Folke Rabe: Introduction to ISNOT (November 2005):

Swedish composers and poets and playwrights of a certain inclination have always – well, since the early Sixties – been very prolific and talented in an art form that has glided between definitions like a dab of butter in a frying pan. This particular art from is more of an attitude and an atmosphere than a downright, well-defined genre. It is always highly interesting, in the way it pulls and bends, stretches and contracts, causing a healthy tension between idioms. In fact, this elusive genre allows for experimentalism of language, music and sounds in a never-ending palette of auditive nuances, with or without a message. Sometimes the works that come out of this generous acceptance of ingredients lean more towards drama, while they may also rise in almost pure poetry, or in a mixture of the two, but also in electronic sound art or more of a musique concrète guise.

Because of the bewildering variety of this particular art, many terms have been attached along the way, like radio art, musical drama, sound art, sound poetry, electroacoustic mixed form etcetera… but the most viable term in connection to what I’m talking about is text-sound composition. This is a generously applied term that encompasses most of these otherwise hard-defined cases. This term was invented by Swedish poet, writer, composer, radioman etcetera Bengt Emil Johnson and composer and poet Lars-Gunnar Bodin back in 1967, on 3rd September in Hilversum, Holland.

Evidently – and at long last! - the art of text-sound is reaching a renaissance these days. Fylkingen Records is releasing a very much longed-for and slow in coming (due to initial funding unwillingness by the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs) CD-box with five CDs of text-sound compositions in late fall 2005; a re-issue of eight long out-of-print LPs from the Sixties and Seventies, and the next project, Fylkingen-wise, is another CD with very early electronic pieces by Bengt Emil Johnson and others from the early Swedish electronic scene, preceding the first electronic studio at Kungsgatan 8 in Stockholm.

Fylkingen has also recently re-released Lars-Gunnar Bodin’s large-scale text-sound work Clouds (1977) on CD.
Lars-Gunnar Bodin has also written and recorded a new radio drama work called The Adventures of Lipton, with the sub-title A Mystery Play for Radio in Fifteen Tableaux Sonores; also – like in the case of Folke Rabe’s and Björner Torsson’s ISNOT - a commission from The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation.

Revered sound art guru Sten Hanson is releasing a number of his earlier text-sound and sound poetry recordings on Firework Edition Records CDs, but he is also working with new pieces, like the recently premiered Ränn-Sten; a magnificent piece of art work, uncanny in its hilarious mischievousness!

As for radio art, Channel 1 of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation has hosted a series of programs under the overarching title White Nights for a few years, broadcast in the month of May (when the nights in Scandinavia are white…), in which new radio art has been presented. Renowned sound artist Hanna Hartman has presented her works in White Nights, and many radio commissions in the field have been delivered to the public through White Nights.

Folke Rabe’s and Björner Torsson’s ISNOT falls right in place here. It slots in nicely in this re-awakened interest for the possibilities of the radio media, and – the tape recorder! Well, one doesn’t use tape recorders anymore, but much of this art form owes it’s birth to the magnetic tape and the tape recorders, and the possibilities they offered, in the form of layering, permutations, manipulations etcetera. The methods have survived the introduction of new technology, carrying over into the hard drive environments.
The sound object was born, and from then on only the fantasy of the composer limited the artistic outcome of the experiments.

When tape art became refined and the artists became skilled, certain directions in radio art and tape art started to dominate, proving to be extremely persuading and effective in the telling of a story through sound. However, bear in mind that a story doesn’t have to be narrative, with a beginning, middle and an end, in some kind of linear progression. A story can be told in a non-linear fashion, with code-sounds or code-atmospheres; with poetry, electronic sounds, concrete sounds and cut-up speech – in any number of ways.

I remember when Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s A Mölna Elegy was done this way in 1984, directed by Anders Carlberg. It was magnificent, and an early precursor of the White Night pieces of the 1990s and later.

Of course, in the wings you will always hear echoes of Åke Hodell’s radio works and radio dramas from the 1970s, like What Was Hemingway Doing in Africa and many other works. He was a pathfinder in several ways.

I am happy to find that the incredibly initiated and internationally renowned composer, musician and radio man Folke Rabe in his senior years – having just turned 70 on 28th October 2005 - has produced such a work as ISNOT, which falls so perfectly into this text-sound and radio drama tradition of Sweden.

