Electroacoustic music fares well in Sweden these days. Substantial releases have appeared on Fylkingen Records and on the new label Elektron, and here is a new issue from Chamber Sound.
The poetic, French-sounding electroacoustics – as opposed to the plastic and shallow feel of many U.S. releases (with exceptions!) - has won acclaim in Sweden, and this is reflected in all these new releases. (There is a new, collage-kind of contemporary sound-experiments going on in the U.S.A. these days - wonderfully inventive - featuring artists like Rotcod Zzaj (Dick Metcalf), Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Jeff Kaiser, Matthew Ostrowski, Erik Belgum and others, and in that field America is in the forefront!)

Media Artes is an independent, non-profit association, promoting contemporary art. The organization collaborates with Swedish and international ensembles and individuals from various disciplines. One of the undertakings of Media Artes is the Studio for Electroacoustics in Växjö, Sweden, which also sports its own stage for contemporary experimental ventures.
All the pieces on this interesting CD are commissions from Media Artes!

There are a couple of towns in rural Sweden where a lot of good things are happening - electroacoustically and otherwise within the idiom of contemporary art, outside of the main cities of Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg - and the most ambitious events are going down in Växjö with Media Artes and in Borås with Föreningen Ny Musik (The Society for New Music).

It is true that the first composer on this album has a name that hardly sounds Swedish – Fernando Gomez Evelson (b.1968) – but that is because he originates in Argentina; a country with some really well-known composers of electroacoustics, like Horacio Vaggione (listen to his “Tar”!), Michael Rosas Cobian, Eduardo Cosnir, Mario Davidovsky, Alejandro Vinao, Ezequiel Vinao and Ricardo Mandolini, to mention a few. Evelson moved to Sweden in 1990 and worked with composer Tamas Ungvary (originating in Hungary) at EMS in Stockholm. Later he also studied in Gothenburg with renowned Swedish composer of electroacoustics, Åke Parmerud. As of now Evelson is at Columbia University in New York.
Evelson’s piece – “Ex Antiqua” (1995) – begins in a tradition stemming from François Bayle’s “Motion – Emotion”; maybe not consciously… but these sharp, fast grayish shrills out of the pine needle forests of long really get to you. A background layer of equally grayish soughing of a mist-like character provides the backdrop. The soughing soon reaches pitches so high that they’re almost painful; way up at the upper level of your hearing, and these instances really works well over earphones. Fernando Gomez Evelson applies a gentle, delicate, shadowy forest feeling, with the dampness under the branches of the fir trees, above the moss-laden ice-age rocks, left behind by the retreating inland ice tens of thousands of years ago… At 5:53 “Ex Antiqua” suddenly changes character, into something more urgent, hectic and loud; a clan of trolls getting intoxicated on poisonous mushrooms? Apparently they found a bicycle to toy with on a forest path too…

