Grigailment is the title of Rozenhall’s starting track on side A of this 33 rpm vinyl; one of two out of his head, the other one being Eyeland. I’ve seen Rozenhall spell it Grig Ailment, though, so I can’t tell what’s correct.

It starts without a break… no, I mean, you don’t get a break when it starts; there’s no fade-in or anything; it’s just there, full force. That is why it may seem shockingly loud at first; a music that is just a slab of rock, heavy granite – but as you get used to the sound you realize the immense wealth of details. Suddenly a better analogy might be a galaxy turning slowly around itself, displaying all its billions of stars in glittering, gleaming occurrences around a center that is white to the limit of blue.

The shattering pluralism of the piece really does belong in a greater entity, the gross-form of the work, because you clearly feel this galactic movement, this turning of time itself and the hypothesis of space in which it turns, this revolving disc full of stars and emptiness.

Yet another valid analogy would be that of the jitter of atoms inside the mineral constituencies of solid rock; a lucid world of grainy components, boiling and restless way down in the kind of matter that seems the most solid; yet just a spacious, almost empty stage for cosmic plays!

Track 2 is short indeed; just under two minutes, called Armistice.
It’s rough like life at the shooting range, or death in an avalanche… - the pressure of sudden gusts blowing anything uneven out of place in a crushing displacement of everything familiar… If you were the tiniest of insects traveling a wet rubber boot through the leaves of October, this is what you’d hear…

Track 3 is Give Me Your Children. This soars in a thinner air, on a higher level, churning winds and a car alarm that just keeps alarming – or is it a very short thought that keeps looping inside the confinement of a psychiatric ward?

Tumbling, bouncing grayish heaps of sound grow in from the side, from the backdrop of things, and build up in logjams dangerously close to your eardrums, right up around your facial characteristics, freckles and all!

It could be tumbling rocks on a mountainside at Nallo, and this seems all the more viable as the whole sound space drifts over into a kind of Beyond, into a shamanistic realm, an atmosphere of the mind that you might hit upon if you hike in Lapland, carry a heavy backpack and get extremely worn out; your consciousness takes off into a level very separate from your body, which keeps trudging along by itself, while you have these spiritual experiences, the way, sometimes, a space of complete calm and silence opens in the midst of the horrible turmoil inside a steelworks at the night shift, when your body is too tired and your mind too awake! This happened to me in Stuor Reaiddávággi Valley between Nallo and Sälka a few years ago, and I’ve thrived on the experience! Daniel Rozenhall’s Give Me Your Children approximates this experience with a lot of credibility!

Much of Rozenhall’s sound world is brute, a demonstration of force and almost Fascist determination – but the trick is how he saturates this boundless might with infinitesimal small details of audio; little grains of minuscule worlds that themselves host worlds – so as it is in life, it is in Rozenhall’s music – endless numbers of spaces within spaces, inward, down inside the inside of inside, and also outward, out on the outside of outside – and all this in a mudflow of sound, a landslide of audio, a place where you cover your head and hold your breath!

The hilarious hollering that enters the glistering havoc with about five minutes to go inserts a moment of uncertainty, as if you suddenly realize you’ve been spooked by some reflections in your glasses or a spell of serious absent-mindedness, called back to the relative reality of reality by wet sidewalks at the bus stop and an itchy ass – which these hollering hullabaloo of voices may gallantly represent; an awakening from a dream called dream to a dream called reality – from which there eventually is an awakening called death!

Another vision instigated by this crazed stretch of audio is a smoking rolling mill filling up with goblins of all kinds from the forests of long-ago far-away! I seriously don’t know what to make of the lion’s roar that follows…

The last work on this vinyl, taking hold of the entire side B, is Sinister Laburnum; almost 18 minutes of Rozenhall sound art.
So slowly, so lowly – the inconspicuous beginning of Sinister Laburnum; little silver smiths with pointed gray beards in a dreamed village in the great Somewhere, in the undefined but loving Sometime!
Cozy whistling fellows with no evil on their mind gently pass through the meadows dressed in green, mindful carriers of Greenpeace seeds for fearful futures…

The music is still like very early Ralph Lundsten meditations (before the guy started making money and turned viciously unpopular amongst the carriers of high cultures…)

Rozenhall paints with his finest sound tools in this piece, layer after layer of thin applications, hazy stories in the mist of time, duration after duration in lucid sweeps of the brush, ample shades and nuances of aged – or timeless – situations, archetypical circumstances in a flow of sonic scenes out of the collected consciousness of humanity and beyond, all the way back into the spiky minds of insects, yes, down into the vibrating vitality of bacteria…

There is no end to the visions and fantasies that Rozenhall’s electronic music gives rise to – and that’s the way it ought to be. The sky isn’t the limit. You are! Rozenhall’s music is ample fuel for dreams!

The silver smiths of the beginning of Sinister Laburnum vanish into amnesia, and the remaining soundscape rumbles like a yard of idling tanks at Kvisätter Farm in Björkvik in the winter of 1955 – 56, when there was a big maneuver in Sweden. The militaries in white were invited for coffee at our kitchen table, and they left us a whole jute sack of rye breads, tasty for a month!

The torrential malice of the final minutes of Rozenhall’s piece poisons you with force-fed vinegar and spruce bark, and as time winds down into a narrow streak of light, life shivers like a trace of dawn – until a choking rhythm of a pile driver forces something dark down, down, way down – as the last seconds of music seep like the final ejaculation of blood out of the depleted…

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