After driving for half a day – a beautiful September fall day – from my brother’s farm at Lake Graninge in the Norrland district of Ångermanland with its vast coniferous forests and hidden lakes, winding rivers and roaring rapids, I descended on Fylkingen in Stockholm, just in time for LUDD’s meet with Hans Isgren.

My eyes were still full of journey landscapes, of white clouds traveling the windy horizons, as I took a seat in the half dark hall which harbors the Fylkingen stage. This descent through Sweden made me extremely sensitive to the soaring sounds out of this meeting between LUDD (Lise-Lotte Norelius & Ida Lundén) and legendary Hans Isgren, as their slowly evolving sound world – a mixture of age-old Eastern traditions and modern Western electronic spurs of the moment - moved across my senses like those fall clouds across the horizons.

This is the musicians’ own description of the event:

Hans Isgren and Lise-Lotte Norelius are both veterans of their arts, while Ida Lundén emerges out of a younger generation of musicians. I experienced Hans Isgren for the first time many years ago on a vinyl with Pandit Ram Narayan (Raga Puria Kalyan) recorded in Stockholm in November 1974 with Hans Isgren on tambura, Narayan of course on sarangi and Suresh Talwalkar on tabla.

The history books say that Hans Isgren commanded the first free-jazz group in Sweden all the way back in Elvis Presley times; 1958 – 59, while he also shot short movies and participated in the happening movement of early 1960s. He went on to studies, like classical Indian vocal music (dhrupad) and also composition. He participated in a musicians’ collective which was quite famous in Sweden in those days; Ett Minne för Livet. After having retreated from the stages in the 1980s he reappeared in 1995, and since then he is an active musical representative of the finest essence of East-West culture

… and now here he rose out of the shadows of the pre-concert hall at Fylkingen on that night of 7th September 2003, with some acrid words about Stockhausen on his tongue, as he noticed me playing through an iBook slide-show presentation of some of the in excess of five thousand pictures from the Stockhausen Courses of August 2003 that I’d recently taken on Stockhausen’s commission – but there is room for everybody in the world, I think…

Lise-Lotte Norelius is also well-known to the progressive and inter-cultural scene of Sweden, working in a musical world of freely and ecstatically mingling characteristics, in constellations like Anitas Livs and SNOW, as well as in various collaborations with the best of the best of Swedish improvisational musicians …and the beer she handed me as I came in dusty as a latter-day Woody Guthrie from the Norrland road was graciously wonderful!

The generations of Hans Isgren, myself and even Lise-Lotte Norelius are getting old, but this also means that we have many cultural layers to our credit; a deep and rich sediment of the heard and the seen and the thought and the felt, enhancing and amplifying all really good and worthwhile cultural events and experiences of today, in a way that can only come with some… age!
Let me also assure you that the music of this evening with LUDD and Hans Isgren could not possibly have materialized in this magic, hypnotic way without those years of the slow but steady layering of cultures, without the experience of incensed Eastern rooms in the half dark of the 1970s, of the eager hunger for all things mind-expanding of the 1960s, without those years of all but despair in the hostile yuppie years of the 1980s. It simply could not happen without all this – and I feel a deep and warm love for the young kid I once was, who took this head on tumble into the San Francisco Renaissance (Ferlinghetti, Corso, Ginsberg) and the consequent wild get-together of Bob Dylan and William Byrd, of Jack London and Giacomo Leopardi, of Friedrich Nietzsche and Vilhelm Ekelund, of Nils Ferlin and Lenny Bruce, of Snoddas Nordgren and Om Kalsoum – and of all the sincere outpour of spirit through the twelve gates of the City of the Earth; three gates to the east, three gates to the west, three gates to the north, three gates to the south… and this ecumenical catharsis of music and poetry and literature that the flowers of the 60s eventually caused for the lucky ones among us, those of us who did not succumb to drugs or greed, but stayed curious, stayed conscious of the wonder of it all!

