Torbjörn Sandén’s second composition approved by himself and his relentless self-criticism is Tangent, dated 23rd September 2003, realized at EMS in Stockholm.

In his own comments Sandén states that Tangent is the result of some playful sessions in the studio, when he fooled around with the equipment, observing whatever emerged. However, he indicates that he did have at least one prerequisite; to achieve floating transitions between sections. The title presented itself to him when, in the final section, a sinus tone detached itself from an expanding sound like a tangent from a circle.

You could well mistake the very outset for a Stockhausenesque greeting fanfare, which repeats itself when the gnawing, squeaking hinges of a Gunnar Ekelöf rural gate between gracing meadows and farm fields appear (Gunnar Ekelöf: Absentia Animi from Non Serviam [1945]) in the pure and disinfected synthesizer incisions that cut through your senses.

In an alternative analogy you’re at some bronze age burial ground, the mound of a great man completed, our ancestors blowing their horns; their Bronze Age lures – as the leaves are in flame and the sky October blue; deep, cold, clear; warm garments around your shoulders.

A lighter silhouette of the deeper fanfare motion is introduced, in a notion of two alternating sine waves, but the higher pitched wave is more frequent, creating a strutting, limping sensation along the progression of the piece, slightly tilted to one side, finally suggesting a spiraling veer off to one side, like the lost-comrade formation of a group of fighter planes paying homage to a downed and lost pilot, when one of the planes in the tight formation suddenly breaks off and veers sharply to the side.

As the synthesized fanfare and its lighter and faster shadowling (be it Stockhausenesque or Bronze Age…) keeps up its repetitious pattern, some deviating, off-the-bandwagon squeaks out of the EMS Studio 4 machinery further suggests a crackled predicament, high pitch sounds falling of like ceramic plates off of a doomed space shuttle on re-entry…

As this progresses I eventually get a feeling of some kind of inner strains and pulls of matter itself, the laws of the forces of matter being put to the test by conflicting torques of the atomic structures, as by gravitational waves passing through celestial bodies, affecting matter, space and time in unforeseen patterns.

Right about here I sense that this music really is mineral, speaking out of matter itself, like in Michael Obst’s Crystal World [Wergo 2011-50] or John Chowning’s Stria or Sabelithe [Wergo 2012-50], and I feel one of the two main electronic music traditions at play in this latter-day composer, in the new and fresh views of a new and fresh audio artist.

In contrast to this, a picture of a Dutch barrel organ emerges in my mind, as the sounds get more modal, the timbres forming in orderly chordal strata, as in some of the pieces by electronic music composer Gilius van Bergeijk.

This is but a passing, fleeting image of the moment though, as Torbjörn Sandén speedily moves into other aspects, a brief techno reference to New York techno loft guru Larry Kucharz (Ambient Blue Washes [International Audiochrome IA 35], ComputerChoral Green Prints [International Audiochrome IA 31], DigiChoral Blue Portraits [International Audiochrome IA 29], Electrochoral Dreams [International Audiochrome IA 27] etcetera), leading over into a more dreamy forest music, rays of light finding their way down onto the mossy forest floor (light patches here and there), goldcrests (Regulus regulus) emitting their shrill, high-pitch chirps somewhere up around the spruce trunks.

An open meadow inside this deep forest opens up, the sun warming the rocks, and though the meadow seems empty except for ants and mosquitoes, you can sense in the music that it’s full of spiritual beings, only seen in the corner of one’s eye as a flickering sensation of light, as from a passing dragon-fly across a small, meandering creek in the green shadows under the willows; a sudden, faint glare of wings, and then just the heavy smell of mud and mussels mixed with the drifting scent of Iris Pseudácorus, your canoe floating aimlessly downstream in the shallow waters.

As the music suddenly stoops in a downward glance, new sounds are emerging in delicate, soaring layerings of dimly lit surfaces; thin transparent layers curving around you – and you’re a wasp flying the inner circumference of a wine glass, the glass left in a summer cottage, dusty… and the stillness is amplified by the flight around the curving inside of the vessel…

At this stage in the piece Sandén applies percussive events while the denser layers of the wasp flight inside the dusty wine glass of my see-through imagination soar and hover in a stealth operation of a suspended moment of alien beauty outside of linear time…

A dark leathery beat as from a heart rises out of this suspension, indicating a return from the soaring spiritual spheres to a body with a name and an identity, to a place and a clearly defined moment, i.e. to the illusion of I and Thou, in the words of Gunnar Ekelöf in Tag och skriv from Färjesång [1941] (followed by a translation from the Swedish by the reviewer):

…and as the beat stops the tangent detaches from the circle, like Sandén said in his initial comment, but what this symbolizes I leave up to the listener.