Some biographical notes on Mårten Falk, quoted from the artist’s official site:

It’s great to hear a playful expert kidding around in brilliance and humor, delivering staggering sonic progressions with a gallant drive and a quirky smile, eyes glittering from inside a dark core of intense creativity! We welcome Mårten Falk and his axe!

The title of the disc is not recommended for people with dyslexia!

Anyhow, as I begin writing this review, I’ve also just begun listening. I come straight from a preliminary hearing in court, concerning one of my criminal investigations, and I’ve barley stamped the snow off my feet, to warm up and get some nutrients before heading out for some ski exercise through the woods… but Falk’s CD keeps me right here in front of the Macintosh for a while longer – because it makes me HAPPY! I’ve come across too much wrinkled seriousness without talent (and some WITH talent too!) lately, so this wonderfully lighthearted and humorous, playful and witty CD lights up my room with a liveliness that vibrates and pulsates with that benevolence that can only be emitted by one who is so completely at ease with his talent and skill that he has no need for that grave, quasi-introverted style of most of the modern so-called artists of the avant-garde. I sense that Zen feeling of the spirit of John Cage as well as the stubborn madness of Erik Satie! I note the smiling elegance of Christian Morgenstern and the morpheme-munching lust of Francois Dufrêne!

If you’re too serious, you’re just a big joke!

The make-up of this collection of pieces is disparate, to understate it! It races wildly between expressions, from the mild and lucid to the harsh and painful, with a lightness of touch that almost persuades you into believing that everything is easy!

In the booklet a characterization of the content is given:

A few sentences gathered across the booklet and stacked here may render a general feeling for the CD:
“One of the great discoveries of modernism is the complexity of emptiness. The dying of the sound is very much the soul of the guitar. We are taken on a trip inwards, toward the epicenter of the tone […]”

Mårten Falk has composed only one of the pieces here, but by way of his guitar I suppose his wittiness and humor has permeated all the compositions, which have been provided by a host of young or semi-young composers. The works date from 2000 to 2005.

Track 1. Christopher Anthin: Playmaster (2002) [14:22]

There is not enough information in the booklet to fully cover all events going down in this work, which is the longest on the CD with its 14 plus minutes.
Apparently Christopher Anthin has sampled an orchestra – i.e. recorded an orchestra and then used parts of the recording in a direct, pure way, or in various altered states. Since Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra turns up in the thank-you notes, I deduce its generous participation!

In any case, Playmaster is a remarkable work, which catches your attention from bar one, and keeps on catching this attention time and again, as very new things – yes, very new! – happen right in your face!

The very start sounds like Mr. Falk taking hold of his amplified acoustic guitar. There’s a woody twang and some electric hum, when, suddenly and out of the blue, the orchestra kicks in with a brief pitch-rising motion, which Falk immediately repeats on his closely miked Kohno. He continues his lyrical finger picking figurines, eventually overlapping the orchestra in a rare soundworld of a classical acoustic guitar heard over the usually much stronger orchestral sound, kind of on equal terms. The orchestra is one entity; the guitar another.

The orchestra speaks in short, aggressive, guttural exclamations, to which the guitar responds in fruity plum ripples that throw incantation nets across dissonant illwill, much like an old fisherman throws his nets over shoals of fish. A different way to describe how Mårten Falk plays his guitar here would be to imagine a series of cracks spreading across a window, fast and branch-like through the glass, while the orchestra is a brewing storm outside, which sends hard gusts of wind towards the window.

Insisting, repetitious figures pop up out of the musical underbrush, in a joint effort by guitar and orchestra, in which the orchestra merely underlines certain sonic syllables in the finger picking. The orchestra is triggered into a more ferocious mood, but gets electroacoustically chopped up in thudding, grating slices, which are rhythmized in a completely unforeseen way – and something new happens again!

The guitar remains calm and steady, and… lyrical, albeit a smidgen exited – but the orchestra shouts and screams in anger for a while…

However, the orchestral backdrop calms down as the musicians ease down into a comfortable position, while Mårten Falk runs about like Woody Woodpecker, fixing things all over the sound space with his acoustic axe!

