Jonny Axelsson is a renowned Swedish percussionist; more often than not engaged anytime a percussionist is in demand. In Sweden he does have a mighty competition in the famous Kroumata Ensemble, who made excellent recordings of for example Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist’s “Sisu”, Yoshihisa Taïra’s “Hiérophonie” and Sven-David Sandström’s “Drums” back in 1983-84. Another dignified percussionist in Sweden is of course Raymond Strid, who appears in free form constellations and improvised music.

Jonny Axelsson is an institution all to himself, though, and shows up in many guises, musically. Not long ago he amazed the listeners with a splendid interpretation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” in the setting for electronic tape, percussion and piano. Fredrik Ullén played the piano. That was on Caprice CAP 21642, which was released earlier this year, 2000.

Immediately on hearing the first percussive bars of this CD I thought about Iannis Xenakis and his “Pléiades”, which has been recorded by for example Les Percussions de Strasbourg on Harmonia Mundi HMC 905185.

The composers providing the compositions on this CD are – most of them – well known characters from the presently active, middle-aged group of Swedish new music composers. A few of them has also composed electroacoustic pieces with success, like Anders Blomqvist and Christer Lindwall, while Karin Rehnqvist has reached international fame with her sensitive and folkloristic ensemble pieces.

The music on this CD was written in collaboration with Jonny Axelsson.

The first track here is Anders Hultqvist’s “Composition No. 1, Alphabet” from 1997-98. This is the first in a series of compositions triggered by the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s poem “Alfabet”. The poem deals with “growing”, and the amazing fact that anything at all “exists”. I don’t know how this has affected the composition, really, but in Hultqvist’s mind it must have meant something. The result is a pretty regular modern work for percussion.

Next piece is a composition by a very interesting Swedish composer; Anders Blomqvist, whose earlier electroacoustic works are amongst my favorites in that genre. Here he starts with a wandering, deceptive marimba, and sneaks around the corner whenever he’s spotted. The work’s title is “Tass/A” (“Paw/A”) (1999), and is a continuation of earlier tape pieces “Löpa Varg” and “Spårar”, who both deals with the wolf theme, in a biological, mythological and social sense. This is easily a favorite on this album, though it is hard to make comparisons, since the family of percussion instruments is very big, and since the marimba here makes quite another sonic impression than the bang-on-a-can eruptions of Hultqvist’s introductory piece.

Kent Olofsson is next. He has composed many ensemble pieces, often with electronics, and is well known also outside of Sweden. His piece is “Treccia for percussion solo / Minotaur Labyrinth” (1996-99), and starts of with an Xenakis solo, it seems. Hard to get around Xenakis when it comes to percussion. His spirit always hovers over the idiom… Here Olofsson uses three groups of percussions; metal, wood and drums, with high, medium and low instruments in each group. A number of rhythmical processes are in swing simultaneously, rendering the fabric of sound an intricate and interesting pattern of stretching and contracting, breathing, movements.

Karin Rehnqvist’s piece is “Strömmar” (“Streams”) (1992), and is completely different from the other pieces on this CD. She wrote the piece for an instrument actually built by Jonny Axelsson and Volker Staub – the bass cimbalom. The piece, says Rehnqvist, kind of streamed, flowed, out of an improvisation that took place when Rehnqvist and Axelsson got together around the bass cimbalom.

This is a very interesting instrument, historically, in its earlier forms. Of course it is well known that the cimbalom and related instruments has been used extensively by the European gypsies, but it has also reached fame in India, where Kumar Sharma has made it an instrument of Indian classical music, under the name santoor. Before the cimbalom, zither or santoor reached India it got well rooted in for example Iran too, where it is used widely in Iranian classical music ensembles. The cimbalom may also have been the model for our piano. The difference – one of them – is that you hit the strings on a cimbalom directly with different kinds of mallets, instead of using a keyboard to maneuver the mallets. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the piano actually is a percussion instrument, and that it has been so since long before John Cage and his preparations also made it sound like one! Rehnqvist’s piece makes for interesting and pleasurable listening, reminding me somewhat of the feeling you get when you hear Ingvar Karkoff’s “Sarangi”, an electroacoustic piece utilizing sounds from an Indian sarangi, played by Hans Isgren. It’s a very rich sound web, sparkling with overtones.

Christer Lindwall’s piece is “Clash” (1992-93), making you expect exactly what you get. The music is kind of erratic, un-behaved, like a neurotic teenager who can’t stand his father’s manners at the breakfast table.

“Prometheus” (1983) is the demanding title Kerstin Jeppsson gave her piece – demanding in the sense that Prometheus was the guy who brought light, i.e. intelligence, enlightenment, to mankind. She uses exotic five- and six tone scales in her work, and contrasts violent outbursts with hardly audible passages. This does not bother me, though, because the combination of instruments – much metal, much xylophone type sounds, big gongs – make for a grid of pleasure, as a barrier of bamboo or a field full of barbed wire – maybe not all pleasure, but also some challenge, too. Maybe this is the most musically mature piece on the CD, and coming from the most anonymous composers here too, whom even happen to originate in my home town, the little rural Nyköping of Sweden – but I’m not biased, I promise!