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Forerunners Track 7. Åke Karlung – Antihappening (1962) [3:48] This is a rarity, unknown to me until this CD from Fylkingen reached my habitat. Åke Karlung (1930 – 1990) worked as a multimedia artist, mostly known for his short films that he kept revising through the years by cutting them to shreds. Karlung also arranged, as it is described in the CD booklet, “violent happenings”, with electroacoustic music as an important ingredient. One of these happenings was mainly acoustic, which is why parts of that one have been reproduced here. Furthermore, the choice of the parts were chosen long ago, when ABF in Stockholm, where the recording was made, released an LP with examples of all their sounding activities. Therefore Karlung, who was quite non-commercial, got some exposure on a strictly commercially intended publicity phonogram – and therefore he became represented for posterity on this historical CD. The examples thrown together in the Karlung track are rough, careless and wild, sometimes with feverish cascades of piercing sound, in which you can detect some repetition, while the cuts between various parts of the original tape (I suppose) are clumsy and awkward. A voice comes clear of all this commotion at times, talking about happening as such: “Happening, happening, always happening, synthesis happening, Soviet citizens could say: You Americans have advertised your happenings, but you weren’t first with happenings, just as little as you were first to the Moon…” (For younger readers, this statement might sound strange, since the first men on the Moon were Americans - later, in 1969 – but the Soviets were the first to send probes to the Moon. This happened already in the 1950s, when Luna 1 made a flyby on 4th January, 5995 kilometers above the lunar surface, before going into orbit around the Sun between Earth and Mars. Luna 2 impacted the Moon on 14th September 1959, and the first images of the dark side – or rather far side – of the Moon were shot by Luna 3 on 7th October 1959). You can also hear a voice talking about an “instructive hara-kiri”… and a little girl demanding: “Mummy, I want to hear a fairytale, about paper finches”… while an adult states that “It’s so banal, it’s so banal!” A woman laughs, and the echo of her voice crashes into crackling pieces. This really exemplifies a certain aspect of the Sixties that I remember well; that brute, demonstrative dissociation that was necessary before refinement and disciplined method took care of the feverish force and used it for viable art. Antihappening shows a point of birth, a gathering of sources, which bloomed fully later in the 1960s. Track 8. Leo Nilson – Skorpionen (1964) [5:53] Leo Nilson (1939) got a wire recorder from his father at the age of just 10, and began his recording activities thus, in fact making makeshift collage compositions. There is a seamless development, after that, in Nilson’s activities, from the first etudes into his mature creativity later on, when he performed large-scale electronic works at festivals. There is, however, not as much recorded material out, as you’d expect from such an innovative and active artist as Leo Nilson. Ralph Lundsten has issued a triple CD with his earlier electronic works from the 1960s and 1970s, and since he cooperated with Leo Nilson in the early days – even sharing his first Andromeda Studio with Leo – there are a few of Leo Nilson’s works in that box as well. I was lucky in the early 1990s to spot and purchase a few of the very early so-called documentation LPs from the beginnings of a more sophisticated electronic music studio in Stockholm, at the Swedish Radio, which in 1966 moved in at Kungsgatan 8. (There had been ambitions to build an electronic music studio before, already in 1960, when Fylkingen and ABF - the Workers’ Educational Association – set up a small studio at ABF, mostly for educational purposes. Gottfried Michael Koenig was teaching there!)
