw A Wobbly!

Sam must have a whole wind section blowing, while the voices of a makeshift choir gets thinned out like jet streams across autumn skies, screws and bolts from a Cagean preparation falling out of the hull of a Bösendorfer Imperial never heard here. Guys croak and caw like a gang of grouchy jackdaws in the maze of the current – as I discover further ingredients each time I listen on this blessed repeat! The text, luckily, makes no more sense than before, and I loooove it, poking nerve ends and all:

“The donkey is snapped in two, collapsed on the floor.
What the hell? I might as well throw on some more straw.
The nerve ends are poking out, all pointy and raw,

When I found out it wasn’t working properly, I got upset and promptly threw a wobbly

I threw a wobbly.

My stuff was broke, I couldn’t cope, I smashed it up more.
Now it is in little bits all over the floor.
The machinery was mean to me so I declared war.

When I found out it wasn’t working properly, I got upset and promptly threw a wobbly

I threw a wobbly”.

And I enjoy these places where madly racing guitar chords hack nano seconds aboard long, drawling bass drones, as well as the times the last line is spoken in a waveform unison with one lone and bleak guitar; especially the last, weighed, corrugated, marked, contoured time. I indeed threw a wobbly!

Track 6. Under Certain Things [4:35]

A breath out of the Earth, out of the jitter deep inside matter; the panting of minerals:

”Under certain things there are some life-forms.
I’m not certain which things hide these life-forms.

I tripped over bricks, discovered creatures.
Up above the bricks were other creatures.

All shapes crawl on my face when I look in the mirror.
Small thing, too absorbing to see anything bigger.”

The music: a slow but persistent march, limping along, enveloped by smoky little whirls that dance along the hypothetical body of sound, much like the birds around the rhinoceroses of Serengeti – presented by Sam Wisternoff through the thick, old, lumpy glass of a farm house window from the late 19th century, life passing in a peculiar unevenness, jerky and a bit unclear; dubious as life always is, illusionary; just energy and information: nothing solid, except in our dreams.

I feel I stand with Finnish novelist Sirkka Laine in Helsinki in the 1980s, in an apartment on Orioninkatu Street, looking through an aquarium, having just made love, or just about to make love. The female voice is so simple in its beauty, so beautiful in its simplicity, a little like that nose tip hypnosis Lolita type chanson of Nico, shadowed almost imperceptibly by a withheld male voice in unison.
The beauty never bores you, because this honey sculpture is dressed in thorns and razor blades, swept in wet sheets full of glass fragments, i.e., other sounds that seem to be poured into the musical progression like salt in sores! Mighty!

As the song continues it starts to tighten and present demands, muscles flexing behind checkered shirts of lumberjacks in Hiski Salomaa’s 1930s’ timber songs of Finnish immigrants in America. This humdrum folksy march of ”certain things” is injected with some spare electronics and some static from the last revolution of a vinyl: ” All shapes crawl on my face when I look in the mirror”.

Track 7. Bubblehead [2:27]

Here Sam chooses to begin in high end electronica style, a tiny repetitious fortuitousness pumped away by a rubbery pulsation, a little Matmos here, a little All Spec Kit or Son of Clay there, seasoned with crumpling small amplified sounds of brittle in-flight candy, landing strip handy, but quickly – with that chewing paper floss fluency retained! – moving into some middle of the road teeny pop, absurdly placed in this environment, the surrealism of the lyrics negating their musical veil like Mother Theresa Herr Hitler, and we like it so much:

”[…] Gone so incredibly small.
Can’t leave or enter at all.
Skull turns to stone,
All windows closed.
Stopped letting anything in,
Forgetting everything.
All answers – ‘no’.
Just had to go,
Where sound won’t go. […]”

A swift dance tune on the verge of fantasy, swept in the light mist of hallucinogens and moonlight that comes from within: ”No humans are getting through”…

Track 8. – [0:06]

Track 8 is a clockwork – or something – transition into super-dried applause, for just 6 seconds, but if you play it on repeat, it’ll mean something, take on the shape of something, like a flannel suit lacking the puffed-up meat of a civil servant’s useless body, marching down Dallas’ Greenville Avenue, expressing the emptiness of our daily mirages and habitual lifelessness. Praise be!

