Torbjörn Sandén’s very first serious try at electronics is dated 2^nd May 2003.
Sandén describes Entonal as simply the result of a number of electronic jam sessions in Studio 4 of EMS. He says it’s got a monotonous basic feel to it, with some events occurring as the piece unfolds, until the music ends as it started.

Well, this may be a laconic, low-key scientific way of defining this music, but there’s more to it.

Entonal opens in a fragile, shivering disturbance, like the earliest premonition of dawn on an alien expanse, pulsating otherworldly, in a Tarkovsky atmosphere – if you have seen Stalker… - of the treacherous realm of the Zone; perhaps a post-nuclear catastrophe disaster area… or a forlorn, distant solitude of someone’s righteous bardo.

Then, out of this glowing distance, a trajectory bending upwards into the void, a thinning line of devastating speed into the beyond… and as it evens out into level flight you realize you’re traveling with it, and it dawns on you like a thought out of a dream, in urgent insistence, trying to call your attention out of the abyss of the subconscious.

The stubborn pulsating quality which forms a backdrop for this alienation hovers like distant church bells in disguise, in a Mediterranean garden dream of whitewashed walls behind the roses, in a reminiscence of the best of French acousmatique; Luc Ferrari, Jean-Claude Risset, François Bayle.

The rapidly wobbling sound of a fiercely rotating pulsar that arises out of this dreamy, introverted state of mind visualizes a neutron star on a rampage, adding a metallic, glary, shining percussive rhythm – or… is it a coin wobbling on a table, caught by Studio 4’s electronic wizardry and kept at the top of its twisting speed indefinitely? Evidently the fragility of the shivering commencement has moved into a more solid state of condensating matter, claiming a definite place in space and time; like this whole world of samsara; in reality just crystallized light…

Soon a statement of more force kicks in, as a grace-field of timbres rolls out a carpet of sunlight wherein references to Theremins and Ondes Martenots are made, whistling like Russian factory whistles of the early 1920s!
Another self-evident analogy is the Tuvinian and Mongolian khoomei or xöömej, the wondrous throat singing of the steppes, one high pitch melody rising out of the fundamental tone, and I see a mirage of Studio 4 soaring in a flickering vision above the rolling, grassy hills and open steppes of Mongolia in the wind.
Simultaneously, there is an ominous notion hanging like threads of storm clouds inside Sandén's music; an unidentified threat in the lower register, like archetype anxiety from the core of existence.

The deeper and denser sounds spiral around themselves like genetic codes or sea weed, and I have recollections of Russian electronics, like some of the sonic expressions caught on Artemiy Artemiev’s Moscow label Electroshock, and justly so: Artemiy’s father – Edward Artemiev – wrote much of the music for Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, and I’ve already pointed to Tarkovsky earlier in this text in connection with some of the atmospheric characteristics of Torbjörn Sandén’s premier work of electronic music.

A subterranean sound of might and force of magmic qualities shakes the foundations like a roar from the underworld, like a groan from the hell hound, Cerberus himself – and you actually feel the cold gusts from the chilly, foggy realms on the other side of Styx…

A sense of thoughtfulness and retrospection follows in the music; a brief passage of melancholy and regret, in an inward whisper of “too late, too late”; a timbral exhalation of remorse…

Echoing birds of enchanted forests in shrill, high pitch granulations from within coniferous realms call upon you to enter the dream, to withdraw from barren realism of no worth… to seek out a shelter from the storm within, deep, deep within… and the warp speed quality of the life of the just dead offers majestic possibilities to the one who can identify the scarecrows of his mind as just scarecrows of his mind, as karmic projections out of his own mind… and travel indefinitely in no time, no time…

…and Sandén's work Entonal eases out on this notion; the notion of the freedom of the scarecrow-revealing bardo traveler who moves into the endless bliss of enlightenment…