Well… this initially struck me as an occurrence in the vicinity of… Philemon Arthur & The Dung, Öyvind Fahlström and Fritz the Cat, all having digested some specially imported breakfast cereal from Christiania and journeyed to a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ashram to meet up with Spike Jones and Folke Rabe… but let’s face it; it’s from out of the head of Dan Fröberg, one of the freest of radicals in this neighborhood of the Earth!

I think Mr. Fröberg would enjoy the company of the likes of Rotcod Zzaj in the States and the duo Alog in Norway, not to mention good old vinylist Askild Haugland, also Norwegian. I’m talking about ingenuity, I’m talking about freedom, I’m referring to a quote from Bob Dylan that goes: “If I'd lived my life by what others were thinkin', the heart inside me would've died.”
The music that Fröberg presents is marvelous in itself, but the aura around it, the atmosphere of it, the inspiration it delivers – are just as important. All too many – and I mean MANY; especially in the so-called avant-garde or contemporeana, who pretend to be free and creative – are, to the contrary, boring traditionalists within their little sectors, their meager coteries, their closed circles of cowards, within their jealously guarded little niches… and Dan Fröberg represents the opposite of this disdainful misunderstanding of the nature of creativity. He is so alive it is almost scary, and so free that you instinctively grab for something to hold on to!
Lapp-Lisa and Harry Partch would fit right in; Erik Satie and Bob Hund, François Bayle and Nils Ferlin, Tomas Tidholm and Hank Williams, Pandit Pran Nath and Ernesto Diaz-Infante, the Dalai lama and Françoise Hardy!

Dan Fröberg is the musical analogy to Hinduism. He swallows everything, makes it his and moulds it into invincible sound art!

I sometimes feel I’ve seen it all, heard it all. I’ve been working intensely with music and the arts for many years, I’m working closely with people like Stockhausen – and I tell you, the only things that matter, the only things that get me seriously going – are freedom and humor. Stockhausen is permeated with both qualities – and so is Dan Fröberg! This CD is one proof of that – and it makes me happy!

The essay on the recordings by Magnus Haglund is so interesting and well written that I decided to give him credits amongst the artist crew above. Good liner notes are getting increasingly scarce, too, as does compositional ingenuity, so hats off to Haglund for his text! There are too many musicologists around, and too few listeners!

I’m not sure about the titles of the tracks, but I state what I think is valid concerning them. I believe track 1 is View From the Pagoda – but it doesn’t really matter.
It is slowly faded in; a soaring transparency of circling, spiraling wheezes, inserted with the jingle jangle of hinges… or perhaps a swing hung from a branch of a big tree in somebody’s childhood; there is always somebody’s childhood - and the circling sounds appear to move at a very high speed, vibrating like a spinning top on the floor of my early years; a tilting Saturn of my kitchen floor, while the saliva-inducing fragrance of the pancakes my mother was making spread a sense of security that could only lessen as the duration of life extended… There was never a place more secure than that linoleum floor and that smell of pancakes… never a time more nowish…

The ringing of Fröberg’s audio turns golden like the brass of some distorted La Monte Young pieces of the 1950s and –60s, surely very meditative, albeit with the seeds of havoc and wilderness just below the shining surface, below those convex surfaces of bliss – steel or honey – and the squeaking recollections of amorous adventures in beds long since lost to a relentless Chronos; dust and stars and bodily illusions, smeared out like glue to which celestial bodies attach like flies to a fly-trap… in grainy sounds of the space-time continuum, articulated and moistened by Dan Fröberg’s attentive wit.

A female voice rises out of these squeaking bed springs and the Eastern timbres of gold, in a manner reminiscent of Ralph Lundsten’s early piece Cosmic Love; to this day the sexiest piece of electronic music ever written! Yes, somehow this passage in Fröberg’s piece brings on visions of Japanese insects in Lotus petals; erotic, sensual, arousing…

As the piece approaches its conclusion, the lion part of the sounds recede and disappear, leaving a thin layer of condensation on the window, in which a tiny bell resounds with an inward melodic figure in the female voice and the obvious reverberation of an atmosphere of a real, genuine geographical place; a worm-hole to the so-called real world (just another way of dreaming…),

I give up on the titling of the works, hence just referring to numbers, i.e. the order in which the pieces are spaced on the CD.