Track 9. Ruddy Spark [1:53]

To be able to listen to Sam Wisternoff / SJ Esau I believe you have to learn to let go, if you’re not already in the habit of this. It’s necessary, and it’s healthy anyway. If you hang on to what you think a song should be, what an album should be, and you’ve not yet experienced the free force of Wisternoff or Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes, you’re in the dark, compadre: you’re sidetracked, keelhauled, run over and long gone – and further more, more importantly: you’re missing out! This album can completely refurnish your upper storey, sweep the coprolites out and let some fresh seaside air in. Most of us are in dire need of a revaluation of all values. We do not have to achieve this by way of Friedrich Nietzsche, though. It’s more pleasant, but just as effective, to let Sam Wisternoff and his involuntary speech do the job, in the intuitive tour-de-force of the Small Vessel album!

Ruddy Spark comes across like Herman Hermits in an asylum on a foreign celestial body. The text seems to rise out of a will free of conscious intent, permeated with and fueled by weightless awareness, in a free flowing creativity. From a Swedish perspective, Wisternoff’s texts are the Bristolian equivalent of Gunnar Ekelöf’s Strountes:

”The catalyst,
That fucking spark was insignificant.
The fundamental interconnectedness.

Things link.
A fly dies in my drink.
A ship sinks.
(Another thing I did which wasn’t innocent.)

Humungous repercussions of miniscule malfunctions.

Conspiring sequence of events.
Identify and kill the catalyst.
Identify the catalyst and kill.
The catalyst, identify the catalyst and kill”.

The music in Ruddy Spark is a kind of rickety, loose-limbed, jingle jangle, garage band rock n’ roll, enhanced by a stubborn orderliness of arrangements – arrangements that you don’t notice in the force of the musical moment, but which you discover if you listen again and ponder all those changes of tempi, of instrumentation, of the peculiar breath of density and thinness. Wisternoff masterly handles all kinds of ingredients, from part-singing to electronic venom and rusty guitar chords, from mad dashes to screechy halts, from prickly, introverted zero sounds to exhibitionistic fat bass thunder, from the saliva-spitting wink-of-an-eye commentary to serene Zen Buddhist reflections. Perhaps he sits down and lets his brain loose, seeing what comes out, and then applies this hidden order to the apparent (on loose listening) havoc. I stumble into the SJ Esau room and swirl like a spinning top, but I’m never really worried!

Track 10. The Small Percent [3:39]

Sam Wisternoff brings on quite interesting questions with The Small Percent; where all went, where it all went, where it all is, where the hell it’s all going, where all those sparks and flames of information went/go, however useless, sucked into the quantum soup, floating about like sperms in a state of pure potential, brought up when brought up: “all the information must be buried somewhere…”

And yes, in that pure potential. Deepak Chopra taught me.

This tune is like a mantra; a persuasive, persistent melody, words carried on those girlish Lolita hypnosis vocals again, like Wittgenstein recited by Brigitte Bardot, a drum beat and gluey chords gliding upwards, and then again, upwards, like the glazed-over tunes from a Dutch barrel-organ in some electronic wizardry by Gilius van Bergeijk, while the drums go Ringo Starr in a Magical Mystery Tour fashion (I wonder if these youngsters noticed that?) while the 21st century reveals itself in minuscule let-ons from left-over electronic gadgetry, falling in shreds of scrap-book audio all along the witch tower of these enchanted audio spheres of SJ Esau’s: “I’ve unlearned more than I know…”.

And at times I feel like Mr. Sam is playing around with old time reel-to-reels, speeding up magnetic tapes, splicing and playing backwards at unsteady velocities… So beautiful! I can feel the draft from giant revolving reels with brown magnetic tape: “I forget where memories went…”.

Track 11. Slate [1:27]

A guy in his bedroom, in front of a tape recorder with some simple effects, phasing out his voice left and right, while you think you hear the surge of a big city (Bristol?) out the window; at first amplified raw down to the last urban indecency; then reduced to just a whimper of a city summer sigh filtered by the foliage of a downtown park, as the boy strums his guitar in his room, taking down his promo promo inside a tenement building with hundreds of identical windows reflecting the sun star, but not going through with this in-the-face simplicity all the way; adding some extraneous, flapping gray-brown waste basket electronics for insecurity… “I tried to co-exist but distance is all I want from you”.

