Rolf Enström was the one composer of electroacoustics that fascinated me the most in my slightly younger days. I can still feel the thrill and the intense artistic grace of works like Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise and Final Curses, released on Enström’s last electroacoustic CD, in 1989. It has taken until now, 2005, for him to release another CD!

Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise won him the Prix Italia Prize in 1987. I still sometimes think about this piece when I make my annual hikes through northern Lapland, where I – in seriously exhausted circumstances – once traveled those shamanistic realms myself.

That 1989 CD was revealing to me on several levels, and I can honestly say that I have spent more time in those works than in the works of any other singular CD.

Because of this I was very excited when this second Enström CD was released in connection with Stockholm New Music 2005.

A few months have passed, and I return to the CD for a more thorough spin, with the aim to let the music speak its mind, free of any circumstances other than its own.

Oddly enough, it seems I’ve never written about Rolf Enström at Sonoloco, which really is ridiculous, considering the heavy impact his earlier music has had on me. Because if this it may be fitting with a small introduction of the man:

Born in 1951, he encountered Bartók and Stockhausen, as well as the saxophonist and berserker Peter Brötzmann in his teens in the Swedish town of Södertälje, due south of Stockholm along the railway and the highway. The movie 2001 also made a deep impression on his young mind, as it did for so many of us.
He became widely known with the pieces mentioned above, Final Curses and Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise, in the 1980s, but he has written many other pieces, before and – especially – after those two classics.

He says: “My art lives in a shadow land between the visual arts and music – with the pictures missing”.

This traversing, this crossbreeding, also reveals itself in Enström’s mixed works for instrumentalists and electronic music.

The works on this feature CD were composed between 1998 and 2003.

Sudden synthesized organ-bursts puff in your face like someone’s smoky breath; the breath of someone that invades your privacy a little too much, getting just a little too close.
The whispering of hiding, ducked-away people – remnants of ancient speech from ancient people, living two-dimensional lives in Greek mosaics? – creeps along the floor and up the walls in dark corners like a battalion of ants, dispersed in all directions by a whistle that calls someone’s attention.
Further into the piece dark nuances of serene beauty seep into your listening like the fog-horns of distant lighthouses in the mist – and out of this halcyon light – Vilhelm Ekelund’s September light – a choir of venomous clarity grows in might and light, only to fall back into the silence and mist from whence it rose.

The choir entity returns, but now with attached, individual speech, in fragments of sentences, of verses, in a dream state, not unlike the atmospheres of some dreams and some states of mind that might prepare us for the bardo state between this life and the next; a thought finding its way up the thinness of a misty condensation on a countryside window in a Scandinavian fall, in an undefined place in time.

Intelligible, complete sentences of poetic significance are spoken on a meandering, flowing backdrop of jingling candy bar audio, and soothing layers of choirs allow the music a Doré type of age and patina. Tingling bells and bending reflections of high pitches circle and spiral inside the Pärt choirs for a while – and I can feel the many influences that come together in this distinctive musical work.

”The tale is eternal: it commences where it stops…”

“How hard the lives of birds…”

Angular, gauche flakes of white and gray noise disperse across the opening of this piece. A limited number of notebook papers, torn out of the notebook, fall away over the table in an act and counteract of air resistance and gravity, picked up by the state of the art microphones of the recording space – as involuntary thoughts, not yet harnessed by reason or Luther or Freud, fly up and flutter around like a noisy flock of jackdaws in a Swedish city park at nightfall.

And then… Three layers introduced… and dropped – while the flaking paper continues, amassing into paper drifts along the ditches, billions of words scribbled… the history of these human beings along a stretch of country road… flying in the wind, rustling in the dark…

“And nothing has happened…”

“Is it during night that something happens?”

Ghostlike presentations of Vesaas’ texts… and now I recognize the wizardry of Enström’s delicate and sometimes brute art; a soft touch by an iron fist…

On a backdrop of slowly winding darkness and the hidden fragrances of a spruce forest at night, turned away from the glittering lights of the town, Enström distributes these close-up Tarje Vesaas words out of the mouth of Hans Jonstoij. Only someone with the experience of the late fall forests and waters outside the town of Södertälje could write music like this, in which Tengmalm’s owl can be sensed, albeit not heard, somewhere deep inside this music, like a silent but intense focusing of spirit and consciousness; a really dense and concentrated realm in the universe, in the late October forests of Sodermanland, inside Rolf Enström’s Kairos.

The very beginning of Kronos resembles Morton Feldman’s Three Voices, but at the same instant you’re drawn back into William Byrd’s late 1500s… in a pure, ascetic progression of highly defined voices, tangible, palpable, material in all their bliss, radiating the light of the flesh and the light of the spirit, the way IT REALLY IS: energy transformed into matter; matter into energy, love and hard feelings and rock-bottom Karma.
When Enström’s church bell electronics - withheld, pitched down - makes way for the spatiality of dispersed voices, shooting this way and that, diagonally past your face like the spruces that part in front of your eyes as you speed down a forest road, only to close ranks again behind you, in your most recent past – I realize that this music is permeated with the philosophy of loving void, the complete clarity of the Buddhist Rigpa… and out of this state of affairs before any state of affairs rises an imagination so beautiful I’d almost like it to be real…

This piece of music is a true masterwork of undefined properties, of elusive shadow plays and symbols scribbled in sand and water, divine messages dancing like mirages over the horizon.