Track 2, apparently, is the title track, with a man – in China, I suppose, asking the fundamental question; the one everyone hopes to one day get an answer to: “I wonder, can a car [c – a – r] go and do the carg o [c – a - r - g - o?]”
It’s profound; it’s… deep, yes! Seriously, the pronunciation is priceless! There are extraneous sounds present, too, somehow watery, as if the good old boy was sitting on a pier, cooling his feet in the water of a river as he speaks, adding the atmosphere of Earthly PLACE again, like in a radio documentary by Hanna Hartman or Britt Edwall.

The Chinaman finishes off with: “…I wonder [w – o – n - d – e – r], spelling the word meticulously…
This is serious fun, I guarantee!

Track 3 seems to be a combination – unparalleled, almost – of field recordings from China, inside and outside, stray ambiences of streets and restaurants and winding alleys – and rock n’ roll treated Pierre Henry doors torn away by deep static from faulty amplifier wiring and a dreamy, minimalist barrel organ, smelling of raw fish and scooter fumes! Little children’s voices, cut-up and mishandled, are thrown into the maelstrom of sounds, and… jeez!

Track 4 offers a glowing, over-all ambience of bulging soap-bubble gold in a wobbling drone of beauty, inside which – like inside a soap bubble – voices and free-floating sceneries from jazz clubs and concert halls hover; dreams caught by Terry Riley’s Planetary Dream Collector – and as I write I hear the planes taking off from Skavsta Airport, Ryanair loads of thrifty travelers heading for Stanstead or Hahn… and the magic property of reality mixes in with the real magic of Dan Fröberg’s sonic visions – as the significance of John Cage’s approach to sound dawns on me loud and clear!

Track 5 starts with a dive into the pool, as a woman at some kind of gathering welcomes everybody – here comes everybody! – to a jazz event, until that faulty wiring short-cuts life again, opening unnoticed cracks into side shows of reality, in which parallel worlds make themselves lucidly known to our auditory organs; a wonderful, close voice of a woman singing a chanting song that sounds like a lullaby… but crescendos of harshness kicks in, blurting a blur, appreciated by applause, while dining hall ambiences announce a kind of spacious emptiness with a lot of potent silence at hand… and no one can make much sense – or make much sense of it – so the trick is to lie back and enjoy, regarding every sound as a sounding tool, an instrument of the world and the moment, either stripping it of its inherent meaning – which takes a lot of practicing – or allowing its meaning to linger, mixing in the fluidity of flaky meanings of the music, a kaleidoscope and star-crushing mixer of worlds and identities; Dan Fröberg’s household tool; the sound world mixer, approaching a real-world world music!

Track 6 opens with a male voice – an announcer of some kind, perhaps from a Chinese auction? – echoed in an Elvis Presley close confinement echo chamber of Heartbreak Hotel, cast at you in piercing white audio, clawing at you in sharp asbestos audio that penetrates and makes you sick – but hey, it’s not Elvis Presley; it’s sound poet of saliva spurts; Henri Chopin, deliriously Chinized by Fröberg, immediately superseded by a submarine organ-type sound that seems to be modeled directly on the first bars of Strawberry Fields Forever – and sure, “nothing is real, nothing to get hung about…”, and I guess Dan Fröberg is the first free-thinker that has managed to make something viable and truly startling out of those ingredients; a Chinese Henri Chopin and a submerged Strawberry organ, equally significant in the stretch of audio that unfolds, in strange, venomous bliss!
As if this wasn’t enough, Dan evokes some sea gulls too, and the rumble of a ship’s fog horn, the salty smells of the harbor, with odor of fish and fragrance of tar and hemp, rising around you in an illusory hologram of scents…

Yeah, it’s a swinging dissection of the world, scooped up by Fröberg and thrown around on a merry-go-round of sound samples, totally accepted for what they are, praised in the listener’s embrace for the dire combinations they make, adding up to something much more and different than the sum of them; a blessed cinéma pour l’oreille, running backwards towards the end… slowing to a precious beauty of slow-motion time vanishing backwards down the funnel of chronology…

Track 7 is a meadow of birds – or the confinement of the false image of freedom of an aviary (but “are the birds free from the chains of the sky-y-way?”) - human voices and car horns floating around the periphery of the massive body of chirps. Eventually an infrasound ambience bends your sub-woofer out of shape and starts moving objects in your room – and as in a dream a distant notion of a piano quivers on the horizon, like something you see in the quavering layers of heat over summer asphalt; a mirage of an Emil von Sauer Central European piano concert of 1912… and then the telephone rings in your music, in your mind – in your sleep!
The deep ambience, on the verge of loosing itself below the threshold of hearing, inflates your head like a balloon, like the back-in-an-idling-bus feeling of Alvin Lucier’s Crossings For Small Orchestra With Slow-Sweep Pure Wave Oscillator.