Track 12. Depth Perception Lack [3:17]

When I read the text, I feel I understand a traffic situation; a frustrated pedestrian in a flock of predator automobiles, and the way the bastard cars have been allowed so much space, it feels like they know something you don’t know, huh, for otherwise, certainly they wouldn’t be tolerated: “You know something I don’t know”. Having visited the area around Crewkerne and Yeovil in Somerset this past summer, I have gained insight into the British traffic situation, realizing that cars have destroyed England. It’s raving mad how many cars demand space in Britain, raving, raving mad. Cars are cancer cells traveling down the circulatory system of Great Britain:

”A brush against a vehicle oblivious to the erroneous detour.
I’m a two-legged vehicle negotiating through the screeching swarm.
(A conversation with a beeping horn).

My depth perception is screwed.
You’re cleverer than me aren’t you?

You know something I don’t know.

You are giving me the fear.

There are clearly elements missing here.
You have them don’t you?

You know something I don’t know”.

There are desperately charming elements in this rampart tune, especially the slow, swaggering, thoughtful choir with just a plinking guitar in a kind of unison and some low, scraping sandpaper brooding as the whole bunch has come to a halt, standing erect like scared bitterns, just letting the phrase go all through the valley, ’round the mountain sides: ”There are clearly elements missing here. You have them don’t you?” – until the piano picks up where the gang broke off, banging away from side to side, careening over the road, the whole entourage filling all cracks with fat audio: audiomobile audio!

Track 13. Human, Annoyed [1:40]

Playing with words is one of my daily, favorite pastimes, or even, in fact more than that: it comes naturally all the time. As soon as I hear something or someone says something, the words spin around in my head for a check; I can’t help it – and now and then hilarious remakes come out. I wonder if this isn’t the case with Sam Wisternoff as well. I’m sure it is. You would of course think he’s about to sing about a humanoid, but oh no; it’s about a human who is fucking annoyed, a human annoyed! Lovely! In this song he’s like an early, seriously nutty Danny Kaye. With just a little more kitchenware percussion, SJ Esau would be a modern day Spike Jones and The City Slickers!

I find Wisternoff’s commentary on his own writing here, in fact:

“[…] I don’t know why I’m saying stuff, one syllable a day’s enough.
I’ve written something down just to make a mark.
An ‘a’, an ‘a’, an ‘a’, an ‘a’, an ‘a’, an ‘h’, an ‘h’, an exclamation mark.

All of the comfy furniture destroyed.
And I am a human, annoyed.
The instruction manual simply says ‘avoid’.
And I am a human, annoyed”.


Track 14. – [1:02]

This track has no name, so I expected it to be like the other two that have no titles; tracks 1 and 8, which were just a few seconds long… but this one is just over a minute. It could be, from what I hear, some dire tape hiss, amplified and then amplified, on which a repetitious and long-suffering guitarist is meditating, while breathing his harmonica, perhaps, or pumping his harmonium from Jaipur, as that extraneous electroacoustic debris that we have become accustomed to in Wisternoff’s soundscapes flake off this section of time as it is sent into the future on the finishing sound of some kind of ominous war machine in the sky.


photo: anticon records

Track 15. What Happen’d? [4:15]

I have reached the last track on this fabulous SJ Esau CD, which I flew to England to get… well, I flew to England and I got it, and if I put those two facts together, it can be expressed that way… though I really went to see Zoë, who slipped me this music, unaware of the fanatic listening it would lead to in Sweden!

This is an accordion shit storm hit! It has a melody that catches on, and at the end, as the bars are getting fewer and fewer and a disturbing noise gradually takes over and obliterates all nuanced sounds, like an avalanche from the Knife’s Edge above the Unna Räita hut, you are prepared to accept that it in fact is “a hurricane of piss and shit”…

“I thought there was some kind of plan.
I thought and I thought.
Some kind of design I had,
That I forgot. I forgot.

I don’t know what happened.

I was on my way somewhere and then there’s a blur.
An object was mislaid somewhere.
I thought I was sure where I put it.
I thought I was sure.

I don’t know what happened.

A hurricane of piss and shit,
came to my door.
And I could not get rid of it.
And I got caught up in a shit storm.

I don’t know what happened.

I got caught in a shit storm.
In a shit storm I got caught”.

The mood is cozy, the music is a healthy swagger down a safe hometown street, and you’re completely assured, until you find yourself up to your knees in shit and piss, mislead by this pied piper who shows you the real state of things in his involuntary, intuitive and freewheeling candor and frankness.

I never heard music like this before, shitstorm coziness and all – and I hope I’ll hear much more!