It is always a very pleasant occurrence when an unexpectedly beautiful CD comes your way. It is even more pleasing when the CD happens to feature electroacoustic music, since rumors forecast the idiom’s imminent death, due to lack of energy and general vitality and too much access to too much machinery. I’ve suggested, for many years, that the common access to software is an obstacle in the creation of electroacoustics, unless some kind of filter – censorship, if you will (on the part of the recording company) – discriminates between the shallow, dilettante etudes of untalented people with computers, and talented, creative artists who can do without computers if needed, but make good use for them if they have them… Computer software can constitute wonderful tools in the hands of a true artist – a creative person – but just a mess of good-for-nothing binary information in the studios of people who mistake the means for the end.

Luckily – it makes me really glad! – it seems that talent really has come through this time, on this wonderful CD from Elektron with electroacoustic wizards of a new generation; Paulina Sundin and Jens Hedman, presented on this CD with individual works as well as collaborations. You're in for a raving review!

Of course, there are some major EAM composers working in Sweden, like Rolf Enström, Åke Parmerud, Anders Blomqvist, Tommy Zwedberg, Pär Lindgren and others, but they’ve been around long, and we welcome a younger generation to join them on the Mount Parnassus of electroacoustics! At least it’s nice not to have to resort solely to the old giants, like Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, Jacques Lejeune, Michel Chion, Jean Schwarz and Francis Dhomont, to mention a few… There is something going on in Stockholm these days, and Elektron Records seems to have a feel for this. It is not purely by chance that I mentioned so many French composers above. The finest electroacoustic music – the really poetic stuff – is created in France and… Sweden! If this has to do with many contacts between the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) and IRCAM in Paris on the one hand, and EMS and Fylkingen in Stockholm on the other hand, I don’t know - but the poetry is there in Swedish and French (and French-Canadian) electroacoustic music, whereas the electroacoustics that come out of the U.S.A. is pretty shallow and almost… stillborn! (with exceptions!). (There is a new, collage-kind of contemporary sound-experiments going on in the U.S.A. these days - wonderfully inventive - featuring artists like Rotcod Zzaj (Dick Metcalf), Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Jeff Kaiser, Matthew Ostrowski, Erik Belgum and others, and in that field America is in the forefront!)

Paulina Sundin kicks things off on this CD with track one; “Crisálida” (1996), and holy smoke; talk about a French opening! Here we have rippling water in the right channel, playing children in the left, and then this tone, full of overtones, sneaking up on you, taking over, hovering, vibrating – sawing right down through your skull… like a forced thought that you cannot escape… or like a ray of enlightenment from some otherworldly source of inspiration… This opening makes me think of Jean-Claude Risset and some of his pieces, like “Songes” or maybe particularly “Sud”. Even “Presque rien” (the series of works by that name) and “Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps” by Luc Ferrari spring to mind on hearing Paulina Sundin’s light and precise and intuitive touch. This may seem too much praise to take, but I recognize talent when I hear it, and here it is! Paulina Sundin is – even internationally – a full-fledged composer of electroacoustics by now, which this CD proves. Congratulations to Paulina, and congratulations to Swedish EAM!
The sounds are very delicate, smooth, but with an edge, and also a spatial quality, enlargening the space of your listening room, lifting off the roof, folding down the walls, letting the wind carry far off scents to your vicinity, giving you a sense of weightlessness, of relaxed attention, as you let it happen, let it happen… The smoothness is broken up by close-up percussive sounds, as layers of different events shift position like ice floes of spring climbing up on top of each other.

Jens Hedman continues on track 2 with his piece “Relief” (1996), which has the bulging, smooth and dainty feel in common with Paulina Sundin’s piece before. There is a French feeling to this too, or a Pär Lindgren feeling… By that I mean the technique of letting a deep, distant, ominous long, outstretched (eternal?) sound hover – oscillate - close to the horizon, while small sounds of short durations granulate, vibrate, pop like soda – right in your face!
Jens Hedman lets a massive web of sounds frighten you some, as knives dance in threatening psycho-kinetics right in front of your nose, very close to your nose-tip… Is he trying to make contact with the newly deceased in their Bardo state? The spatial events here almost freak you out at times, left-right-left-right in a fast – but decreasing – motion, as if you heard the sound of a spinning coin in the middle of your head, the left-most passage in your left ear and the right-most passage in your right… I’m hearing this over earphones, so that effect gets really spooky, I can tell you. This is clever electroacoustics, walking the razor’s edge, heading for some kind of catharsis… You name it – we like it!
About nine minutes into Hedman’s piece things get really hectic, and you can compare that passage with some passages out of Leo Kupper’s “Litanea” or Gabriel Poulard’s “La Mémoire des Pierres” – but something about Hedman’s music also points in the direction of British EAM gurus Alistair Macdonald and Andrew Lewis. Don’t misunderstand me; Jens Hedman is a composer in his very own right – I’m only trying to connect, find lines of evolution and possible influences, and different veins of electroacoustics. (I didn’t study ethnology for nothing!) You may already have guessed that Paulina Sundin’s and Jens Hedman’s electroacoustics fit me perfectly, really reassuring me in my notion of something good going on in Stockholm!