The very first of the documentation LPs, called LPD 1, was released by the Swedish Radio in 1966, and contained Lundsten’s and Nilson’s two works Kalejdoskop and Aloha Arita. Another LP on which Leo Nilson participates came much later, in 1980, on the Caprice label, with the Pax Art Ensemble performing a live concert at the Museum of Modern Arts in Stockholm in 1979. Leo Nilson had a private studio in the District of Skåne in southern Sweden. It was called Studio Viarp, because it was placed in the area of Viarp, and on a compilation LP (Caprice RIKS LP 35) there is a piece by Nilson called Viarp I. In 1982 came time to celebrate John Cage on his 80th birthday, which Fylkingen did with a new LP, where Leo Nilson participated with the piece Early Ear; a beautiful piece of repetitive but still ever-transforming music in seamlessly connected movements realized at Leo’s Studio Viarp. The work chosen for inclusion on the Fylkingen CD that I am reviewing is Skorpionen from 1964. There is information about that piece in the liner notes of the documentation LP from 1966, stating that Skorpionen was a birthday gift for Pablo Picasso in 25th October 1965, when he turned 84. In these early days of electronic music in Sweden – (it was not so early in other parts, such as in Germany or the USA) – equipment was hard to come by, but there was a guy in Helsinki, Finland, who built his own machines for sound. His name was Erkki Kurreniemi, and Leo Nilson borrowed a machine, which is characterized as a mini computer in the CD booklet – but probably wasn’t, strictly speaking – from him, on which he achieved the Skorpionen piece. There is a Finnish movie, 90 minutes long, available, about Erkki Kurreniemi, called Tribute To The Electronic Music Magician Erkki Kurreniemi. Kurreniemi founded an electronic music studio for the Department of Musicology at the University of Helsinki in the early 1960s. Many of the electronic devices and instruments he built are now in Ralph Lundsten’s possession at his Andromeda Studio outside Stockholm. Kurreniemi also composed his own electronic music. Skorpionen starts with typical, disturbing, incisive electronic calls, rising in bending trajectories like water out of firemen’s hoses at a stirring demonstration against Rhodesian tennis players in Båstad… The sounds develop into hastier, chopped-up incidents, blended with the maze of static and churned interferences, still somehow in the less cultivated forms of the early 1960s, though some of the straggling and sprawling awkwardness may stem directly from the electronic characteristics of Erkeniemi’s device. The progression gets tighter, wilder and faster, until everything is pressed down a cone, coming out a winding, twining flow of minced meat… I wonder how Picasso received this! Track 9. Ralph Lundsten – Atomskymning (1964) [3:14] If you talk about electronic music with the general public in Sweden, most people will mention Ralph Lundsten and Jean Michel André Jarre. Let‘s forget Jarre directly, since he has nothing at all to do with electronic music, or with art in any form. In Sweden, Ralph Lundsten (1936) has not been received well by his colleagues, who think that he became too commercial later on. This may be so, when considering his music for the public presentation of new fighter jets at SAAB and so on – but he has had a great importance, and he was a forerunner in Sweden, starting to build his Andromeda Studio as early as 1959. He composed many interesting electronic compositions in his earlier years, but then sort of disappeared into a strange mixture of blatant commercialism and New Age/Fantasy. Therefore he was considered a defector from real art, and the reputation that befell him from his composer colleagues in Sweden reminds me of the way Stockhausen’s colleagues regarded Stockhausen in Germany, though no other similarity should be maintained, save perhaps the role as a forerunner and innovator. In later years is seems Lundsten has regained some of his good reputation from the early days. Atomskymning received several prizes and has been used in films by Pierre Robin and Margit Ogebratt. The music is much more sophisticated than the sounds of his colleague at Andromeda; Leo Nilsson; easier on the ear and more complex in a compositional sense. Lundsten uses a mixture of human voices and electronic sounds, in a flow of sonic waves that stirs imagination and provides a pulsating base for the innate force of the music. Long, flowing whistles shine like bleak Northern Lights, while prickly, percussive dots of sound crackle like electricity across the heavens. Metallic wobbles divide the sonic space in sections, into which Lundsten pours nervous female laughter and rolling barrels of thudding commotion. This is a very interesting piece, especially considering the early realization; 1964. Track 10. Bengt Emil Johnson – Enmans Gubbdrunkning (1964) [7:22] Bengt Emil Johnson (1936) is one of the most important artists on the new music and new art scene since the 1960s, and he keeps it up. He is also an important poet and author, and has been – before retirement - one of the most influential radio producers at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation for many years, also with managerial responsibilities.
I recorded him and his wife Kerstin Ståhl at the Tellus stage in Stockholm in April 2005, when they performed individually, as a duo and with pianists Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz. At that time Johnson and Ståhl performed a new work; a textsound piece called Det var nu; det var då, as vibrant and energetic and fun as ever. I also had the pleasure to record him, Kerstin Ståhl, Kjell Fageus, Margareta Hallin and others at a Werner Aspenström afternoon at the ABF House in Stockholm in October 2005, where, among other things, a rare Aspenström play was performed.
Bengt Emil Johnson has been represented with phonograms – mostly on compilations – over the years, but he has had at least one entire phonogram to himself: a Caprice LP (CAP 1174, 1979), with the three works In Time, Vittringar and Escaping; a very fine album. He was also represented on an album called Music for Tape from Sweden, (Caprice RIKS LP 35) unknown year of release, but surely 1970s or 1980s, where he participates with Through the Mirror of Thirst (second passage), realized in 1969. Bengt Emil Johnson occupies one side of an LP with Night Chants I; a fascinating and compelling work, in which you easily get lost. On the other side of that LP (SRLP 1417) you find Rolf Enström’s famous collaboration with the poetess Elsa Grave; Slutförbannelser (Final Curses); one of the most fascinating electroacoustic/textsound works ever made in Sweden. Johnson is if course represented on the few so-called documentation LPs released by the Swedish Radio from the start-up of their electronic music studio venture. On the second of those LPs, LPD 2, you can hear the intriguing textsound work “1/1967 (Nya släpkoppel med vida världen: besök, äventyr, lindringar, etc.)” On the fourth LP from that series, LPD 4, Johnson’s entry is “3/1970 (bland) III”. This fourth LP was released in 1973.