Suddenly, without a hint or a warning, the whole musical motion comes to a halt, stooping forwards in the inertia of our imagination, as the sounds heard at the very beginning come on again, to signal something else, and a relaxed, repetitious event of unpretentious, indefinable music – reminding me of Norwegian duo Alog – kicks in at left… and then at right, in a loose, fast-food kind of notion, little grains of sound appearing like colorful candy bars here and there!

The signaling sounds of the very beginning – that are assigned (I realize here) the task of marking the various sections of the work – come around and do their work, and a new stage starts. Now the guitar speaks in smooth, melancholy musical deliberations, while the orchestra moves like seaweed on the sea or barley in the wind across the plains of Nebraska… It’s beautiful, but Christopher Anthin never lets things get too pretty, oh no! His score prescribes good medicine for prettiness, as he pours a measure of biting venom into the music! A wobbly, fat aura glows around the strings of the guitar, and Mr. Falk’s fingers grow witch long in the elasticity of the duration at this stage. My vision gets a bit blurred as some kind of intoxication in the sound affects my perception…

The recurring, insisting little fragment – still beautiful – keeps on keeping on: some auditive residue and space/time paraphernalia get caught in the suction and scar the passing moment in anomalous, furry flybys. Tempo and tonal property change; density thickens and rhythm becomes something to take into account. For a short while you have a drum-machine in each ear.

Harsh, short and rugged blasts cause abrasions in the sound web. At first I though these were purely electroacoustic slabs of mean, menacing audio, but on second hearing I realize that it’s just Falk mistreating his acoustic guitar, while (kinky!) miking it closely! These harsh, ill-witted incidents appear right in the flow of beauty and misty purple intoxication, the way Gilius van Bergeijk introduces painful static into the harmonic hypnosis of Over de Dood en de Tijd: his electroacoustic/acoustic homage to Franz Schubert and his Der Tod und das Mädchen.

This, incredibly, transforms into a disco fast track, hightailing through the confusion!

Through all this, the by now maddening little melodic guitar fragment stays with us, as a hypothetical ledge of sanity in this storming dreamscape.
Gradually, this fragment gathers momentum and becomes the main theme; becomes the essence of this work by virtue of persistency, and simultaneously the music starts taking on the familiar properties of some softly intellectual and playboy easy Hanson de Wolfe United song from the 1980s!

The marker sounds make me aware of yet a change of course, and a ballad-like, careless, melancholy and yet summer soaring tune opens up the music for the common man – for our concept of the common man – playing bingo and devoting himself to pre-sexual dancing rites and suicide plans at the People’s Park: a very Swedish kind of anxiety dissolved in hard liquor and trashy intercourses behind birches through light June nights… and I think of troubadours like Olle Adolphson and singers like Monica Zetterlund.

“Suicide is painless, and it brings on many changes…”

As the tune takes on a marching guise, I see flags flying in a Stockholm wind and white ships moored at the quays. At this instance, as another surprise, even more surprising than all the other surprises of this piece, the composer comes on in person, presenting himself smack dab in the music, center stage, head over heels, stating:

Yes, Mr. Anthin, we really, really like it! Wunderbar! I’m all smiles, because Falk and Anthin have raised my existential temperature with quite a few degrees with this piece, not just because of the wit and the soaring expedience of their ideas, but also because the music as such is so exciting and ingenious, so inspiring. The best you can do for someone is to inspire! This music has inspired me. It continues to inspire me!

Track 2. Christopher Anthin & Erik Bergqvist: Minuten (The Minute) (2004) [1:08]

Poet Erik Bergqvist recites one of his poems to the tenderly inconspicuous accompaniment of Mårten Falk, who leaves the music open at times, in breathtaking pauses that opens hatches to eternity.
Bergqvist’s poetry here is delivered in a found language; a personal lingo that reminds me a bit of Öyvind Fahlström; yes, more than just a little, indeed. His voice is soft and brown, comforting, persuading even though the meaning is hidden in the enigmatic and indecipherable. I listen on repeat many times when I write. In some inexplicable way, this piece brings comfort. Mårten Falk and Erik Bergqvist work in perfect sympathy with each other. When Bergqvist’s intensity tightens and rises, so does Falk’s slithering accompaniment. A great miniature!

