Andreas Bertilsson is as much a painter and an entomologist as he is a composer and a musician.

Look for the smallest, tiniest character in the Moomin Valley, and you will find Bertilsson in the vicinity! Look for the surprising details on the shelves of early Donald Duck comic strips by legendary Carl Barks (1901 – 2000)… and you’ll also find… Andreas Bertilsson! He is a master of swarming but also highly defined detail. His audio is imperceptibly refined and shredded, yet glowing and pulsating with the clarity of vastly magnified atomic jitter.

On his new CD on Mitek, Bertilsson also offers the deep, involving but fearsome, ominous atmosphere of a situation inside a late summer lilac arbor (a Swedish national symbol; a summery hide-away in secrecy and closeness; a temporary retreat from the hassle of daily chores; a piece of after-life and heaven right smack-dab in your back yard!), the air slightly humid, the clouds a dark blue, the insects getting grouchy and insolent, thunder in the distance while silence is very, very close…

Somehow he has tapped into the immeasurable resources of dark matter in the universe – and his music molds the dark substance that we know nothing about into a Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin, in front of which we grasp for air and rethink ourselves…

You know those areas where stinging nettles grow; zero-places under motorway over-passes, or in desolate corners of railroad yards: this is the spiritual habitat of the sounds on this CD; a CD for zero spots; the anonymous spaces we pass without noticing; the last remaining wildernesses in our urban circuits; spots of social amnesia, secluded places with their backs turned on us – blind urban spots…

The look of the physical CD with its cover and booklet in itself gives a hint as to the mentality of the project. It gives the impression of an art project – and the title of the issue spells it out: Two Abstract Paintings. This is very much in line with my own thoughts, from the very beginning of encountering electronic or electroacoustic – acousmatique! -, i.e., it’s relationship to abstract art, and the related ways in which you perceive abstract pictorial art and acousmatique. In the brain similar things happen, when confronted with these disciplines; it’s just a matter of the impressions taking different routes into your brain, into your emotional and intellectual situation room, and into that specialized ER of art, where unforeseeable visions are cast up over the walls in sudden flashes, like the erratic, high shadows of workers welding in huge factory halls.

The booklet is equipped with a number of black-and-white graphic sheets - functioning almost like Rorschach’s inkblot tests - that are referred to as photographs, taken by Alorenz and Ina-Maria Rittmeyer. A few of them are inserted into this text. If you hold the pages up towards the light, you get a superimposition of two pictures, creating new and probably unintended – but no less interesting – variations, in a somewhat Cagean method!

I enjoy their minimal, almost Japanese, touch, employing a stripped-down simplicity that nonetheless is charged with an immense tension and a hidden, not yet deciphered, significance; veiled messages that remain to be decoded and understood, with a notion of a promise of great importance; yet undisclosed - morphemes that had to sail veiled in misty anonymity to reach our centers of existence, to pass our intellectual and habitual protective shields undetected and unrestrained, eventually to light up inside our Halls of Conscience like phosphorus in revealing flares of enlightenment, enabling us to rethink ourselves and that which we think is not ourselves, the I and the Thou, the two sides of that which IS.

This pictorial art of the booklet perfectly serves the purpose of amplifying Bertilsson’s sound art, while the sound art does the same for the pictorial art, in a diligent, symbiotic crossbreeding.

The CD comes in two sections, each entitled Untitled. The untitled work that comes first begins in different places according to the state of your hearing, because it slithers and soars through your own personal duration of imperceptibility, until it climbs over the threshold of audibility and makes an impression on your tympanic membranes. In doing so, it conveys a sense of tiny specks of dust slowly dissipating across spread out sheets of black paper, eventually to accustomed random patterns or perhaps just an even layer of grayness, like the grainy, misty audio that enters your anatomy by way of the faintest, slightest air compressions you can imagine, this side of silence. Bertilsson thus makes his humble entrance.