ISNOT carries certain burlesque theatrical moments through some sections, in declamations of dark comedy, which echo some atmospheres out of earlier stages in Rabe’s career, like the Ship of Fools trilogy with the New Culture Quartet, but I also hear crafty devices from early Swedish occurrences, typically from the university traditions of old, like the well-known collection of songs entitled Gluntarne, written by Gunnar Wennerberg between 1849 and 1851; song duos for baritone and bass with piano accompaniment, which can be sensed sporadically in Rabe’s and Torsson’s work, like a laconic streak through the lingual gesture of the music.

I’ve always felt – especially with some releases from Stockholm label Firework Edition Records – that the most innovative of contemporary Swedish text-sound art and radio drama draws heavily on very old traditions, and typically from the 18th century, in the way the texts often move in a realm of fundamental research, into the make-up of language, through saliva-dribbling morphemic experiments and a daring contextual catharsis, like the brewing scientists of the 18th century did with the elements and nature as such; wild thoughts leading to the production of charts of basic elements and system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms; a kind of brainstorming chaos that ends up in rigid scientific charts! Think, for example, of the Father of Taxonomy, Carl von Linné.

On another level, this sweetly venomous spirit immersed poetry and literature and music. We have, for instance, Olof von Dalin (1708 – 1763), who was a typical example of a man of letters of the Age of Liberty. He was a poet, writing moral satires, and in 1733 – 1734 he published a periodical called Then Swänska Argus, in which he scourged the madness of his day in a humorous style that became immensely popular.

On a different note we have the poetess Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht (1718 – 1763), who was the focal point of a part of the intellectual aristocracy that cared more for poetic elegance and refined taste than Olof von Dalin.
We cannot omit Karl Michael Bellman (1740 – 1795) in this context; a poet whose songs flourish till this day. Olof von Dalin was a role model for Bellman, as Dalin came across in his more gay poems and satires. Bellman’s poetry trembles with life and truth, through which figures out of Stockholm’s 1760s and 1770s move in an amazing presence. Joy and sorrow are joined in Bellman’s oeuvre, often in a burlesque delicacy, easily accessible in two volumes of his best writing: The Epistles of Fredman and The Songs of Fredman.

The 1700s are, on a deeper level, comparable to the 1960s, with a flood wave of discoveries, with a new way of thinking, with a gush of creativity and a certain peculiarity, a certain bohemian wretchedness permeating the dominant minds of the day – and not least an optimism for the future, and a feeling that Man could improve his circumstances considerably and even revolutionary through science, while humanity also started to see itself in a different way, in light of advances in the fields of astronomy and physics, for example.

The art of text-sound emerged in its current shape during the Sixties, and Folke Rabe wrote a number of musical pieces in the Sixties, which, though not adhering to the text-sound characteristics, still enrolled in the venomous spirituality of the decade. In 1967 Folke appeared at the infamous Musiktage in Donaueschingen, from where an unofficial recording exists, featuring Folke Rabe and Jan Bark, performing some of Folke’s most notorious 1960s’ pieces: Bolos for Four trombones, Pièce and Rondes. This was a concert with Folke Rabe, Jan Bark, The Culture Quartet and The Bel Canto Choir. Folke has humorously and with quiet irony entitled this CD Wahrheiten, because we all know how strict the German music festivals could be in the Fifties, still in the Sixties trying to continue this same lacklove of humourlessness and complete absence of self-irony that Stockhausen steadfastly holds on to till this day! And still, if you take yourself too seriously, you’re just a big laugh! (hehe, how’s that for breakfast, Karlheinz?)

However, in Folke’s case, even more far-reaching analogies are possible, with the Middle Ages and the special sense of joint venture of Life and Death that was bestowed on villagers of Europe when the Black Death – the Plague – silently roared through the lands like an invisible Reaper, demanding a horrific tribute. This uncertainty, this possibly imminent death, caused among poets and musicians and writers and painters and common people a virulent gayety under the gallows, so to speak. This was in a sense whole peoples’ humor macabre, a whole humanity’s self-irony, in the sharp light of the elusiveness of reality, of this Earthling life. Thus the Plague was, psychologically speaking, a kind of Liberator out of the harness of necessity and the caste of society.

Yes, Folke is an aristocratic jester of the kind we find in the Middle Ages, but also very much a chart-writing, meticulous arranger of circumstances, like the scientists of the 18th century! He is a complex person with highly creative and utterly original traits, which, as we have seen, are traceable at least into the Middle Ages, by their characteristics, flowering in the 1960s - and again surfacing in his and Björner Torsson’s ISNOT.