Kronos is without doubt an inspired work of art, simply mediated by the composer – because no human can write music this beautiful!

The last seconds of the piece is a hardly audible, hardly perceptible buzzing anomaly on the perfect surface of a gravitized liquid; a ripple on the Water of Life.

Small sounds, clipping audio and spitting oralities; Saxplock! Jörgen Pettersson shows that he is one of the best on the instrument, when the saxophone starts sounding like a door that is about to be yanked of its hinges, which is when the tape – perhaps – introduces some kind of friction, like distant city traffic gnawing on your ear drums or some unwanted fear circling the perimeter of your dream, looking for an abrasion!

Some recognizable saxophone tones rise from the commotion of cardboard audio and Cagean amplified small sounds, but this is an exception from the rule in this avant-garde piece. The saxophone imitates – successfully – a stubborn donkey that won’t move an inch, and somehow this music is stuck too, suffocating in a small spot like an American housewife of the Fifties, tied up by the relentless commodities of suburban rigidity. The music tries to break loose, finally tiring of itself, disappearing into a dot that shrinks into a theoretical point and then into oblivion before you’re really aware of it – and you’re alone again; no spitting, no cardboards, no donkey!

Ebb kicks off in a jazzy Terry Riley idiom, very soon snared and rounded up by atmospheric disturbances that swirl like illuminated magnetic fields through the upper atmosphere. A strange – or unexpected, rather – development come sin the shape of a fast beat that I’ve never heard in an Enström piece before. Luckily, this section is short, and the saxophone holds its breath while resounding space events curl and dance across the nocturnal sky. The electronics move through a realm of church bell dreams, integrating the deep space encounters with an earthly sense of passing life.

Bird calls circled by the backwards alarm clocks of insanity, or a swaying pillar of saxophone statements in dancing clouds of sand: a hot day outside Phoenix, and no mercy (and a little Stockhausen to go with it…)

The instigator for this was the myriads of stars over New Zealand… without even mentioning Olaf Stapledon!

Of course, the impact of the magnitude of stars seen from a dark New Zealand rural area is all the more stunning for someone from the Northern Hemisphere; to see all those stars, and all alien, since you’ve never seen them before, from your usual vantage point up north in Scandinavia!

A quite rambling story about how Enström set about constructing his piece from the impression his starry Down Under stellar adventure made on him is printed in the booklet. How well I understand those feelings! I fall asleep each night with one out of four CDs with Ulf Palme’s celebrated reading from 1958 of Harry Martinson’s ANIARA in the player, as I drift away into sleep aboard the straying goldonder, and since a girlfriend of mine that I found in the northern mountains last summer moved to New Zealand last fall, I can’t help but feeling this globe of ours in a strangely material way, sort of embracing it, with land masses, oceans and mysterious creatures! And by my bed: new copies of Stapledon’s Star Maker and Heinelen’s Stranger in a Strange Land…

An old friend of mine recently told me that he once found a box of books that had belonged to Harry Martinson at a farm auction in the village of Jönåker outside Nyköping in Södermanland, Sweden; books with dedications to Martinson from his writer contemporaries. This treasure was on sale for almost nothing, each book 3 Swedish crowns apiece; a third of a Euro. He also told me the story of how an aquaintance of his for some reason or another visited a relative of Harry Martinson's deep in the countryside in Södermanland in the 1950s, when Martinson was there. This was during the period when he wrote ANIARA, and Harry Martinson spoke about the Universe with my friend's aquaintance, saying: "The stars, you know, the stars; they're just falling and falling and falling..."

Brittle, glassy sounds (reminding me of Denis Dufour’s Bocalises) shine and glimmer in a hectic commotion of Christmas tree spheres at the outset of Observatory Music, but a soaring backdrop (background radiation in a space simmering at 2 degrees Kelvin?) is smeared across the universal Over-There and Here-After – and traumatizing Krakatoa rumbles darken the planet…

Jingling notions cut like light through diamond heads in Rolf Enström’s creation, as thought-powered vessels go down in history with a spasm of amnesia. You’re walking like a terminator through the wheezing steam and diagonal daylight of huge, deserted factory halls, where the tools of destruction were shaped by greed of many generations, greed of many nations – and since we’re all gone, only greed as such remains, jingling like flapping oak-doors on history’s hinges; not a pretty sight, not a pleasant view… but Gaia staggers through space now like a worn-down hobo, down stellar trash-can alley towards the Clouds of Magellan – and the Star Maker “puts his fingers against the glass and bows his head and cries…"

Enström’s music widens and deepens simultaneously, echoes of the Phototurb spinning a wheel of prayers through the vast, unfathomable voids in which organic life appears as a mere disturbance on the flow of time…

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