The evening at Fylkingen almost imperceptibly transformed from a slow gathering of people into a slowly emerging, cautiously materializing concert situation, in which instruments and electronic paraphernalia gleamed and glowed in the semi-darkness.
Lise-Lotte Norelius was placed inside a circle of percussive tools at the left, her Macintosh screen spreading a comforting light across the near-by devices.
Hans Isgren with his electrified kantele, another dimly lit Macintosh, his alto clarinet and a set of curious devices had placed himself dead center, while Ida Lundén, with an assortment of bowls and indefinable gear, plus her electronic set-up, maintained a badly lit position to the right, in the shadows…

The meager and austere beginning of the music felt like a sparse fall precipitation in the forest; a cold but cozy, enchanted, secret moment under the spruces and pines of Scandinavia, drops of dew falling with distinct sounds through the peacefulness, obeying the law of gravity with the most natural grace. Yes, it was the feeling of treading the forest by yourself in September, hunting those elusive mushrooms, full of penetrating bequerel that light you up from within… and if you look at it from another viewpoint, it felt like a sounding illustration of the sparkling sensation of a mind at rest, a mind resting from thoughts and emotions, simply emitting haphazard, involuntary sparks of electricity from inside the cerebral cortex; as close as you get to the original Rigpa without being fully enlightened…

At times I even got visions of olden days, with cows shuffling through the meadow on their way home to be milked, their cowbells resounding in the moist and chilly air…

The thoughtful – or freed of thoughts! – atmosphere of the beginning of the music attuned the listeners into a mood of meditation, wherein the senses where furthered sharpened. The sharp and grinding, panting noises that entered, in a vision of wild boars boring their snouts into heaps of dry leaves – a battalion of snuffling shadows under the moon – hit all the harder in the serene mood which the carefulness of the players had qualified us for…

The pigsty audio, though, always swung at us from a backdrop of the original Rigpa serenity, in much the same way thoughts take shape and rise out of the charged stillness of undisturbed consciousness.

A feeling of intense concentrated activity rose out of the still rather thin and transparent audio layer, like a notion of a medieval woman in England huddling at the fire, shaping something out of wood with her hands, the world outside a circle of darkness under the stars, death just a visitor...

Hans Isgren started to paint elegant sonic clarinet figures rising above the humus feeling of the electronics and the concretisms, in slowly gleaming, spiraling auditory movements; invocations from a muddy existence at the bottom of the sky… a timeless rite…

The sense of an ageless, timeless matter-versus-spirit predicament grows on you as the dripping of stalactites towards rising stalagmites in the music keeps up relentlessly, while Isgren points his horn towards alien skies as a scout for humanity, as a scout for spirit helplessly rising out of matter, into a samsara realm of provocative fantasies.

At this stage in the music, a resounding, metallic cloud of sound hovering in the background, like tooth-ache or heavy thoughts – or steel barrel drizzle! -, makes the initial words about La Monte Young having provided some inspiration for the evening understandable. I come to think of La Monte Young’s recordings from his and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House in New York City (on a Shandar recording), but maybe especially of the second piece on the so-called Black Album; 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM, recorded 1964, and The Volga Delta 23, recorded in 1959. I remember that picture of the bearded gentleman on the prairie at Bern, Idaho, with the mountains in the distance, as portrayed in the booklet of The Well-Tuned Piano. It is airy, windy, open; room for thoughts, room for no thoughts!
Some of Hans Isgren’s clarinet expressions also remind me of the ecstatic wind music on La Monte Young’s 12-1-64 First 12 Sunday Morning Blues, recorded in December 1964 with La Monte Young (sopranino saxophone, Marian Zazeela (vocal drone), Angus MacLise (hand drum), Tony Conrad (guitar) and John Cale (viola).

