Askild Haugland of Norway has released yet another of his vinyl records. This one is called Six Pieces, and contains works from 2002 – 2006. He has expanded his sound sources with harmonica and voice since last year’s Three Pieces.

I am amazed at Haugland’s stubborn creativity, and his utter originality. Over the years I’ve received numerous compact cassettes with Haugland’s earlier releases, as well as a host of LPs of different dimensions – all bearing this unique and undisputable Haugland character, from the design of his issues to the mesmerizing, hypnotizing musical content. I have to get down to writing about all those earlier releases too, because not one of them is uninteresting; on the contrary; Haugland’s is one of the most original oeuvres of modern art music. Who else keeps pressing his own vinyls like Askild Haugland does, and who could care less than he does about trends and fashions? Admittedly, there are some vinyls being printed elsewhere, but then mostly in a fad for the anachronistic, in an attempt to create an art object more than a sounding phonogram. Haugland, on the other hand, has the sound in view, and the vinyl releases are simply in line with his habits, his style and his personality. He even writes his letters on an ordinary typewriter. He is completely true to himself and his artistic convictions; his ideas of sound art, which seem to speak directly from deep within his life; from that place within ourselves that we have in common, that reflects time and space like a diamond of the finest cut.

Askild Haugland was mentioned in The Wire a while back, as someone who simply does what he wants, without glancing at what’s popular in avant-garde circles. How true. I know so many artists who think of themselves as avant-garde artists, but only once in a very long while does a really free person show up. Askild Haugland has shown up. He is free. Most of those avant-garde musicians and other artists that I’ve encountered are nothing but followers of trends. They walk a fine line of fashions, so scared to fall away, so eager to belong, just like school children in the schoolyard. I look at them, and then I forget them, because they bore me so much with their cowardice and lack of originality.

Askild Haugland is a real villain, a real freethinker. He doesn’t adhere to trends, he IS a trend himself; a pathfinder – a REAL avant-garde artist. He doesn’t look anywhere to find out what to think. He just thinks. He is a great inspiration to me; a fine example of what people can do when they are themselves and don’t try to be anything else, just trying to be as much of what they are as they possibly can. Haugland can’t make any money to talk about with his art. He does it because he must, because he loves sound art and because he’s doing a kind of music that nobody else does… but he would do it even if everybody else were doing it. He simply doesn’t care what those others are doing or what they think. He does what he does because that is what he does! I love it! There is much to learn from his artistic example, which is a human example.

Sometimes I find correspondences to La Monte Young (For Brass) or Gilius van Bergeijk (Over de Dood en de Tijd) – but those analogies are pretty shallow and just a testimony to my massive listening experience. Haugland is a singular phenomenon, for sure. The only thing about Haugland that actually does correspond intimately to another artist is his way of entitling his pieces, by way of date. La Monte Young does the same – but maybe that is just a logical and kind of laconic way of getting past any title that would interfere with, and color, the listening. Morton Feldman also used to give his pieces anonymous titles, like Piano or String Quartet and so forth, and so does Haugland sometimes, with titles like For Electric Guitar and For Tape Recorders – but always with the more detailed date subtitles as well.

Track 1. October 05. 15-10-05 / 17-10-05 I -- 15-10-05 / 17-10-05 III – 18-10-05 [3:09]
Equipment: drilbu – singing bowls – dingsha – harmonica – voice – tape recorder – cassette recorders.

This music brings you into a dreamy, wavy world of vague visions, be it fever illusions in the merciless heat of the Australian Outback or the experiences of someone hovering at the end of life.

Voices are sensed deep inside this smoky landscape at the outset, but only like veils of thin autumn smoke, like shreds of memories of human existence; like the last evidence of sentient beings dissolving into the maze of possible worlds.

This is music of loss on the grand scale, of whole races disintegrating into electromagnetic pulses through interstellar space: Humanity as a slight coloring of smoky horizons… and perhaps it was all make-believe; the fantasy of something too alien to even imagine…

Askild Haugland plays a masterly game with sonic illusions, with semi-transparent bands of audio, with layer upon layer of overtones that shimmer like desolate transmissions from deep space, or like unvoiced cries for mercy from inhabitants of murky institutions of cruel societies.

The combination of sounds that Haugland uses serves this impression of desolation beyond understanding well, and while the music brings dark violet emotions of utter loneliness, it is also very, very beautiful. The long durations that swirl and bend slowly, are sprinkled with sudden, glary percussive ingredients that glow and disappear, like brief thoughts of hope that light up and die down into darkness. Marvelous! We are all so lonely, and yet…

Track 2. 13-6-05 / 9-7-05 / 17-8-05 IV [4:03]
Equipment: keys – drilbu – singing bowl – dingsha – voice – tape recorder – cassette recorders.