Like a jingling, bitterly cold winter’s dawn, ISNOT begins, sharp and high-pitched, like morning’s first streak of light over snowy expanses, in that special aural sensation of innumerable minuscule bells of glass in a brittle time of day; waxwing time…

It almost feels like it’s Anna Lindal playing a piece by Lars Hallnäs, but that is not the case.

Then just ONE single word in the cold: IS [ice…]

Some brittle violin strokes later, TWO words: ISNOT [ice note / ice seine]

Folke Rabe’s music is sparse here, distant, like the bowed flight paths of small birds across the snow: a few black lines of motion, thin on the brink of imperceptibility – a Zen story told on rice paper: silence roaring with REALITY. (Someone sitting on a rock in a snowy slope in Lapland, looking, breathing calmly)

Electronic extensions – or reductions – of the violin travels the soundspace, suddenly rendering it spatiality, spaciousness - and the voice returns, in English: IS NOT: a laconic statement of absence, of emptiness, of the core of existence: nothingness; false thoughtforms, hallucinatory shapes, Bardo scarecrows…

After a continued winter morning’s flight on a ray of light, a young girl’s voice, singing unto herself like children do: “The swallows are resting in the lakes of the dusk, where the row boats are caught in the ice” [so is it dusk, not dawn?]

Torsson’s poetry is devastatingly clear here, for anyone having spent several winters in the north – talking about the closed houses with leaves on their doorsteps. He paints a landscape with his words; he paints an atmosphere: a turned-away emotion – an existence curling up in the closed-down privacy of an apple orchard in January… and Rabe brings these desolate winter words – these black and gray sketches – into his score (sparse dots on a white paper; a swarm of long-tailed tits in an aspen grove); amplifying the inner significance of their laconic semantic shift in the withheld diligence of his tonal consideration, barely touching, hardly breathing… but completely present!

New sounds bubble up, water and air stirring under the ice, brooding murmurs from within, from a river moving in winter unconsciousness, dark veins of the landscape, meandering towards the sea – leaving an involuntary burp in Rabe’s sound art…

A grown woman’s voice appears, with a slightly altered, shifted and developed variation of the young girl’s words: “The swallows are sleeping in the mud on the bottom of the halls; their icy sounds, defined by the clay – but the tones, here under the ice, sound changed… as if the small throats contained spacious vaults; as if the dreams of winter sleep could turn small breasts into great halls…”

After this extremely transparent and elusive thinness, ablaze with intense observations, two male voices start singing, coming on like the baritone in Jean Schwarz’s masterwork Quatre Saisons; a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In fact, the preceding jingling winter intuitions followed by this stark, close male voice, renders the Rabe composition, for a while, the same fairytale atmosphere as Schwarz’s fragile density.

At this instant, more of a soundscape opens, with the sounds of water trickling and distant voices, while two male narrators recite Torsson’s text: “The rapids are falling, and the boat falls with the rapids and the body that stands…” – and this is a picture of the log-drivers of old, guiding the timber from the forests down to the saw-mills by the coast, gallantly balancing on slippery logs.

Björner Torsson’s poem is split here into the two voices, which take turn, spatially divided left and right, delivering the words in spurs, one at a time, like a boxer delivering left and right jabs that come at you with force. Rabe’s way of arranging this simple spatial turn-taking allows the poem rhythm and structure that it doesn’t manage in its pure, original form.

Already Torsson arrives at his recurring memories of his mate that drowned under the ice, as the text continues: “…or boys that jump on teetering ice-floes, unaware of Death…”

And he continues, after describing how a little boy disappeared with the black current, depicting the little boy’s cap on the ice by the whole, forever remaining there [etched in Torsson’s fire-ice memory], “even though the ice melted away… and summer came…”

After a story of the sighting of a strange ship that rises out of the ocean and rolls over [the mythical Merzbau ship?], distinct Swedish folk music moves out onto the dance floors of old rural circumstances, the fiddles going through the gestures of age-old, handed-down melody lines, in dialectal variations – always touching something deep in our collective past: Dalecarlia tapestries above the kitchen sofa bed.

Here, for the first time in this work, a true text-sound accent is added; the layering of voices, tickling your hearing with doubled or half-hidden sentence lines, moving in and out of each other, panning and stretching and bowing and dipping, talking about the reflection of the moon in the water, seemingly traveling with the ship that heads into the Great Unknown.

