Med vinden i ryggen (With the wind from behind) is one of Hanna Hartman’s longer pieces, addressing one of the Swedish passions; bicycling! Being an industrious biker myself, I can identify most strongly! There are few pleasures that can top the whining of thin, hard bike tires on dry, even asphalt through the diverse landscape of central Sweden a summer’s eve which doesn’t get dark; just bleak…, but I know the pleasure of biking just takes on other characteristics in, for example, Berlin or Amsterdam. I know it’s a different story in New York, where I have thrown myself diligently between the cabs of Park Avenue on a Crescent 10-speed speeding odyssey in the late 1970s… but it’s still a pleasure, dodging the potholes on the fly!

Actually, the first section of Hartman’s bike piece, which consists of part of an outdoor concert by a brass band, reminds me heavily of an experience I had at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport when I returned to Europe with a newly wedded American wife after a year in Texas in 1979, when a brass band played something similar to the arriving passengers who had just come in on Braniff Airlines’ inauguration flight from Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to Amsterdam…

However, if I dare decipher some kind of chronology and unfolding of consequent events in Hartman’s work (I don’t know if I can…), I’d suppose this jolly brass band plays somewhere in Stockholm… and as the music slowly drifts off on the winds of summer, the spinning of a bicycle chain emerges, gears clicking… Hanna pedaling down the road, DAT recorder handy, the sound of a passing car serving the compositional purpose of a sharp division, letting the shrill ripple of a small brook, closely miked, envision a roadside rest along the route south towards Nyköping (I have figured that one out!)

A dark beat that Hanna Hartman picked up somewhere along her bike route beats a muffled rhythm to the ripples of the brook, and all the small birds of the shade of the forest sing absentmindedly, as the moss-laden ice age rocks rest deep in their gravity and the fern hide the elves and fairies from all but the kindhearted…

The dark, muffled beat – perhaps from some kind of generating station further down, where the brook spills out into a creek – lingers in that hypnotic mix of running water and birdsong, the atmosphere akin to earlier Luc Ferrari soundscapes that I’ve heard.

Light percussive attacks may stem from something held against the spokes of the bike wheels when rotating.

A heavy drizzle starts pouring, and the cycling lady stops at someone’s house, calling a repeated “hallo!” to whomever may appear behind the door as Miss Hartman stands dripping on the porch, still recording, as I envision the sequence… Sudden thunder and showers of rain are well-known occurrences of Swedish summers, but the fresh fragrance after such a passing rain is enchanted, carrying all the spirits of life up your nostrils… and no one is home…

Later the sounds of gravel indicate that Hanna Hartman has left the asphalt for a smaller forest road. The rattling of the bike along the gravel road lets a good old Kletschmer band join in with clarinet and percussion, as the wind grabs the microphone momentarily. Perhaps the composer has entered a daydream phase of her bike ride, as fatigue and the warm feeling of numbed muscles work her anatomy, letting her mind loose for a while…

Apparently the forest around the road has taken hold of Hanna Hartman at this stage, accepting her, letting her in on some secrets of the whispering and murmuring wind through the spruces… because the whispering trees seem to sooth and comfort her, lightly altering their windy voices into stretched-out, elastic speech of resin and spruce needles…

In the middle of this fairytale forest lives not a witch but a lady with dogs!

One of the two dogs goes on barking for a while, and I can imagine Hanna Hartman ducking outside the house with her portable equipment, greedy about sounds, happy about this barking session! The lady opens the door, calls her dog and lets the biking composer in.
This is where the Britt Edwall quality of Hanna Hartman’s art takes the upper hand for a while, through a hilarious conversation about dogs, or rather the lady’s outrageous monologue about her pets. The lady in the forest does have two dogs, but in this recording she is at first preoccupied with one of them; the small one, though the chat later opens up to encompass more dogs... Some people in the land of Sweden have given up on humans for the sake of dogs. This lady seems to be of that breed.
This dog part is a piece of pure social documentary in the midst of the sound art!

“I have my dogs, and I’m comfortable with the solitude of the forest…”

With about five minutes to go, Hanna H. is on her bike again, direction due south, the wheels spinning, the chain rotating on its pinions, the gears clicking in place. As soon as she has left the canine lady the forest once again takes Hanna back, lifting her through the consciousness of the conifer belt, which encircles much of the globe on northern latitudes. The sounds of the wind through the trees again speak to her as to a child bestowed on them, a human child to be guided safely back to humanity. The forest is kind. Hanna is princess. Life is a mystery.

At minus three minutes I know exactly where Hanna Hartman is. This surprised me seriously when I first heard Med vinden i ryggen. Actually, it is not until a little bit later in the piece that I could pinpoint her position, when the name of a place on the coast in the vicinity of the town of Nyköping is mentioned, when Hanna is asking directions! That’s when the ringing signal of a pedestrians’ crossing was a hundred percent located and defined by me, as there is only one of those crossings, especially outfitted for the blind, in Nyköping, in a section of town called Stenkulla.
Ah, I felt comfortable realizing that this biking composer of sound pictures had moved through and recorded that pedestrians’ crossing some time in the early 1990s! Suddenly this piece of sound art touched upon my neighborhood, my own day-to-day reality, like a mischievous smile out of the corner of Hanna Hartman’s mouth!

Towards the end the composer talks to a local old-timer, who drops local names of places like Lilla Uttervik, and it is evident from the short conversation that Hanna is headed for the open sea; i.e. the Baltic.
Sure enough the swell of the sea is gallantly spread across the last minutes of the work, and gulls call out. The heavy, muffled beat from earlier on reappears, as does the spoke percussion, but a new element is the humming of boat engines out on the surface of the Baltic at Bråviken. A crow crows, a gull shrieks… and the sound winds down into… silence.

Magnificent!