This CD is one of the most important issues of the last decades in the sphere of Swedish contemporary art. The New Culture Quartet is a unique occurrence in modern Scandinavian music, and the members of the group are latter day jesters, redefining the concept intermedia art, effortlessly traveling the habitats of human culture, entering room after room of emotional and intellectual atmospheres, flashing quirky grins, opening door after door on human predicaments, human suffering and dreams, sniffing the treasures and rejects of the periods, riding their secret ghost ship through the ages, wry smiles lighting up their windblown apparitions…
This CD brings to the fore some choice samples from the recordings the group made over the years. It’s a magnificent concentrate; an odd, facetious, brilliantly medieval kind of insight into the forlorn, meaty, ghostlike properties of this strangely alien and familiar existence three planets from the center star.

One person who got as excited as the reviewer about this CD was Professor Emeritus Stuart Dempster, the famous trombonist and long-time collaborator with Pauline Oliveros in The Deep Listening Band:

From the booklet:

A section of a longer interview I made with Folke Rabe in 1991 dealt with The New Culture Quartet:

The booklet contains a long elaboration on the part of Folke Rabe, which is quoted in part here. Comments inside brackets are the reviewers’. Rabe recollects:

Folke goes on to explain how the group conceived the idea of The Ship of Fools and the later Fools Trilogy, from which the music on this CD is drawn. It was Jan Bark who had acquired a reprint of Sebastian Brant’s 1494 version of Ship of Fools, which originally is an allegory from the Renaissance widely alluded to by artists of the time, picturing mankind as a shipload of fools destined for destruction, while they maintain the illusion that they’re headed for Paradise… Folke Rabe further explains that The New Culture Quartet combined this concept of a doomed ship of fools with different human notions from various periods of the center of the universe: race, mankind, Earth, Sun etcetera. As they worked on the synopsis for their grand intermedia performance, they related kind of freely to their original idea.

When they had gotten their ideas and wills together, they had arrived at about one hour of performance, mostly set in the dark, fitting the medieval, meaty kind of dark spirituality that was a practice of love and death to the very core.
The Quartet by this time had integrated pre-recorded tape parts, film, light-and-shadow play, multislide projections, stage sets and theatrical acting. It was an offensive creative force that blew through the minds of Rabe, Fuzzy, Norman and Bark!

The gang brought The Ship to The Zagreb Biennale and also Austria in 1983, after a couple of public rehearsals in Stockholm. Then, from time to time, the Ship sailed, landing a total of 75 times in different ports in Scandinavia, Latvia, Poland, Germany, the U.S.A. and Canada until the sails were finally lowered in 1997 as the four jolly sailors dispersed somewhere inland, Rabe retreating into his Stockholm studio to ponder new compositions by himself.

The idea of transforming The Ship into a Trilogy had been brewing for long, and the second part added was The World Museum (not to be confused with Das Welt-Parlament. That is written by Stockhausen!). The World Museum was premiered at The Nordlyd Festival in Oslo, Norway, in 1987. It is a kind of dream play, in which the fools endure a series of disasters. The lurking risk of these unlucky events was sensed already in the earlier part. In The World Museum the travelers pass into a new dimension, into the third and final section of The Ship of Fools, Narragonia. This is a fools’ paradise; the final destination, the fate of the travelers. The piece was premiered at The Electronic Music Festival of Skinnskatteberg in Sweden in 1990.

Folke Rabe:

Folke then talks about the importance that Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516) has played for the pictorial form of The Ship of Fools concept. For Narragonia his painting Cure of Folly has meant a great deal.
Folke Rabe underlines that The Fools Trilogy was a joint venture, composed collectively. The group had meetings, bringing along sketches, resulting in homework, more meetings etcetera, out of which the work gradually grew. Sound work was also done individually in the studio, or with a varying number of members present, while the final touch always involved the entire crew.

Folke describes the vile sides of trying to adapt an intermedia performance to the CD format, and concludes that it is an impossible feat. Consequently, the CD Ship of Fools does become something else, something different, with only those parts present that can stand their musical ground firmly, and even then often only after certain adaptions.