Since these names come up here, I may as well provide my impression that in addition to La Monte Young, I think homage should be paid to Angus MacLise and Tony Conrad in connection with influences on and inspiration for this evening at Fylkingen, pertaining to the Western influences, if you can call those musicians Western… well Western with Eastern souls, perhaps… This is more obvious a little further into the concert.
Listen for example to MacLise’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and Brain Damage in Oklahoma City; somewhat more feverish than LUDD and Isgren, but with the same musical spirit!
Tony Conrad is soaring in and out of the Fylkingen event with remembrances of early pieces, like, for instance, LYssophobia: on four violins, recorded in 1964.
A little surprisingly, maybe, even John Cale once produced a sound world that could well have fitted into the evening at Fylkingen, like Stainless Steel Gamelan (1965), Big Apple Express (1965), At About This Time Mozart Was Dead And Joseph Conrad Was Sailing the Seven Seas Learning English (1967) Sun Blindness Music (1967) and The Second Fortress (1968).

Another Western composer/musician who definitely has bearings on the kind of music that Norelius, Isgren and Lundén provided is Gilius van Bergeijk, with his piece Over de Dood en de Tijd (On Death and Time); a work of shattering beauty, for which I once wrote a poem, which as well may convey the feeling of this night a Fylkingen:

However, the big form of the Fylkingen concert is developed out a North Indian tradition. Isgren talks about the dhrupad tradition, making me think about the Dagar Brothers (Ustad Nasir Zahiruddin Dagar and Ustad Nasir Faiyazuddin Dagar) and a beautiful recording of Raga Miyan ki Todi that I have. These singers come out of 19 traceable generations of dhrupad musicians!
The dhrupad is foremost a religious music, representing a kind of prayer. This also corresponds well with my impression of Isgren as raising his horn in an invocative gesture of a humanity with its feet in the mud and its head among the stars. In that situation, prayer, open prayer, is the only pure gesture, the only sensible attitude.

Like in North Indian raga, LUDD and Isgren slowly builds the evening into a continuously denser fabric of sound, from the extreme transparency of the dew-stillness of a Scandinavian forest to the gradually more forceful and relentless atmosphere of the Bardo of Becoming and its magnetic pull towards rebirth, as described by Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the scare-crows of our mind steering us dreamily along (ISBN 0-7126-1569-5), although a few periods of withdrawal do occur in the concert, like a slow breathing, when the musicians, with the exception of Isgren, disappear for a while, letting the Macintosh computers and the electronic devices talk among themselves by themselves, like letting go, like tapping energy straight from the source of the music of the spheres, our minds clear as mirrors towards the endless void…

A highlight of the evening was when Hans Isgren played his electric kantele with a small electric fan (which can be seen in one of the photographs provided here), as the computers emitted a binary drone of much beauty. That was when the evening clearly took off and soared into the beyond, hovering in a dream state, in a rare glimpse into the bardos.

Another significant highlight was Ida Lundén's spasmodic outbreak of spilling of objects from her little table, an aluminum can toppling over, small objects falling onto the floor. She achieved this musical catharsis by the charged and nervous ringing of two bells that hit objects on the table; the kind of bells we had in Swedish schools way back in the 1950s and perhaps 1960s, for calling the children back to class after breaks. I remember running around the school building in my rural school in Tuna outside Nyköping, frantically ringing such a bell, during my week as a ringer. This chore went from pupil to pupil during semesters. You can see Ida Lundén doing this ringing of bells and spilling of objects in one of the pictures earlier in this account.
Ida performed this part of the concert with an energy and purposefulness that slid over into ecstasy of almost erotic proportions, like sudden lovemaking in the kitchen, pots and pans flying, bodies wrestling in pleasure, similar to the goings-on in Katharina Riese's Ein Hörspiel über die Liebe on a CD from a 5-CD-box of sound art from ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation... Wow, Ida!

Sogyal Rinpoche writes about art and “art’s […] sacred origin and […] sacred purpose”, which he says is “to give people a vision of their true nature and their place in the universe, and to restore to them, endlessly afresh, the value and meaning of life and its infinite possibilities”. He writes about “that radiance which transmits, translates and communicates the purity and infinite meaning of the absolute to the finite and the relative”.

Without a doubt, this evening with LUDD and Hans Isgren at Fylkingen on 7th September 2003 was such a moment, when the musicians opened themselves to a transmitting function, filtering the influx from soaring energies into a music that could affect all of us who were present.