In another review of a Firework Edition recording I intuitively found a lineage from way back in Swedish high-brow culture, from Thorild, Ehrensvärd and – Swedenborg. There is something in the attitude of the Firework artists that puts history into perspective, while also bringing forth tendencies of intellectual thought from the 17th and 18th centuries, integrating these thoughts or atmospheres in sound art works and installation pieces of our day.
Another observation is that the CDs from Firework Edition often are just a by-product of something else, like an exhibition or an installation. This renders the CDs a complementary status, a more carefree feeling – shifting the focus from the solitary sound of the CDs to the more important wider scope of the whole atmosphere of the release, such as the art work connected to it, or the general sense of society and politics of the time, or the realization that the sound of the CD is the concrete end product of a process that might have begun in 1730 or thereabout. This kind of opens up obscure alleys of the Old Town of Stockholm and cellar taverns of passed centuries, tapping into intellectual thought-streams of a different consciousness – which might not be so different after all, basically, since the human situation isn’t much different; just surrounded by different gizmos… a different apparatus…

Therefore it must be seen as significant that the introductory text by Leif Elggren immediately brings up the name of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772):

Leif Elggren explains that the above text was posted outside a small room called Sillaförrådet (the herring storage) at Karlsborg Castle, Sweden, from 1st July till 15th August 2000 in connection with a joint exhibition called “Omvandling” (“Transformation”). Inside the room a 45-minute sound composition with its intellectual and artistic base in the text provided above was played back, entirely recorded in the toilet.

Firework Edition provides this information about this CD on their website:

To get in the mood for listening to this coprolite audio I spent an hour with Beethoven and his Violin Sonatas, to get awe ay from an obvious and insistent now.
The long first part of “Latrine” arrives in a sub-audio rumble, in a passage across dark, rocky matter, more associatively reminiscent of a dusk passage across the rock deserts below Nallo peak in Swedish Lapland north of Kebnekaise than of a fall through the void of a timeless excrement disposition…
There is a sustaining, whisking, whispering circular sound inside this rumbling, thudding, rock-like sound, like the sound of an idling truck outside a 1945 warehouse, but the dark and intrusive sounds could be the sounding equivalent of an endless series of brown droppings through the history of Man, down the millennia, fertilizing the environment… and the infrasounds give a sense of humus layers and bacteria brewing for our benefit; the much denied basis for our sustenance and our intellectual varnish layer…

As I’ve stated before I give the intellectual attitude more room and significance in this sound world than the concreteness of the sounds themselves, even though this dark, uneven and wobbly rumble may cause a hypnosis of perception to grow inside your mind, in a quite minimalistic way. Infrasounds may affect you in surprising ways, and given a subwoofer these sounds will cause a lot of sympathetic vibrations from objects around your room. It is mighty, and you should take care not to ruin your loudspeakers.
At 14:14 there is an abrupt shift into sharper, watery sounds, as of mad women rinsing clothes in a vat at an incredible speed. The element of fluids is now introduced into the sounds of the previous humus audio. You can almost smell decades and centuries of flowing urine! There are diligent timbral nuances waving back and forth through the urine, rendering the audio a grainy, shining luster of a certain beauty.
At 19:14 a sudden drop in volume appears, until the sound gradually increases again, only to decrease, and so forth. This means that through these rather static sounds variations do appear, in different aspects of the work, though the grinding and stubborn insistency is the prime fact of this music.

Part 2 is quite different, beginning – and continuing! - in a soaring, timbrally rich drone that slowly shifts its center, protruding through space like a thread of honey around the hemisphere. Contra-timbral layers mix with the honey like vinegar, causing trembling, whining currents and under-currents to develop in the utmost beauty, like golden and silvery hues across a mercury sky… It is enchanted, elf-like, the light reflecting off the wings of millions of elves vibrating in the starshine of eternal space-time nights…

Part 3 is similar to part 2, but transposed down to lower pitches, yet still as insistently beautiful and khoomei timbral, the richness of overtones outdoing any of the participants of the Khoomei symposium of Tuvinian Kyzyl… There is a bronze shield nuance to this part, conjuring up visions of bronze-age crowds gathering for the festival of the sun, of fertility, of sustenance – and there is so much astronomical deep space hard facts sensed through these metallic timbres, that they may direct your analogies to some works by La Monte Young or Harry Bertoia.