The above is in fact the text at Revelation 11:18, quoted in the booklet of this CD. It reminds me of the years I studied with Jehovah’s Witnesses, until I confronted them with this one Bible quote, asking them how they could keep on driving cars between meetings! I confronted them with the fact that automobile fumes represent a very big part of environmental toxins globally, and told them I couldn’t understand their driving in view of this and the text at Revelation 11:18. I stopped my association right there, since this proved their hypocrisy to me.

In Jehovah’s Witnesses’ own Bible translation [New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures], this part reads:

PROCLAMATION by the Sons of God is quite an interesting issue. The sound material basically comes from three different performances by the comrades Kent Tankred and Leif Elggren: JAG TALAR… (I SPEAK) at Fylkingen, Stockholm 6th December 1990, SVISCH (OCH SÅ GÅR DET EN TID) (SVISCH; AND SOME TIME PASSES) at Fylkingen 26th October 1991 and UPPDATERING II (UPDATE II) at Liljevalchs konsthall (The Liljevalchs’ art gallery), Stockholm 13th October 1992.

I am impressed by the artistic stubbornness that these guys reveal; they’re at it always, at the forefront of sometimes provocative, sometimes downright melancholy and even nostalgic, and sometimes historical artistic events. It is very valuable that Firework Edition Records issues these quite exclusive CDs, who probably, realistically speaking, do not reach Bob Dylanish crowds, but rather a few enfants terrible in the dusk and haze of remote coffee shop corners around the globe…

At first this disguises itself as a conversation taking place in some kind of common environment, like a restaurant at a university, a coffee shop or a class room right before class, but then the aggressiveness renders visions of more dangerous places, like parts of town you shouldn’t visit late at night, or perhaps the subway at 3 AM – but the words which crisscross and spiral through the piece, in and out between brute sounds, between cardboard boxes and chairs or tables, is political! I hear monologues rattling words like CAPITAL and PAID LABOR and so forth, in a rage… until the havoc dies down into the distant rattling of cutlery and china ware, onto which whispers and intimate conversations go on, and since you can’t, for the most part, hear what is said, you’re left out, not let in into some kind of secret kind conspiracy, like the ghosts of the Red Army Faction taking shape inside a magmic force of frustration and exploitation, which has to be unleashed, and is, in a crescendo of coffee shop furniture drumming, as the whispers turn loud and bloody, the smell of blood inside your mouth as you bite off the words in an anger seldom expressed, and I perceive a catharsis of an uproar, the hard fist of the proletariat against the oppression, repression and tyranny of the well-to-do, and perhaps this is the last nervous spasm of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or… the beginning of a new movement, a new revolution of the down-trodden, the outcasts – and these sound poets by the name of Elggren and Tankred manage to stir these feeling inside me while Im listen, make me feel this rage, this hate, this righteous violence brewing inside my own self… and holy shit, they’re good at this; they’re instigators of rebellion, the truer poetic troublemakers, the guys who demand a immediate cleansing of the temple of labor!

The sounding space, which I still envision as some kind of public place – it could even be an arcade inside a morning supermarket – is at times acting like a Tibetan temple yard, as the reciters of communist truths mumble their mantras of correct attitudes… as I imagine, because I can only hear certain words, but often words of a strong coded quality, opening up places in my own memory where I see myself reading Mao’s scriptures or throwing eggs at policemen at a demonstration against the fascist regime of Rhodesia at a tennis match in 1968… or printing the words Baader-Meinhof all over my helmet at work at the steelworks of Oxelösund in 1975, seriously advocating the imminent destruction of the means of production...

...and I feel the burning thoughts of the theorists who are so eager to get the word working, get the disciples of the International to pry up those paving-stones and sling them in graceful trajectories across the street, one end of the beautiful curve at the center of rage of a kefia-shrouded, autonomic activist, the other in the back of the head of a cop, gun in hand; a curvature, a trajectory fashioned by rage, a shape like Stig Dagerman’s bridge in Birgitta svit, the bridge that had one abutment in the melancholy of September; the other in the darkness of November – and I take a break from PROCLAMATION, leave the humming Macintosh and go make myself s cup of strong black coffee, and on the way to the kitchen I look on my shelves and find a recording of Stig Dagerman reading Birgitta svit (Birgitta Suite) from Vårt behov av tröst (Our Need for Consolation) in an old recording made in 1950… and I marvel at the text and the voice, this magnetic, overpowering presence of this writer and poet who wrote with his own blood, and who, when the words ran out, killed himself with fumes from his car in his 1950s’ garage… and he was a fighter too, against the oppressors of souls… and it gets late and I continue listening through headphones, immersing myself in this brute but tender sound world of righteous wrath. This is the auditory aspect of the essence of righteous wrath!

Then suddenly, at 31:57, silence falls, and when sound returns it is the sound of wind and sea, perhaps the wind by a shore, or the wind of fall through aspens near a farm house, and a dog is barking, sounding lonely and forlorn, as the rumble of the wind against the microphone makes for a realistic field recording, in stark contrast to what we’ve heard up to this point on the CD. The dog is joined by other dogs, now all both barking and howling and whimpering. A jet plane is heard in a hypnotic elastic thunder across the sky, through the wind, and birds are chirping up the trees.

A few minutes later silence returns and recedes, and a deep but turning, shifting drone fills every last part of a space, into which, however, glimpses of the voices of church-goers seep. Perhaps the rumble is a closely miked church organ, or perhaps the rumble is generated by tone generators of sorts; it doesn’t matter; the result is magnificent, somehow absolutely perfect after the two kinds of sound webs we have gone through so far on PROCLAMATION. This deeply droning section, rumbling like the infrasound sometimes heard in the back of idling city buses, shudders like a mighty standing wave through human and supra-human existence, bringing the scare-crow landscapes of intra-lives Bardos in view, as the timbres of the drone shifts and wrangles, letting off sprays of glittering grains of sound. It’s mighty, powerful, truthful as the wrath of section one, as the wind of section two.

Towards the conclusion rattling, sharp, bamboo-like properties are introduced, like city precipitation on the hoods of parked cars in a meaningless mid-fall morning in Stockholm, and a feeling of mystery within the duration of every-day life is creeping upon me… and I realize that this CD has moved me much further than I could have anticipated at the outset. I am impressed by the determined and almost relentless creativity that The Sons of God has revealed herein.