Sometimes I wonder if my body is a bonus or a punishment drill… Anyway, it does come with some rare opportunities. Hearing the duo ExSurge is one of them. The Ex before the Surge is a witty indication that the two band members Lisa Ullén and Lars Bröndum come out of the ensemble ReSurge, which they share with Jonna Sandell and Ulf Åkerhielm.

ReSurge has just (late November 2005) released a new CD, recorded at the SAMI studio in Stockholm (Swedish Artists’ & Musicians’ Interest Organization).
This ExSurge CD contains live recordings from Fylkingen, Stockholm, 2004 (tracks 1 – 4), the Vågom Festival in Gävle 2005 (track 5) and Bergshamra, Stockholm 2005 (tracks 6 – 7). There is no information as to where track 8 was recorded.

Here’s a very brief example of what an Internet coma search comes up with:

Coma emerges like a fence out of mist, slowly, sharp: a barbed wire fence – or just like morning breaking over your life once again: a tingling sensation in your limbs; the thought-machine gearing up again, with a new mix of fears and hopes and bodily necessities.

Lisa Ullén enters this soaring atmosphere in loud but sparse statements, coming at you sideways through life, like dark slabs of facts, rectangular sheets with bare truths scribbled onto them, etched into their surfaces – yes, like rocks on a Lapland slope, strewn in random patterns; black against white: the clarity of chaos; Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise!

Sparks of electricity crackle in the music, in the minerals of my analogies, until, towards the end, Lars Bröndum brings his synthesizer out into the open, where it winds elastic bands of sticky candy round my perception, until finally stopping dead in his tracks, the heart of the music tolling like a church bell that slowly melts down, Daliwise.

The second piece is Falling Down. This also starts on a soaring electronism, into which the piano enters long prayer beads of blue glass spheres, the cord cut, the beads rolling out onto the floor in Lisa Ullén’s bursts of tones. The electronic mist gets dense fast, materializing into thick impenetrables, brown walls of stale moments massing up like fearful forests, the trees growing higher as you watch, the moss soft under your feet while your mind seeks a solution to a problem not yet formulated.

The music continues in a de-domesticated direction, into the danger of freedom.

Lisa Ullén excels in bursting and boundary-breaking bounces, fondling here, striking there, flying her fingers like ballet dancers along her keyboard. Lars Bröndum steps out of his electric mist, carelessly chewing his synthesizer candy bars like Antonio Perez-Abellán in the Stockhausen ensemble.

This wilderness is sexy, voluptuous and jungle dreamy! It’s a torrential rainforest downpour!

Velour is the ambiguous title of track three.
The entomologic soaring of Bröndum’s synthesizer insects from an enchanted hideaway glares by in bulging sonorities, more sensed than actually observed, like the feeling of something coming indecently close and then retracting, like a wind flurry of spring or a sudden erotic daydream on the subway! Possible pleasures! The feeling of something heavy that just missed you.

Bröndum moves dizzyingly, in serpentines of seasickness, mumbling under his breath about things that could be different. Lisa Ullén delivers poignant and harsh statements, like nails driven into wood; no hesitation, but tones driven deep into the music, while Bröndum retorts in Rileysh Ten-Voices-of the-Two-Prophets accents, dreamy yet clearly contoured.

Little sonic coins keep tumbling, swirling down the tilted planes of Bröndum’s ingenuity, while Ullén’s piano stubbornness circles and spirals its titanium screws into ebony and jacaranda, ensuring a steadfast and sturdy beauty! Yeah, Ullén’s hatchet comes down hard on the body of the grand piano, causing showers of overtones to gush out in gleaming trajectories.

This Velour coat is embellished with innumerable glistening diamonds, out of the piano as well as out of the hypnotism of the electronics. I relax in this adventure; I feel well taken care of by Doctors Ullén and Bröndum.

The fourth piece is Treadmill. Bröndum is tuned in, carefully as usual, but here in a rambling, fast Jean Schwarz sonority; bubblegum and rubber band electronics on the loose – or is it a reverence to Morton Subotnick? It doesn’t matter; the rubber consistency is exploded into shreds by Ullén’s thundering piano, which arrives on the scene like a ton of falling scrap-iron at an ironworks by the Baltic Sea. Believe me, I know: I was almost killed by falling scrap-iron in my younger years at an ironworks, when a magnet hanging from a traveling crane suddenly lost its electricity… Ullén kind of makes the same fateful impression when she comes crashing down into Bröndum’s rubber band beat!