Rolf Enström (b.1951) hardly needs to be introduced to the electroacoustic community, since he is one of the most important composers in the genre, with famous productions to his name, like “Directions” (1979), the scary and overwhelming “Slutförbannelser” (“Final Curses”) (1981) and the mysterious, shamanistic “Tjidtjag och Tjidtjaggaise” (1986). He was inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” when very young, and he has administered that inheritance very well, evolving it into something of his very own, sometimes incorporating other art forms in his compositions, like Elsa Grave’s text in “Final Curses” and a Saami jojk with Jonas Edvard Steggo in “Tjidtjag och Tjidtjaggaise” (The name refers to two mountain summits in Lapland, Northern Sweden). The latter won him the Prix Italia Prize in 1987. There is a CD out with those three pieces on Caprice CAP 21374; probably the best Swedish EAM CD to date, only rivaled by a brand new CD on the equally Swedish Elektron label – “Currents” (EM 1002) – with the music of Paulina Sundin and Jens Hedman, reviewed elsewhere on this site.
On this CD Rolf Enström contributes his “Up!” (1999). “Up!” is a part of a cycle consisting of “Directions”, “Spin”, “Charm” and “Strange”, which reveals Enström’s interest in the nature sciences and elementary particles. All these four pieces (not “Up!”) have a duration of circa seven minutes, and can be played simultaneously or separate. “Up!” is longer, and different in other respects too. One of the originators of the sound is a grand piano. The vibration of piano strings can do wonders when manipulated; remember for example Pierre Henry’s “Le livre des morts egyptien” (Mantra 043) (1986 – 88) with its dark ambience of the hereafter…
This business with different pieces that can be heard simultaneously or at different times is not new to Rolf Enström. Already on a vinyl called “TNT” (1985) on Fylkingen Records FYLP 1031 Enström proposed the very same procedure. The pieces on “TNT” are “Tònal”, “Nagual” and “Tsentsaks”, all with the exact duration of seven minutes.
An Enström work that I hold in high esteem is “Skizzen aus Berlin” (“Sketches from Berlin”) which I do not think has reached any commercial media yet, except radio (where I caught it!). I know that Enström put it down on a demo CD last year or a couple of years ago, together with “Open Wide 2000”, “Io”, Spin” and “Charm”.
“Up!” is a determined piece, banging where banging is appropriate, and curling up inside your head where that is the best tactic. The music changes very fast, and is very spatial; also extremely layered, and I return to the metaphor of ice floes of spring, climbing up on top of each other, collapsing and melting down into oblivion. As always in an Enström atmosphere, you never get the chance to get bored. The sounds are so close that they get up your nose – you sneeze, I guarantee! – and so distant that they disappear behind the horizon, but changing super fast between those extremes. Sometimes the sounds are deep murmurs shifting position like the slow but relentless movements of a glacier, and if you get caught you’re done for… This is exemplary electroacoustics, and considering the great stuff this guy has produced earlier, anything else would have been a disappointment!

Bo Rydberg (b.1960) is also a well-known EAM composer. His composition – “Planflykt” (“Level Flight”) (1999) has a charming beginning, with high shrills, as if he’s kept the sounds of a cymbal after the attack has been cut away – and maybe that is what is going on. Rydberg also applies the very useful Pär Lindgren method of painting a thick layer as a backdrop, then applying fast, crisscrossing patterns up front. Rydberg has managed to make this method very personal here, and he is just as spatial as Enström in “Up!”, and elusive in a way that is unusual in modern electroacoustics. There is a shamanistic touch here too, I think, in the same manner as some parts out of Rolf Enström’s “Tjidtjag och Tjidtjaggaise”. That is probably why I think of Lapland mountain treks when I listen to Rydberg; those vast expanses between enchanted mountain tops, with a river meandering at the bottom of the valley and the melting water from the glaciers on high rippling by in freshwater jokks! I am completely at ease inside my imagination, listening to “Planflykt”. The spiritual returns may be very rewarding in this piece too!

Jonas Broberg (b.1962) participates with “The Drama Within” (1999). This is the shortest piece with its five and a half minutes. The rattle of keys or some other small metal objects starts things off in what at first seems to be a very concrete piece. No matter what, it is very interesting, and I kind of get spoiled by all the new and highly sophisticated and qualitative electroacoustics that has been filling my mailbox lately. This surge in the production of extremely well done EAM is a surprise to me, but I don’t mind being pleasantly surprised! This piece sprays a bundle of percussive energy at you, unlike the former contributions, which sets it aside somewhat – and the voltage is high!

Hans Peter Stubbe Teglbjærg (b.1963) comes from Denmark. The title of his piece is “Aïra – aurale för band” (“Aïra – aurale for tape”) (1998). This work is certainly different from the major impression of the former contributions, in its moaning, ghostly (ghastly?) approach, after the initial Pierre Henry sounds. Wolves? Displaced spirits of the deceased? Surviving remnants of sounds from a closed down factory? Intriguing, anyway, adventurous! Some very spooky sounds emerge a little later in the piece, making me want to listen many times.

Anders Blomqvist (b.1956) is no stranger to the EAM folks! Here we experience his “Spårar” (“Tracking”) from 1997. “Spårar” is a sequel to “Löpa varg” (Wolf Run”) from 1996, with texts by poet Bengt Emil Johnson. The composer says that these pieces have to do with alienation from a wolf perspective, and the desolation and large, curved gestures of the wolf run and the ghastly grins out of long jaws in “Spårar” are eerie, chilling… There is no mercy here, no way out of the desolation, the speechless despair of someone detested, misunderstood, hunted… a life on the brink, with no margins, no real long-term possibilities of survival… of a prospering wolf existence on the outskirts of the world… lonely…