I’m really surprised to get surprised by any phonogram falling through the mail slot over at Sonoloco Record Reviews, but this CD makes me surprised – and that makes me happy! This has got to be one of the very best sound-poetry CDs since the idiom began… and it’s not confined to sound-poetry as such, but roams through a zone of speech and audio that could as well be branded pure poetry or pure electroacoustics, or chamber art, or cabaret, if not sonic circus! Who cares what we call it! You name it, we like it!
It is evident that the curator of Resonance.dk Records; Hans Sydow – who is also the composer of the works on this CD – is a very free-spirited spirit, who let’s what happens happen, and in addition to that he has an uncanny intuition for the expression, for the scalpel-sharp accuracy of his sonic and poetic incisions! He uses his technological means in a spartan, downscaled manner, utilizing solely what he needs – and nothing more. This fastidious attitude makes his compositions madly contoured, insanely focused and adventurously enjoyable, in a calligraphic sense, in the progression of a collection of haikus! This man gives sound art an elevated quality, an unexpected splendor!

“Dada3” is the most exquisite little sound poem, bound to baffle! It hits right off with three words, spoken again and again, with an effective underlined stress: “Mærkelig, meningsløs, sludder” (“Strange, meaningless, twaddle”)! It begins kind of softly, the first word appearing to the left, the second front center and the third to the right. The male voice – Tom Kristensen (1892 – 1974) – speaks in loud and clear Danish. For a connoisseur of sound poetry like this reviewer, this seemingly simple event sends thrills of enjoyment down my lingual erogenous zones, right down the back of my head and down the spine, connecting to the ground below my feet and entering the trees in the park, glowing at the very end of each and every branch!
The cello of Morten Zeuthen appears as Hans Sydow begins to manipulate the sound, to permute the voice in hilarious, elastic glissandi, really grabbing you by the collar and lifting you off of the ground (thereby disrupting the connection to the garden trees, which subsequently stop glowing…). The cello is in perfect unison with the melodic line of the insistent voice of late Tom Kristensen, but it also comments on Kristensen’s words in the silences between the morphemes, or else the cello appears soloistic, playing – or actually cutting; like a machete through the brush – the melodic line of the vocals; in a senseless, on-the-spot mimicry of the voice. It’s so simple and yet so ingeniously done, and that is… true art!

“Entropi 2.3” draws it’s nutritious energy from two lines arising out of time in Homer’s “Iliad”: “Styrke er sagen i krig; i råd er det ordet, der gælder. I krig kommer ordet til kort, nu gælder det blot om at kæmpe” (“Strength is the thing at war; in counsel, the word is in force. At war, the word falls short, and combat is the only resolve”). Rie Koch reads, sings, whispers these words, on a backdrop of a choral layer made from her own voice. The piece is incredibly totem rhythmic, in a totem rite, an age-old rite of the blood – a Potlatch ceremony of the olden clans of the American northwest – and the shaman voice of the totem ancestor (Rie Koch) swirls and whirls, shows up right in your face with a crushing whisper, or far off in soft screams… She’s popping up all over the place like Woody Woodpecker on the Christmas 3 o’clock PM Donald Duck TV rite in Swedenland, and she is given the guise of some funky disco drag queen, if you can fit that in with Woody Woodpecker and the Potlatch ceremonies… Again, Sydow works his sounding objects with a mastery touch, and you’re on a speedy roller coaster of morphemed audio throughout!
The sentences get ground down to single words, then parts of words, then just flaking remains of parts of words, parts of syllables… and I get the notion of a medieval erotic monasterial trance dance in the shadow of the spirit of Hildegard von Bingen… or Rabelais!
Staccatos of singular consonants crackle like chips of wood for the fire, and this spirit let out of the bottle won’t adhere to any earthly principles. It soars!

“Öjeblikkets Byggeri” utilizes the vocal efforts of a whole group of participants; Tobias Faber, Erik Christian Sørensen, Knud Friis, Nils-Ole Lund; all architects! The basis of the piece is strange and ingenious enough: the architects rework architectural remarks by Charles Dickens – and Hans Sydow of course pours this knitwitbit of a vocalism through his magic audioscope, achieving an architectural audio pile-work rising in a maze of voices towards the Danish sky! It’s a lust to immerse yourself head-over-heels in this speech-bath, embellished by electronic sounds akin to bamboo gamelan or a gentle evening marimba! The sophisticated and honorable participants in this quartet of voices might be seated in comfortable armchairs in a gentlemen’s club in downtown Copenhagen, wearing tweed suits and smoking sweet tobacco, causally uttering these architecturally related sentences picked up by Sydow’s eavesdropper of a tape recorder, and the noble atmosphere is not in any danger, but retains its dignity through the moderate manipulations of maestro Hans Sydow.

“Lyd/By/Fugl” commences with a manic onomatopoetic expression of bird sounds… This might raise remembrances of Öyvind Fahlström’s infamous piece “Fåglar i Sverige” (“Birds in Sweden”), but this is taking it much further. Søren Søgård-Jensen performs the notated language of four urban birds; blackbird (Turdus merula), starling (Sturnus vulgaris), chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) and sparrow (Passer domesticus). Hans Sydow gathers all the twiddelidi and makes a mess of it, quite frankly, but an orderly mess – which is my contradiction of the day! This is fun, making a mockery out of our little winged associates! The piece even sounds operatic at times, since one of the imitations of Mr. Søgård-Jensen is generated in the style of a fat and swollen baritone!

“Ifigeniasvit” is a through-composed, condensed version of the music of a play (Kærlighedsbarnet Ifigenia” [“Love Child Iphigenia”]) that hasn’t yet been staged, but which will hit the Theatre Kalejdoskop in Copenhagen come spring 2002.
The voice – mostly coming out of the oral cavities of Helge Baun Sørensen - is winding up from the netherworlds in the manner of an old grandfather’s clock being wound, and the tense spring is giving the energy to the voices that appear, now whispering, now singing out loud, accompanied by bicycle bell percussion and other fragile glass sounds. The structure is coming at you in the style of Venetian bridges; the kind Friedrich Nietzsche and Lord Byron ascended and descended in early fresh-bread mornings…
Choral speech is relieved by an Arvo Pärt-like estrangement and aloofness of semi-medieval clarity.
The layered white noise of the classical electronic studio – or is it the static on the short-wave band? – opens a misty atmosphere for close female whispers while male a male speech choir gets loud in the background. Repetitious morphemes, similar to the fluent web of Lars-Gunnar Bodin’s “For Jon III”, sweep by way back in the gallery, and the piece comes to a peaceful halt.

The last track on this CD is a computer file; a Quick Time movie with the sounds of “Dada3+” with an animation by Christian Leifelt. The animation consists of the three words of the piece - mærkelig, meningsløs, sludder – being written (with a computer mouse, the booklet text says) as the words are spoken, and the cello part appears too, in jittery lines hitting the screen as Morten Zeuthen bears down! It’s a spellbinding sound poetry video!

The whole concept of this wondrous CD hits me right in the belly! The pieces are carved out by Hans Sydow in violent attacks of equilibristic intuition, wherein everything – against all odds! – falls right into place in a brilliant expression of contemporary art!