Track 3. Mårten Falk: Finsterling (2000) [4:04]

The one and only composition by the featured guitarist is presented in a calm swell of a tune, which soothes and warms you. For this melody you should dress in corduroy trousers and a Lakeland sweater and use the stereo the way you’d use a log-fire in your summer cottage; staring into the fire/music, but really looking much farther, into your own mind and beyond, to where your mind merges with all minds, in the state of Rigpa that is the basis for all things and all non-things. Yes, Finsterling is quite meditative, if not hypnotic, detaching your spirit from its anatomic prison, in a liberating flight of ease and light.

Falk describes his composition:

I recall moments under foliages by a river, in early adolescence, like a painting of Monet or Renoir.

Track 4. Ida Lundén & Erik Bergqvist: entvåtrefyrafem (onetwothreefourfive) (2004) [1:15]

Ida Lundén is a familiar artist to me, from the Fylkingen realm, where she usually teams up with the likes of Lise-Lotte Norelius or Per Magnusson. Entvåtrefyrafem is yet another semantic Bergqvist mystery, this time delivered in a nursery rhyme or an incantation; hard to say which – or why not both? The information in the booklet is a bit cryptic, so I can’t deduce the complete role of the participants, but I suppose the logic order of things would be that Ida Lundén has composed the music and perhaps Bergqvist’s performance practice, and I know for a fact that Mårten Falk plays his guitar! The poem as such must be Bergqvist’s liability!
This is a catchy miniature; laconic and, towards the end, burlesque and lustfully grotesque! You name it, we like it!

Track 5. Fredrik Fahlman: Nullo (2004) [7:56]

Mårten Falk describes his playing of this piece in extenso, so let’s quote him:

The step into this composition is delicate, providing a series of gradual descents, slowly, candidly – but soon all hell breaks loose. A panning gray sound sweeps back and forth like a sonic searchlight, while brute sounds move like heavy slabs of rock across rock bottom. I see huge machinery and ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources, like had we been reduced to a mining planet, providing for evil alien creatures from beyond our physical and psychological reach.

It’s really quite difficult to hear this out, even though it’s not particularly extended, with its eight minutes.

The most abrasive sounds do diminish, though, allowing for a distant, breathing motion for a while – or have we just distanced ourselves geographically? A tight, brown drone levels out and opens the sounding space, revealing a huge hall of a steel plant, into which jingle jangle mornings pour daylight in diagonally descending rhomboids of dusty sunshine. This isn’t nice, and not intended to be, either.

Track 6. Christofer Elgh: Inside (2004) [12:49]

Falk on Inside:

Sparsely as an absentminded mistle-thrush shadow-singing in the wrong season, Mårten Falk takes on a duration of 12:49. It’s a Japanese rock garden in mist, pitched in various variants, and encountered at gravel level as well as at birds-eye’s view level.

The repetitious, yet varied, expression that keeps on keeping on, is dealt with from all kinds of aspects and playing techniques – or rather a stubbornly bent out-of-shape technique, cutting those short rippling centimeters of sound rubbery and then in shining metal, up your skull, and then down your lower chakras. Short cuts and roundabouts.

Music like a spinning coin on a kitchen table, music like Texan auction callers, music like roofs of corrugated steel – yes, music that corners itself in meditative rage; in raging meditation: glaciers sensed through the mist at Tarfala: prehistory dissolving in the green lake. Yabadabadoo music.

Track 7. Martin Q Larsson / Erik Bergqvist: Alaton (2004) [1:04]

Falk on Alaton:

Martin Q Larsson often surprises – at times though his music, at other times through his ideas. This man once suggested a complete orchestral performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, and, lo and behold, he found other maniacs willing to accept the challenge, now committed to 24 CDs! In this case of Alaton, it’s Erik Bergqvist who once again plays a verbal trick on us, through loud and invasive exclamations coupled with meek and foolish linguistic counterpoints. Bergqvist reminds me quite a bit of Antonin Artaud here: Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu!

Falk does indeed play the guitar the way he describes it above, but Bergqvist’s vocal circus all but masks the instrument (in the listener’s mind; not in actual sound – but you tend to concentrate on the madman vocals!)

Track 8. Ylva Skog: Till konstfullt uttänkt list (To Artfully Conceived Cunning) (2003) [3:12]

The title in itself inspires though and imagery, doesn’t it? The line in Baudelaire’s poem spells: “…en de subtils complots”. The English title above is my own interpretation of the Swedish interpretation…
At 3:12 - very close to&Mac185; - this piece carries the insignia of the single vinyl of late 1950s, early 1960s, and even of the earlier 78 rpms. There’s probably no significance to this, but I observe it when I note the duration.