This is a standing wave of sound, shining and glaring in the most beautiful colors of light imaginable, like a pillar of divine mercy leading the remainder of the clan towards a Promised Land. La Monte Young talked about stasis in music, about vertical music that comes before you with no aim or goal or program, like the moment of NOW that always – FOREVER – encapsulates you. This music engulfs you in fragrant breathables, in rising incense of a deeper inspiration, nurturing insights into the everness of us, of all, in this journey of souls towards the Light, towards Liberation from rebirths, in an ascending motion out of the Darkness of Ego into the Light of Purification.

Haugland’s music seems to inspire the best within you, your innermost cravings of liberation from these chains of matter, these prisons of the flesh that we are so preoccupied with, putting food in mouths, covering anatomies in garments, drifting in and out of supermarkets and churches – yet all in the turned-away velocity of illusion…

Haugland’s composition of extended, flowing, swirling and meandering sounds reach a high-point in 13-6-05 / 9-7-05 / 17-8-05 IV, persuading anyone with descent hearing of a higher purpose of this everyday life in which where home-blind - and keep in mind, the correct translation of Bardo Thödol (commonly called The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State.

Track 3. March 06. 1-3-06 / 3-3-06 III / 6-3-06 VI / 9-3-06 I [3:07]
Equipment: drilbu – voice – tape recorder – cassette recorders.

March 06. 1-3-06 / 3-3-06 III / 6-3-06 VI / 9-3-06 I is maybe the most unexpected and brilliant sonic piece of art on this vinyl. It begins with the distorted ringing of brittle bells; frail, thin, behind a peculiar filter of time and age – out of which a deep growling sound rises, like the permuted mumbling of Tibetan monks in some high-altitude monastery. There is a deep mirror-like resemblance to slowscan human vocal cords in here, on a voice-in-the-clay level; someone underground with the oral cavity filled with soil.

The music is unusually grainy; a gravel-harp of sorts – a snow-melting occurrence on the slopes of Lapland under starshine. The drones are heavy-duty, overwhelming and over-powering. The music is like time itself rolling in across the brevity of lives like a relentless mudslide of eternity… Nowhere to hide… and it’s beautiful like an uproar of a huge crowd on a city square in a totalitarian regime: We are the people! Who are you?

Track 4. 4-6-05 / 5-6-05 II [6:53]
Equipment: drilbu – singing bowl – harmonica – voice – metallophone – tape recorder – cassette recorders.

Rising like a railway out of the distance, this Haugland duration soon fills up with the intense humming of telegraph wires through open landscapes and the cling and clang of railway crossings, all mixed together in the mincer of compositional deliberations.

This is high-tension music; high-voltage transformer music, up-beat Brian Eno with a smidgen of Harry Bertoia: powerful drone-and-noise music of unusual beauty. These works are too short, though. All of them could individually be extended to at least half an hour, and perhaps I’ll do my own remixing of the content on this vinyl, allowing each work to swing seamlessly for at least that kind of duration.

Track 5. December 02 / February 05. 21-12-02 / 7-2-05 I /II/IV - - 22-12-02 / 7-2-05 I /II/IV [13:09]
Equipment: electric guitar – tape recorder – cassette recorder.

This is the longest work on here, with its 13 minutes, which, nonetheless, is much to short for this kind of winding dreamscape audio. Soundwise, this may be the most beautiful music on this vinyl, with a permuted electric guitar swung backwards through the ether in echoing, panning streaks of sound, appearing like inversion layers in the atmosphere, traversed by shining spearheads of metal that leave white tracers of jet exhaust trailing across the sky, clothing the planet in a maze of white threads, like a ball of yarn through the void.

There is an extended spatiality in this particular work, slabs of sound appearing here and there, like sudden glimpses of truth in a world of lies; like dark ships of memories in a sea of amnesia…

The music continues to become more and more austere, until it dawns upon me like an angelic choir in a woodcut by Gustave Doré; an angel procession through the remote areas of consciousness!

Track 6. 20-10-05 II [3:04]
Equipment: drilbu – singing bowls – dingsha – harmonica – voice – metallophone – tape recorder – cassette recorders.

This is a more crowded environment, with all kinds of percussive, ringing and bouncing objects on a backdrop of a soaring, gliding, transforming drone that positions itself in the lower chakras, like a tremor from the unconscious; a reminder for the soaring sea-gull thoughts of Apollonian intellects of the dark and unruly, destructive and creative forces of Dionysian emotions.

I am amazed at all the emotions and thoughts I have experienced by listening to this new vinyl from Norwegian musician and composer Askild Haugland. The originality of his art is immense, and the beauty too, with that certain venomous ingredient that makes listening good medicine for the soul. Perhaps one of the major new music record labels, like, say, Pogus Records, or Wergo or Lovely Music should look to Norway for their next release? Do!!!