When my son Isak died at his premature birth in the summer of 1983, my longtime friend Sune Karlsson sent me a recording he’d made of his poems, as a benevolent gesture of compassion; as a well-received act of consolation for me and my wife Judy. This is that very recording, meticulously cleaned and balanced by me, at first a few years back, and then again, second by second, early in 2006.
I have also applied some electronic magic wands to the sound to further clear and line out Sune’s very beautiful reading.

I have also composed music – or, maybe you’d rather call it sound environments – out of which Sune’s poetry rises in intervals.

The music/sound environments come in five sections.

Section 1 is composed from recorder sounds. I played my recorder through scales, and cut short parts of these sounds, running them through numerous loops, after they’d gone through certain down-pitches of various degrees. The result may sound like a mystical, timeless wind ensemble or a submerged ocean organ, or something to that effect. It’s a dreamy, heaving, contemplative music, anyway.

Section 2 is a part from my composition Winter Glass, made up of the resounding of a wine glass struck with a sandalwood pencil from India, the attack when the pencils hits the glass removed, leaving a wondrous glass music that transforms the ether into a transparent beauty of ice and light, dancing like the Northern Lights.

Section 3 comes from a piece in the works called Dialectus Gothensis. This is a section of the final part of that future work. It deals with all the different dialects of the modern day Swedish language. The section that I use here is a mix of people – male and female - talking in various Swedish dialects, but I’ve filtered and manipulated the sounds so much that you can’t hear what is being said. It sounds more like a partly liquid ghost whispering chaos, wherein dark secrets are being conveyed, mouth to ear. It’s pretty ghastly music, really, like eavesdropping on your own sub-conscious.

Section 4 uses a section from my work Stuor Reaiddávággi, which is an electronic composition that evaluates and tries to convey a shamanistic experience I had one summer when trekking the wide and barren expanses of Northern Lapland in Sweden, through the rock deserts beneath the glaciers. I was completely wasted from the trek, carrying a heavy backpack, and finally entered a hypnotic layer of existence through my exhausted anatomy. My mind soared in a state that felt like this music sounds; layer upon layer of floating images, and my body magically carried itself to the end of the day: the mountain station of Saelka.

Section 4 does not only use the composition Stuor Reaiddávággi (which is a name of Lapland valley), but slowly, halfway, slides into a short-wave event that I recorded and edited years ago.

Section 5 begins with a sound environment I call Mosquito Thunder. The sounds are in fact up-and-down-pitched bee sounds that I made for part of my composition Lagboekeri but here I only use one of the many bee environments I used for Lagboekeri.
Section 5 then continues then continues with one of the recorder sections that I mentioned above in connection with section 1 – but here the sound is very dark and brooding, withheld, turned-away.
The long Section 5 is then concluded in the sounds of thinning glass, i.e. a dense sound of glass as described above in connection with Section 2 and the piece Winter Glass, even though this thinning technique wasn’t used in Winter Glass, but in an offspring of that composition.