Monster Drownage – with the subtitle Full Moon Over the Quarry – is a classical gem in the annals of the compositional adventures of myself, comprised and welded from ideas of the moment one blessed night with my friends and foes Hans Åke Runell and Sune Karlsson in 1977, at the House of Magicians, Lilla Strömgatan 3, in Nyköping (Shitville), Sweden.

I lived on the bottom floor of the old house (built in the middle of the 1880s), while Sune Karlsson lived on the second floor. Hans Åke Runell lived in an other old house on the other end of the small town. Sune was my teacher in many ways, a pathfinder as good as anyone, and probably better than most. He played Om Kalsoum and Terry Riley in his apartment, while I persisted with Bob Dylan. Many years later I produced a radio series with Om Kalsoum songs, and became acquainted with Terry Riley – but all of that wouldn’t have happened if not for Sune Karlsson and his burning spirit. I love him for it.

This night in 1977 the three of us – Runell, Karlsson and I – got together up in Sune’s living room around a mono cassette recorder that belonged to Runell. We gathered some percussive objects on the table, like a brass mortar with its pestle (that Sune used for mashing cardamom for his Jordanian Bedouin coffee), glasses, metal ashtrays, water bowls and much more. We simply put on the cassette recorder and hit it, working our way without score or even the slightest plan – but it came out better than one would have expected. I didn’t realize quite how well it really went until decades later, because I wasn’t acquainted with experimental, improvised music, electronic music or anything resembling what we did, and had never heard of Harry Partch or, for example, The Scratch Orchestra. Some years earlier a friend of mine working in a record and book store tried to sell me Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, but I could in no way understand the alleged greatness of the piece – until years later, when I even worked four consecutive years down at the Stockhausen Courses in Germany… So that recording – which I named Monster Drownage; Full Moon Over the Quarry – really was some kind of intuitive creation.

Nonetheless, I kept the recording, putting it on CD in the 1990s, and this year I returned to it and shaped up the sound, turning it into stereo through an effects unit, which I also used for some other tricks – but the basic feel of the piece; it’s historic and virgin, pristine legacy, remains.

Man, I really dig my own Donald Duck mimicry, Sune’s pouring of water and Runell’s celebrated monster roars, right down the last moments of monster drownage at the bottom of that fateful, moonlit quarry…

I congratulate myself and my two friends and foes on this achievement, presented here in two versions, the second a little more treated than the first!