A liquid world of glassy, elastic shapes embracing shortwave static opens around the listener, in encouraging whistles from passing electronic delusions. Lowpass-filtered organ flakes flutter about like glass fragments around WTC towers while micro events from micro worlds seep out into the gross-form of existence in un-deciphered messages conveyed through Theremin lingo…

Way inside the standing waves of humid audio a telephone keeps ringing in vain, apparently inside a vacated room, a vacated hotel, abandoned in some distance disaster – or is it a wake-up call in somebody’s vacated life; time to change, time to go through the mill, through half a year’s consumption of anti-depressants, to be reborn on the other side, pick up your enthusiasm at the end of the tunnel and step out in to a new light, with slightly alerted wavelengths to match your spiritual growth in the bardo of this life?

Track 8 commences with a right channel household tool or a barbers electric cutter or a circular saw cutting the underbrush of roadside ditches, as a female voice expresses herself dead center. There is – as often in Fröberg’s pieces – an ambience, a spatial feeling of vibrating space – and children’s voices in wordless singing of scales appear, accompanied by and old rural school organ, pedal-powered, and the organ takes on a slightly widened ear space, multiplied and broadened in a weird form of temporal shift, dimensions touching, partly overlapping in an illuminated play of quantum mechanics, Planck length strings vibrating inside hypothetic worlds of latter-day theories of physics…

The organ of corti translates the incoming compressions to readable streams of electrons, flashing auditory messages inside the halls of mirrors inside our brain – and it seems we are the eyes and ears of Gaia, this mystery being observing itself…

A woman utters a number of isolated words on the deep backdrop of the soaring, hovering organ, sounding like Julian Beck in Alvin Curran’s For Julian, that won Curran the Prix Italia some time in the 1980s – and the same method was used in Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites, recently reissued on a double CD, John Cage’s part: “Ice – Dew – Food – Crew – Ape” –, which were the words Cage used.
This section is one of rest in Fröberg’s set of audio adventures; a solemn cathedral of human words rising under the dome like choppy prayers, in the rumbling of the giant organ that roars like an approaching tsunami…

At the end of track 8 that dreamscape out of a distant time layer; a piano concert many decades gone, rises again, like a memory reaching across the gap of amnesia…

Track 9 bounces off in a jolly, out-of-tune keyboard melody, accompanied by shuffling feet and a “Hej Martin!” greeting; obviously a field recording from a school yard or a kindergarten yard, somewhere in Sweden – because the children that perform a dance rhyme – “vänster, vänster, höger, höger, fram, bak…. (left, left, right, right, forward, back) Etcetera – speak Swedish. If you take no note of the faulty wire static (that Fröberg likes a lot!), this piece really does remind any old Swedish fart of the over-pedagogized atmosphere of the progressive years at the start of the 1970s in Swedenland, when only leftist macrobiotic feminists were allowed… as the Red Wine Left gulped more and more red wine, and the Left pealed off into more and more leftist movement, known by their cryptic abbreviations, like KFML, KFML-r and so forth… It was a gas, gas, gas!
The melody sometimes moves into the realm of bands like Samla Mammas Manna, later called Zamla.
The telephone rings inside someone’s life again, and a speedy Zappa-Zamla keyboard tune evolves, later formally taking on a more funky beat, before it gets jellier and wobblier and drenched in gluey substances… (and no plans for next Sunday!)

Track 10 is very short, but full! You hear a gong inside the weather. It feels like a Japanese garden – a rock garden – with the gong player standing under a roof, sheltered from the rain, while the listener stands across the yard from him, under another roof. It’s peaceful right in the heavy rainfall. This is a field recording with the complete requirements for a composed piece of poetic music present. Wonderful – I could listen to this for hours (perhaps I will import it into SoundMaker and prolong it thus!)

Track 11 takes you right into the midst of a Chinese soundscape, a playful little melody figure on a toy marimba – or something like that – and a friendly conversation between people that have the comfort of knowing each other well, never having to fear the loneliness of Swedes and Finns, who lie dead, undetected, in their apartments, missed by nobody for months, until the maggots tell on them…
A plucked string instrument is also heard in this wild China talk ambience of track 11.