However, the sounding result comes through as a vibrant atmosphere of The Ship of Fools, as a captivating account of one of the few really important ventures in contemporary art of later decades, in a sound world that conveys a peculiar truth; that of life being an awesome playground for comedy and tragedy, where you ever so often don’t know which one is which…

Track 1 is called Eccentric Prolog. With its initial sounds of a distant crying babe and mooing cows on a rhythmic backdrop, a wildly doppler-effected railway crossing, birds up in the trees and other animals, for example a ptarmigan of the Lapland expanses, flying around in a sonic whirlwind of spatiality - the title is very much called for… Seriously; this is fun, a little Åke Hodell-like, I’d say, in the spirit! This is really good, European – perhaps mostly French – acousmatique of the musique concrète fashion, pulling the sounds out of their natural habitats and using them like slingshots… Wow!
A slow breath of deep timbres comes sweeping now and then, ominously foreboding something dark and vicious… The booklet simply defines this as EAM (Electroacoustic Music)

Sanza Rag comes next. The instruments utilized are called Collective Sanza and Underberg-sikus… Well… luckily the booklet provides explanations. The Collective Sanza is said to be a thumb piano with steel springs fitted onto the soundboard, modeled on the African Mbira. Here the soundboard comes in the shape of a flat, triangular traffic sign.
The Underberg-sikus is a collection of a kind of panpipes comprised of tuned small bottles from the aperitif company Underberg… Anyone but me thinking about Harry Partch? Or Sune Karlsson? Or Johannes Bergmark? I hope so, my educated, initiated friends and foes – or like Dylan says; “Friends and other strangers…”
It kicks off like a North Indian raga; that strumming across all them strings of the sitar, you know, ‘cept there’s no sitar. A fast, thudding, whispering rhythm emerges, locomotivish, with a soaring synthesizer see-through falling like a lady’s silk gown around your face… and its sensual, erotic, even gamelanish, in a Western way. Those pan bottles make for a beautiful tripping dance around the perimeter; swiftly spreading musical circles, ever-generated, like the rings on the water from a continuous fall of drops: beautiful, dreamy, clean – stylish!
This does remind me of something, but I can’t really put my finger on it. Perhaps it’s a Trance Gong CD that I have (an American gamelan ensemble), or is it Robert Macht’s CD Vishnu, or even Paul Lansky’s CD Homebrew… This reminds me of all these; a kind of swirling minimalist Western Gamelan brew, if you catch my drift, if you dig what I’m saying, Mr. Man! Nice! Swift! Elusive! Transparent! Soaring! I could listen to this for hours.

Final Rag hits track 3 with a clarinet, two trombones and electroacoustics. This is a wonderful little melody, served in different syncopated rhythms, gliding in and out of sight, past and back, in an illusionist trombone number of highly developed skills. I’ve heard this before on the old radio. I believe this is a piece with true hit potential; watch out, Billboard!
Seriously, folks, this swings madly, the backbeats and the shuffle, the madly happy gestures, the tilted heads, the wry smiles, the tap dancing, jeeezzz! This may be called Final Rag, but it’s a true starter, getting one and all in hefty motion, “down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy”, to quote the Man from Hibbing! The sudden metallic halt near the end and the extended post-attack sound fanning out arrive in a musical surprise that breaks the ongoing party in the most brutal way, easing out in a downward glissando into the next track.

Uncle’s First Dream sports trombone, kantele and electroacoustics at number 4. The scenery here is more enchanted, layer after layer opening in a cinematic manner, valley after valley presenting itself under our fly-by – but soon the elegant and introverted dreamscape of the golden trombone weaves a shroud of contemplation and sweet fragrances all around, me sitting back in my Ian Dunlop “say-after-me” 1960s British armchair, floating in the center of my room, at a perfect distance from those mighty loudspeakers, which are also floating a feet or so above the floor, in the moment’s cartoon magic… and those garlands of bliss keep falling all around in slow, slow, slow motion… in this all but narcotic relaxation!

At track 5 we find a piece with the alien name Bullroarer, Episode… yes… Ah, a bullroarer is a Bronze Age instrument or sound maker; a pebble attached to a thread, which can be swung around in the air, thus producing a deep vibration that can be heard for miles; a method used also by Australian Aborigines. The sound is related to that which the Gallinago gallinago produces when diving across the marshes of Scandinavian springs! Here on this CD the sound mostly expresses an ancient way of communicating over great distances. I feel the ages piling up above my shoulder like a mighty fait accompli of human mismanagement… For the record I have to insert that the booklet describes the particular bullroarer used herein as propellers of small wooden discs hung up in strings.