The black and white, graphically stern and imaginative covers were designed by Lars Fursäter. Before I searched this information out, I believed Lars-Gunnar Bodin had made those geometrical paintings. I’ve seen other art works by him, in the same clean-cut arithmetical style. Enmans Gubbdrunkning is a text-sound work that originally came on a 7” vinyl with a book, a collection of poems, called Gubbdrunkning (Drowning of Old Men or Drowning of an Old Man). The poems of Gubbdrunkning are meant to be performed live by one or more people. The book came with two versions. This is one of them; Johnson’s own version. That’s why he calls it Enmans Gubbdrunkning, which means One Man’s Drowning of an Old Man…
This work is a typical Johnson piece, with many witty ingredients, and a gradual build-up of sections that enhance each other and recur with a slightly different meaning, or shaded in various ways. Then he throws in some truly funny passages, like the word “baktala”, which in Swedish means “slander someone”, but also “talk backwards” – so Johnson lets the word “baktala” be immediately followed by a phrase played back in reverse!
It is a bewildering text, with a doubtful meaning, here and there spiced up with various lists, like different kinds of water: “fish water, bathing water, drinking water, washing water, lake water, salt water, melting water, mineral water, brook water”… or the mad idea of putting the word “book” in front of each word in a sentence… . The text is meant to be absorbed as is, without thinking as much as just feeling where you are, letting yourself go, letting yourself loose in your associations, which are bound to come, and which sometimes will have you burst into laughter, and sometimes have you duck and brace yourself, not to go insane. Searching for so-called logic in these texts is just foolish. It’s quite wonderful, and one of the more sane-testing linguistic acrobatics in my frame of reference! “Can I gnaw on you?” The morphemes fly up and fly around, like a flock of jackdaws: “Can you then, please, drown when I tell you!” Track 11. Lars-Gunnar Bodin – Den heter ingenting, den heter nog Seans 2 (1965) [16:01] I’m happy to get this great text-sound work on a CD now, without the crackling of the old LP where I’ve had this piece until now. I found an old LP called Semikolon; Lars-Gunnar Bodin / Bengt Emil Johnson (RELP 5016) (1966) in a Stockholm record store for vintage vinyls in a basement on an off-Drottninggatan street some time in the early 1990s. It has a cover that was designed by Lars-Gunnar Bodin, in black and white geometrics, and contained Bodin’s Den heter ingenting, den heter nog Seans 2 and Bengt Emil Johnson’s Släpkoppel; äventyr på vägen, plus a joint Johnson-Bodin work called Vietnam.
Lars-Gunnar Bodin (1935) has had an immense impact on the new music scene in Sweden and all over the world. He has been active in the purely electronic field, and in the text-sound realm, where he has introduced and popularized his very own kind of space or science lingo, often with an almost frightening, alienated chill, robot-like. He has also been active introducing other modern music composers and musicians on radio, and in various juries of international electronic music competitions, like the one in Bourges; Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique.
“Meditation over the word coward… coward… coward… coward… coward…” or “vomit waltz” followed by intense percussion that might have been achieved with a pencil in a tinplate can… or the jubilant introduction: “A merrily quacking overture in three parts; one: song flakes” (and yet more percussion, but now layered and more cardboardy…) – and so it goes on and on, with unexpected sentences, suggestions and sounds. I’m listening to Lars-Gunnar Bodin’s Den heter ingenting, den heter nog Seans 2 (It’s Called Nothing, It’s Probably Called Séance 2), and I jump at: “Three: sandwich berries”. At times Bodin lets a female voice utter a few words, each word repeated many times while moving around the room. Simple methods stacked like this has a much stronger effect than one would expect, and the six-teen minutes of the work – which is a crown jewel in the idiom of text-sound compositions! – enriches the listener with energy and linguistic inspiration. At other times Bodin moves on the verge of the blacklisting that came down like straightjackets in the 60s and 70s, with passages like: “A message to the fleshy, preserving housewives”, followed by volleys of machinegun fire! (Åke Hodell’s Mr. Smith in Rhodesia was indeed blacklisted at the Swedish Radio many years, because of Hodell’s wonderful insults of Ian Smith, and for those school children’s rhythmical speech choir, stating: “Mr. Smith is a murderer!”) For the most part, though, Bodin moves in erratic patterns through the unexpectancy of lingual mirrorings and the jacked densities of homeblindness and forced traditional thought patterns, opening our stuffed halls of logic to the winds of change. Bodin’s text-sound poetry moves like the flashes of fish backs in a creek, dipping into the sub-conscious and flashing back up with backwards messages or chorus lines out of amnesia and precognitions.
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