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Kent Olofsson - Cordes Phono Suecia PSSACD 170. Duration: 74:09 The first thing that strikes me about this new Phono Suecia phonogram is the wonderful richness of the booklet and the inventive and intriguing cover design. I immediately look up their graphic designer, and his name is Julian Birbrajer. It’s so nice to sense that a lot of fantasy and love for the work went into the design job here. It really means something, really makes a difference, even though some recording companies deliver completely indifferent and almost insulting covers and booklets. This has been a lasting trend among the so-called avant-garde labels, and I hate it; it’s so untalented and ridiculously boring. Phono Suecia has invested a lot of positive energy in Kent Olofsson’s CD. I remember Kent Olofsson from – and since! - way back, when I started to take a real interest in modern art music, in the solid 1980s, when I believe I saw the long-haired enfant terrible Olofsson pictured in the contemporary music magazine Nutida Musik (A Swedish art music magazine), looking just like he came straight out of a rock band of some kind – and that was indeed the case. However, since then he has become one of the most interesting composers of modern Swedish music, with his current looks of a distinguished middle-aged businessman, always with something up his compositional sleeve, something delicate or surprising. I notice that Kent Olofsson is represented on Swedish Caprice label too right now, with one piece on Duo Dialog’s new record. On this CD on Phono Suecia he has chosen two major works; Corde for guitarist and orchestra in three parts, and The Bells for solo voices, double choir, ensemble and electronics in four parts: full-grown works of a mature, experimental and also classic composer at a very strong sector of his career. Track 1. Corde: Fascia (2002) for charango, electric MIDI guitar and orchestra [16:30] Quote from the booklet: “Fascia […] melds different genres, cultures and epochs. […] ‘Fascia’ means the tissue that holds the muscles together. The title refers to the way the orchestra is connected with the solo instrument, but also the way in which elements from different musical cultures are united.” The piece appears swiftly in front of you like a whirlwind, light and energetic, spraying sand in your eyes in the form of charango grains, through strands of an orchestral fabric that could be branded Latino desert music, a rider approaching; the wind beginning to howl (in a Dylan travesty if ever there was one!) – until a neatly wailing electric guitar portrays an iconistic player of sophisticated rock music. The massive complexity of Olofsson’s writing here reflects the predilection of the compositional 1980s, and nothing wrong with that. Olofsson masters this intricate composing perfectly, and has the electric guitar reappearing in the midst of modern classicism without even a pinch of hesitation, delivering the gluey, elastic guitarisms like was he emptying a tube of caviar in an artistic pattern over a loaf of bread. Edgy percussive bursts mix with a roaring fuzz box guitar that points ahead like the figurehead of a dark ship in heavy seas. Musical waves break in whitecaps under Strindberg skies: a music massive, complex, overwhelming – but by degrees calming into a slower, deeper swell of sound, twanging and twirling away in some kind of neurological strait. The absurd – or at least unexpected – lyrical instance follows, quite relaxed and happy, for a while, the charango a flow of trembling drops on a tilting metal plane, rendering the music beauty and a measure of security. Track 2: Corde: Collagène/Fascia II (2006) for glissentar, 11-stringed alto guitar and orchestra [12:20] Woody percussive measures lash out, and a seasick guitar with rubbery strings can’t decide its pitch, moving seamlessly up and down and aside, squinting – tickling your senses, nose-tip-close. I don’t know what a glissentar is, but it sounds like it would be a guitar for advanced glissandi, and that pretty much sums up their most obvious impressions of what I hear – but the orchestra also whines and squeaks, like the rusty hinges of an old gate deep in autumn. The piece is unexpectedly meditative, in spite of its Olofsson complexity, and though denser and more powerful orchestral moments pass like storm-clouds or the shadows of armored fighting vehicles, the lasting impression is a more introverted progression, with some panicky sections pouring salt in sores here and there.
Track 3. Corde: Colloïde/Fascia épilogue (2006) for banjo, oboes, harp, percussion and violas [3:01] The stranger in this part is the banjo, which you usually associate with folk music a la Burl Ives, and not modern art ensembles, but here it’s inserted in this short finality of Kent Olofsson’s Corde. The violas are played in an unusual way, almost sounding as if contact microphones were attached to the trembling strings, and the Corde epilogue is perhaps the most experimental of the three sections of the piece. You don’t hear all that much from the banjo, but when it says something, you do listen! Then follows the other major piece on the CD; The Bells, for solo voices, double choir, ensemble and electronics (2000/04-05), in four tracks. As you might have imagined from the title, the work draws on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem – but it goes beyond this and much further. Olofsson began dwelling on this musical idea towards the end of the 1980s, and a first version – a three-page fragment for soprano, flute and guitar - was ready in 1992. He then continued working with the idea towards a large-scale work with a different composure for choir, ensemble and electronics, which was premiered in 2000. The final version – heard here – was completed for the Stockholm New Music festival of 2005, commissioned by The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and the Berwald Hall. In addition to the Poe poem, Olofsson has chosen texts as far apart as newspaper clippings from 1984 and the inscriptions on the four French bells used for the basis of the tonal spectra of the work. Olofsson also inserts texts by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and even Friedrich Schiller! Track 4. Silver Bells [7:51] Whispering voices like winding veils of smoke in the dark, illuminated by stray street light, and the precious clarity of the solo soprano like a slowly rotating obelisk of reflected starlight over the rooftops: this is how the music begins, soon evolving into a majestic and multi-layered fabric of female and male voices, choir and the orchestral cloud. At times the music thins out into respiration breaks, respiratory pauses, indicated by but a few instruments, while at other times the instruments and voices take turns in a kind of hocetus manner. A little further up, a female voice talk-chants in French, creating a vision for me of French revolutionaries in 1789 or 1968. Kent Olofsson amply shows his agile musical mind and his cunning compositional skill in this work that perhaps will be called a masterwork as time goes by. Track 5. Golden Bells [8:23] The piece commences with a Stockhausenesque confusion of voices giggling, the percussion rattling piercingly, and bells tolling way inside the musical motion, more like memories, like recollections, than here-and-now music. The choirs and the solo voices shoot in masterly juggled shadow plays through the moment; projected shadows through the mist of the mind of the listener. Extremely interesting, compelling music, keeping your ears on their toes! Track 6. Brazen Bells [10:48] The bewilderment is raging here at the outset, having me associate to as disparate cultural occasions as Luigi Nono’s Non Consumiame Marx, with slogans from the walls of Paris in 1968, and Lucian Berio’s Cries of London. Wonderful! Languages change, tempi change, voices come and go like stray groups of soldiers through the mist of a battlefield of the American Civil War – and sometimes the dense orchestra is reduced to a plonk and a wheeze, like the sun glittering in a beetle across a Bronze Age burial mound. Track 7. Iron Bells [15.06] As you’ve noticed, each of the bells pieces is longer than the preceding one. The layers of audio are more directly beautiful in Iron Bells, as you can soar on overtones expanding in drone-like serpentines over tight groups of voices, disciplined and straightforward inside a dream. The solo voices fly nigh like angels of bliss, while the choir voices move in shifts like curtains of northern lights. This whole CD is a complicated fabric of tonal colors and sometimes a havoc of seemingly disparate events, but somehow it all comes together when you’re reaching your second wind, so to speak. Listening takes some effort, perhaps, for the unprepared listener, but for those who endure and take their time, Kent Olofsson’s art is very rewarding, even exciting. This is state of the art art!
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