Track 12 opens hesitantly, a synthesizer tune, more like a scale, a simple little figure that stands by itself – until that telephone in the mind rings again, setting off a terrible tremor of thrown-together sounds; mopeds, another kind of telephone, a chainsaw, sea birds chirping madly, a slow-motion tune climbing and falling at right, a dedicated cough… and a repetitious something winding things down…

Track 13 has a bell beginning; small bells, like cow bells, ringing on the backdrop of an electronically stretched ring of a bell, like a bell flung open and unfolded, good for a million miles, ever thinner but always golden; the essence of that which is bell in a bell…
The brass overtones shine and gleam like the roofs of Thai temples.
Fröberg widens his view on bells, as they start sounding more Mediterranean, like some soundscapes out of the closed-in gardens of small towns and villages in Southern France, so well described in electroacoustic works by Jean-Claude Risset and Jacques Lejeune on phonograms from the revered Groupe de Recherches Musicales.
Seagulls fly in over the garden, and the fabric of sounds tightens as the piece fades out in silent thoughts.

Track 14 is a long breath of a rockscape, slopes of Lapland, embellished by Saami yoiks, though a little more soothingly melodic than they normally are – and I suppose these are Chinese women, not Saami – but my first notion was a place just north of Alesjaure, by those lakes, where I’ve seen a whole mountain slope take off; actually a giant herd of reindeers…

Track 15 is a workshop in a steel works, but what is that breaking subway train doing there? Ah, it’s one of these fantasy rooms where anything can happen – and does! The piercing ringing of high pitches and ear-winding timbres grab you by the neck and drag you into a world where industrial timbres suddenly seem to have drifted over into a chamber ensemble with droning trumpets and trombones and celli, seasoned with the complaining voices of infants.
The drawn-out timbres sound like Toot n’ Blink Chicago; a famous ship horn concerto by Charlie Morrow, first broadcast in Sweden by Folke Rabe in his praised radio series From Hopefulness to What? in the late 1980s.

Track 16 whines in desolation in very high pitches from inside the secret atmospheres of some stolen-away piano bar – and it is impossible to tell how this is perceived; perhaps from inside a slightly faulty mind that crackles and buzzes, but it ends in a school class singing something that is either religious or nationalistic…

Track 17 delivers the most subtle high timbres in elastic progressions; thin, transparent bands of delicate sounds, gently applied on your frame of mind, soap bubble light and sensually fondling the erogenous zones of your mind. This music has got be achieved by the handling of glass, to the extent that even Adelaide’s ensemble Music of Transparent Means must be placed in the shadow, and even Denis Dufour’s Bocalises distanced… Maybe you have to conjure up Annea Lockwood’s Glass World to get close… or maybe and perhaps even the Swedish household music guru; the notorious Danderyd sound wizard Sune Karlsson, with his 12-hour work Phonia Domestica from 1988; jeez… where he wipes a wet glass bowl for a good 45 minutes…
The feelings induced by these sounds so radiant with almost scary beauty places you right on the high plateau of Tibet, though, somewhere between Shigatse and Rhongpu monastery, in thin air and cold winds, prayer fliers in the wind, the sky a darker blue, the tea flavored with salt and thick with slightly turned yak butter, your head beating with altitude adaptation…

The atmosphere is deeply spiritual, permeated with beauty and humor and the conviction of endlessness; this journey from life to life in search of enlightenment, so elusive, so hard to finally enter – but always the goal, somewhere in a Buddhahood billions of years ahead…

Female vocals are detected inside the timbres, like auditory pledges for consolation and hope and rest – a music that is a place of rest for the weary traveler of lives, and we thank Mr. Fröberg for his rewarding creativity and his stubborn evasion of the trends and fashions of contemporary man. Again, Bob Dylan said, in Up To Me: “If I'd lived my life by what others were thinkin', the heart inside me would've died.” I substantiate that; I know Dan Fröberg does. I know many a man though, “who’d rather drag you down in the hole that he’s in…”

The last and final track, number 18, reveals an open air ambience with the hush of a flow of air and the slightly withheld ring of a thumb piano; a reflective, introspective notion, similar to the sight of a three-year-old kid sitting by himself in a sandpit, toiling with his bucket and spade with the whole focused concentration of the Universe; this relaxed will of the Cosmos through the life of a child… and so Dan Fröberg’s CD winds down in this atmosphere of soaring mind and endless energy which is the nature of this existence, of this life, of this world…

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