Watch your speakers here. They may well burst. Behind Ullén’s palisade of thunder Bröndum gets rock n’ rolly, sporting echoes of early Les Paul guitarisms, but after a while he seems to take on the style of Canadian enfant terrible Paul Dolden. I have to accept that, but I don’t like the original Dolden, mind you: it’s soulless music. I recently wrote such an aggressive report on Dolden’s new CD that Empreintes DIGITALes didn’t even publish it. I respect that, but I have to respect myself too, so if the Emperor is naked, I say so! I find out that more and more emperors really are naked…

The title piece – Strontium 90 – appears at track 5.
Strontium-90 is a silver-gray metal, which is produced by nuclear fission. It decays by beta particle emission. It’s flammable; powder will ignite spontaneously.

A brief example of a Strontium 90 Internet search:

After the initial grainy mist of Bröndum electronics, Ullén forces her way into my close vicinity by way of a prepared piano. Bröndum builds a suggestive, breathing drone, which is cut short, only to be replaced by other droning effects, into which Ullén runs amok in a self-consuming battle royal.

Bröndum swings shiny high pitch swords around above his head, while Ullén ponders the situation in crushing piano curses along the ground, like an emerging flatiron of vengeance, her fingers glowing, her eyes shining like two monster truck headlights through the smoke of havoc.

Bröndum chatters madly at left and right. Ullén makes use of all her glowing fingers, smoke rising out of the keyboard.

There are more calm moments too, in Strontium 90, but mostly I really do feel this piercing radiation through my lofty anatomy, passing through me without effort or bodily resistance, since most om my make-up is emptiness anyhow, and some would say that all of this meaty I-ness, holding on to a swaying skeleton, is emptiness throughout.

This is very complex, highly sophisticated music, and it’s not for everyone. For the experienced listener and/or the open-minded perceiver, Strontium 90 is bursting with pleasure possibilities, though. This music is for immersing, for torrential showering! Take it in, become it!
This piece of music convinces me that the duo Bröndum-Ullén can achieve anything and everything in their music. It’s worth the trouble of becoming a good listener, to be able to experience this! It takes one to know one, you know!

Chlorine is next in line, at track six. An Internet search for this compound reveals, among other things, this:

Several guitaric strands flow forth simultaneously, in a wavy, submarine motion, peacefully. The piano enters in subdued clarity, resounding in pounding, blotting sonorities, blue ink dots dispersing and thinning in this underwater jellyfish dream.
A soaring shoal choir high up in the pitches appear like a fishy backdrop for these closer activities, and when the shoal of shiny fish recedes into the darkness behind the reef, the piano – Lisa Ullén’s piano – plays a hall of mirrors game with Lars Bröndum’s piano mimicry, until, later on, the electroacoustician provides a steady, brown seafloor drone to which the pianist can entrust her jewels and gems. They glitter in the silt as the daylight just barely reaches down in wavy curtains from on high, from another world on the surface…

Lake Effect is number seven. A hesitant motion of a piano poured through Bröndum effects staggers along, slowly… one leg after the other: a motion that might be achieved by a spider in jeopardy, or a spider hunting – a steel spider in a metal world, shreds of sonic residue Bröndumized and galvanized, twitter-boxed, audio-chirped, sway-brushed!

Together and against each other, the two musicians construct a pleasure possibility on a grand scale, inside out, outside in; musical eroticisms, fingers up thighs, watery glances… a lie-down at the earliest opportunity, or a behind-the-counter skirt-lift.

Like the Dalai lama supposedly said: “Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon!” There are no recipes! You have to make them up as you go! Ullén does, Bröndum does!

The final gift on this CD is Forever Autumn. Once again the feeling is magic, the atmosphere enchanted, perhaps by way of a light, wavy motion through which all sounds emerge somewhat hazy, a little obscure, with light and color mixed into a sound that harbors seriously possible pleasures! Some kind of love is at play here, be it universal as the constant influx of interstellar energy, or highly Nordenskiöld specialized in a bookstore at the corner of Saint Paul’s Street and the Maria Square in Stockholm a Jibbolii November.

Lisa Ullén and Lars Bröndum succeeds in building a Southern France atmosphere, akin to some of the best sonorous paintings by François Bayle and Jean-Claude Risset, albeit with other means than those gurus used – and I’m sure Ullén and Bröndum didn’t even try, perhaps don’t even know what I’m talking about – but I refer to a dreamy, super sensual, transcendental property of the music, that serves to lift your spirit and enlighten it somewhat. Forever Autumn grabs me by the neck as if I was a kitten, and lifts me into a realm where I’m heavily immersed with pleasure possibilities!

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