Tracks 3 through 6 make up the title work; “Currents” (1998) – a joint effort by the gifted composers Sundin and Hedman. There is a sub-title to this piece; “Traffic – Water – Nature – City”, which sounds a lot like programmatic music. Is it? Well, yes, in a way – but only slightly, giving a hint, an idea, a direction. There is some traffic, highly spatial, wonderfully spatial – and maybe – maybe – bicycle spokes being plucked… It sure moves, anyway, in delicate, very clean sounds, delicacies. These sounds are like chocolate candies in colored wrappings; wrappings in clear colors: stark blue, overwhelmingly green, Buddha-golden, Antarctica-silver. This package is full of goodies for the ear and for the imagination, and I just keep on getting more and more impressed! I probably have the darnest collection of electroacoustics in Northern Europe, and this CD comes out on top together with a few select others. Not bad!
The sheer intensity of the event between 1:45 and 1.56 on track 4 calls for extra honors, no doubt! This couple really does work well together! A little later it gets enchanted, silvery, forest hazy, with elves and fairies fluttering about in the meadows. This is John Bauer music for a while. Magic! Man, it doesn’t get better than this – this is as good as it comes! I’m going to play this DC a lot! When I get enthusiastic I get – enthusiastic! The nature part of “Currents” is no simple forest sampler! It gets darn sophisticated!

Paulina and Jens do not have anything more to learn from the wizards at Groupe de Recherches Musicales. They got so much poetry and so much technical skill to get it across that it bends me over and turns me around… Wow! This is outrageous! The sheer composition of it all is magnificent. It doesn’t matter if you have all the machinery and all the sounds, if you don’t have a compositional idea. These guys do! They mix these wondrous sounds into an overwhelmingly beautiful and interesting – imaginative – web! The only other CD that immediately comes to mind in connection with this one is the double CD "L'illusion acoustique" by Marc Favre on the GMVL label (Groupe Musiques Vivantes Lyon) (GMVL CD 014/15)

Track 7 – “Clandestine parts” (2000) – is Paulina Sundin’s second solo piece. I don’t have any more superlatives left, but if I did I’d unload them here. A whole dump truck of honors would be appropriate. Paulina has me under a spell, I do believe… The ambiguous title relates back to childhood dreams of Paulina, and the vivid soundscapes could well transform into dreamscapes – but that is true of most events on this Elektron CD. Sonic Poetry is back – Paulina Sundin is its figurehead, its beautiful princess! Jens Hedman is its gallant knight! “Fearless ahead!”, as Stockhausen sometimes concludes his letters!

“Mix-up” (2000) is Jens Hedman’s second solo flight. The piece is what the title suggests, a mix – of Hedman’s favorite musics, which have formed his compositional aesthetics, as he says in the CD inlay. These kinds of ventures usually fall flat, but even though this is the least intriguing of the otherwise fantastic pieces on this CD, it still is well composed, cleverly constructed.

The last piece on this – I dare say – revolutionary new EAM CD from Elektron, is again a collaboration between young composers Paulina Sundin and Jens Hedman; “Reflections” (1999). Now, could it be that these guys are aware of the Bardo Thödol – The Tibetan Book of the Dead –, which has lately evolved dramatically through Western minds like Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, dispersing spiritual awareness far and wide? Could it be? The description of the work in the CD leaflet reads: “Reflections is a symbolic journey through life, traveling from birth to death and disappearing into a tranquil pureness…” Now, nothing is mentioned of a rebirth, but it sort of lingers at the end of the sentence…
Anyhow, the music is really wasting me, with drone-like horizons of deep sounds and fast, curly and sharp movements right in front of my eyes, like occasional wind shield wipers in a heavy rain on the road from Särkisalmi to Parikkala and a love so strong by Lake Saimaa in medio of June that even Väinömöinen’s passion for the elusive Aino grows pale in comparison… He who has ears, let him hear…

I have been through - on this CD - a wondrous fairytale adventure of enchanted events and violet dreams, in a luminous preview of the Bardo state of the hereafter, and it all ends with that straight line on the electrocardiogram, when the spirit has left through the Brahma opening on top of the skull, and is floating out like the spirit of the old man in John Holm’s legendary song “Ett enskilt rum på Sabbatsberg” (“A Private Room at Sabbatsberg”) (A Stockholm hospital).

I am grateful for this sound art of Paulina Sundin and Jens Hedman. It has been much more than could ever have been expected. This is the electroacoustic CD of the year for an EAM aficionado like myself!