As it is with dissipating dust in your earphones, it can suddenly take on quite an opposite property; that of drizzling rain – and again I find an analogy to ambiguous pictures, as it occurs to me that the lightning-fast switch inside my perception from dust to rain and back again is similar to what you experience when studying one of those pictures that contains two pictures, depending on how your perception is directed, by force of will or involuntarily; the witch and the beautiful woman and so forth. You’ve all seen many of those. Bertilsson’s initial audio on Untitled 1 renders this experience.

After a while I get creepier sensations, in visions of metallic insects swarming the soil, approaching in force and might and overwhelming numbers, to kill us all off, which is what we really do deserve, the way we’ve treated Gaia, our celestial home and intergalactic vehicle. I hear millions upon millions of these thin nano legs marching towards the cities, into the circuits of our power plants and our computer halls, into the vessels of our urbanism, denying us, annihilating us, as our spirits fly up like legions of jackdaws at dusk, darkening the sky…

A couple of minutes into the work, however, Bertilsson opens the inflow dramatically, twisting the levers full blast, pouring jingle jangle sounds that penetrate and scar, but also fondle and stroke! These are the dual aspects of this music; its ambiguous characteristics; soft and sharp, wholesome and venomous.

Andreas Bertilsson lingers and swirls, paints in dark nuances and thick layers, a little bit like Munch or… Strindberg, but even more expressive. He paints with thick timbres that meander in serpentines; satellite shots over the Indus Valley around Multan; strong feelings that can’t be properly tamed, bulging and pulling under the skin, inside the forced captivity of social criteria and judicial frameworks, bound to find an outlet sooner or later, be it in schizophrenia or rampaging art, in sex or extraordinary journeys! The music envisions a held-back libido that will eventually burst, like dandelions through crackling asphalt around the gasoline stations – and the body is always smarter than the mind!

The August arbor sensualities surround you further into the soundscape, as described earlier in the text, and I remember the August of 1975, as I was sitting inside the arbor in the backyard of my derelict building, loudspeakers out on the porch across the gravel yard, a just deceased Om Kalsoum on sizeable volume; Amal Hayati; the Hope of My Life – and I sipped some cool and refreshing liquid…

Some sections of Bertilsson’s untitled oeuvre are very instrumental, i.e., traceable back to acoustic instruments, be it an illusion or not – in a slightly twisted mimicry of KammarensembleN or Mats Gustafsson’s Hidros One adventure… but the sensations get wringed out of whack, into illustrious gardens of Bertilsson sonorities, always wriggling your perceptive convictions out of your grip, taking you further, somewhere else, into halls of sordid shadings and doubtful nuances, gluey substances hanging from your elbows when you find your way out into a blistering sunlight, like treading out of the Retretti caves in eastern Finland, at Punkaharju, after experiencing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites in the granite.

The second untitled work hums and rumbles to a rainy beginning; resounding transformers heard through a subway opening somewhere at a city zero-point.
This is the ringing of rusty frameworks in abandoned areas, moss-grown brick walls and formless piles of corrugated steel; a Tarkovskij zone, a Stalker environment and an imminent threat in the filthy stillness; careless deposition of the poisonous remains of industrial greed… sick rats and scabious rabbits with birth defects… while elsewhere, on the other side of this loneliness, spacious, air-conditioned offices shine with chromium-framed furniture and the white flashes of teeth in grinning capitalist faces!

Sounds of uncertain origin are heard through the tunnels, signing some kind of activity elsewhere, elsewhere, far away; shreds of messages traveling through the underworld, while unspeakable horrors glow on the inside of the eyelids of traumatized victims of the grasping that Tibetan Buddhists have warned us so distinctly about, through the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – and nowhere else have I heard these warnings so illustriously manifested as in Andreas Bertilsson’s second untitled work on this CD from Mitek; Two Abstract Paintings. Take heed! Be aware! The implications have effects down many consecutive lives…

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