“[The water] drowns in its own depths”…

“Why does the Water Sprite play? The Water Sprite plays; you want to unite with the playing… […] Then the weight of the water is confirmed. You feel like you have rocks in your pockets… The water lacks bottom…”

Rabe’s music turns electroacoustic, delivering shattering violence, which eases out in the fierce motion of chains… or anchors rushing to the sea floor.

“The water entered its heavy head into a boy’s pocket… It forms long tunnels under the ice… where the body moves soulless… and the water spins itself around the body… After several weeks the wind lifted the ice lightly…”

“They found the cap! It lay screaming in the reeds…”

Rabe accomplishes amazing combinations of sounds; roaring water that gushes forth and seamlessly transcends into the string exclamations of an orchestra, falling in serpentines of fear and despair all around, rising in rock-solid panic like the pumice of a volcano.

The fiddle music returns, but in a dream state backdrop, fluttering about like fragments of memories, the way the Tibetan Buddhists say you remember a life you’ve just left, in flaky and incoherent reflections of something you thought were YOU.

“The water shook to the marrow, it shook in its surface, it shook its surface…”

Surrounded in a rumbling torrent, a symphony orchestra enters the game, swaggering forth in the broad motions of a long distance skater on the canals of Holland or between the islands of the Sodermanland archipelago…

“The Merzbau ship roars through the waves! […] They all have something black in their eyes! But their hands are white!”

A female choir sings about how they burned their hair; how the anxiety machine always runs.

The soaring voices from a bar or a restaurant or a nightclub provide a soundscape in which you hear the tinkling of glasses and bottles, and the double basses of the orchestra offering their latticework of dark strings trembling.

The music turns smoky, jazzy, soft and anonymous, simply giving the ghastly remains an opportunity to dance blotting-paper-tight, corpse to corpse in a heavy grip of Death, aboard the Merzbau… fading memories of bodies, of anatomies, of who they had thought they were…

“…walking on crutches through the water; the waves at times pass through the ship…”

“Who can see that the ocean soughs white like hospital milk, when the moon has been drowned in the sack of night?”

Light but melancholic Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov reminiscences move through the orchestra in ballet shoes; a little Sleeping Beauty and a grand Second Piano Concerto, to contour the horror of the Merzbau… the way we fool ourselves day by day, as life is drained from us, as reality grows ever thinner, until nobody remembers us; until we ourselves don’t remember us anymore, who we though we were…

A drowned revue singer appears on the deck in a suit discolored with vomit, breaking out in a highly absurd song, considering the circumstances, as he’s passing through the Bardo of Death, himself unawares, like most people do when they die, according to Tibetan teachings; i.e., they go on living as they’ve always done, for a while, just sensing that there is something strange about everything, though they can’t pin it down, put their finger on it.

Folke Rabe even brings us into Berlin cabaret atmospheres, rancid reminiscences of 1930s’ perversions of power and impotence.

Torsson’s preoccupations with death by drowning are endless, stubbornly repeated in different variations through-out the work, as if he’s caught in a water curse…

“The flag is yellow! It is the plague! Come aboard! The anxiety machine runs!”

The mumbling voices of men and women, spoken in low tones, in secrecy, in the manner of a formula, are presented on the backdrop of howling winds – and I get the impression of Icelanders a thousand years ago, casting a drowning spell on their adversaries.

The speaking choir gets denser and louder, ominously, forcefully.

“We’re rowing are rock boat through a sand ocean!”

“A whole landscape protects the frost. [Again; the jingling sounds of a very cold winter]. White and black, open channels in the ice… and a wide expanse that blinds…”

“A ship iced-down on the horizon…”

“A witch is stirring the water…”

The above observations plus many others are repeated and mixed in Folke Rabe’s composition, into a masterly outpour of distinguished text-sound, simultaneously traditional and innovative.

ISNOT winds down to its conclusion in a cloud of suspended sentences out of Björner Torsson’s text, moving in and out of vision, like ice-floes in spring, shifting positions, gliding above and under each other, kaleidoscopically: fragments of a language and a life, fading reminiscences, threads of clouds moving across the sky of consciousness like unintelligible thoughts… as you slowly, gradually, loose yourself in anatomical amnesia, forgetting, forgetting, forgetting who it was you thought you were…

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