Soprano Ingrid Falk is heard for the first time on the CD here, in lofty, melancholy seagull-soaring vocalizings over a shimmering ocean of salty breaths out of GAIA.

The text – the poem – by Charles Baudelaire, is from 1857:

In an English interpretation by William Aggeler from 1954 it goes:

Another interpretation by Roy Campbell from 1952 sounds:

Ylva Skog has composed the music with a Swedish translation by Ingvar Björkeson, and Ingrid Falk sings in Swedish. This is one of four Baudelaire poems that Ylva Skog has used for a set of compositions called Baudelaire Songs.

The tune is faded in, slowly rising out of silence on the gentle, introspectively dancing motion of Mårten Falk’s guitar. The poem is carried high on Ingrid Falk’s more than beautiful vocal timbre, like a goddess carrying a bowl of clear, cool water above her head, through a thirsting and languishing crowd. There is a quality of serene pain in this melody, this voice, this text: a blessing withheld, a relief not granted easily, a rest that you have to be worthy of: eavesdropping on the angels. Can the spirit of Baudelaire’s poem be represented better? I doubt it.

Track 9. Mattias Petersson: Sustained and Loose (2005) [7:52]

Falk on Sustained and Loose:

Usually presenting music that is boringly serious and ridiculously presumptuous, almost as much at loss of content as the completely dead “music” of Erik Mikael Karlsson, Mattias Petersson nonetheless brings interesting listening our way here, through this composition of his, and especially through his electronic permutations of the sound.

I almost forget that it’s a guitar being played here (pardon me, please, Mr. Falk!) – even though that is not hard to hear – because Petersson’s light but decisive electronic interventions lure you straying off; they glare and tickle, bend the music elastically into brief passages through the outer realms of neighboring dimensions, from where quirky, ghostlike artifacts are brought back; alien comments on Falk’s guitar monologue.

This is music that craves for duration, i.e., a much longer duration than is being allotted here. These drawn-out sonic morphemes, combining into indecipherable messages in a much slower time frame than our current one, can be better understood in a state of meditation, and to achieve this kind of listening you need a whole CD of Petersson’s sonic laconisms. I see a surprising analogy with Pierre Henry and his Le livre des morts Egyptien in Mattias Petersson’s Sustained and Loose, and I enjoy a title like Petersson’s, simply forming a performance instruction!

Track 10. Antonio Carvallo: Duao (2002) [3:09]

Falk:

Carvallo’s entry on Mårten Falk’s CD is ascetic, airy, lofty: an open sky over bare rocks; the jitter of mineral worlds only hinted at, eons of time commented through the corner of a mouth, causally: an existential flyby, mostly spent asleep on a ray of light… Cultures could rise and fall inside this music, whole galaxies could vanish on a brief fraction of friction on one of these guitar strings… trembling, down to the smallest Planck-length superstring of illusionary matter!

I’ve heard quite a bit of music in this vein, from John Cage, especially – but that doesn’t mean that I regard this Carvallo tune old hat, oh no. I experience this piece as a gust of fresh air, just barely moving the curtain at the window, cooling and reviving: moments of silence accentuated by absentminded, modest and unassuming sounds: a perfect way of celebrating silence with sound! (Darmstadt and Donaueschingen looming somewhere in the shadows!)

Track 11. Tony Blomdahl: ReMakeup (2005) [4:28]

Falk:

Be careful when you attach this tune to your tympanic membranes! The may well implode!

Seriously, this is a heavy punk rock fuzzbox kind of catharsis! The only experience I’ve had of this intensity in modern times is The Great Learning Orchestra’s performance of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in the Stockholm Culture House in January of 2006. Ulrich Krieger traveled to Stockholm to rehearse with the GLO, and I hooked up with the crew for photographic documentation and documentary recordings, so I am in possession of more than 20 CDs of Metal Machine cut-throat and lowdown chakra shaking Music!

Tony Blomdahl’s composition is devastating! Gravel harp music! Sledgehammer audio! Stone quarry sonorities! Rock fucking roll, shit heads! Death by deafness! Yes, energy is the one thing we will never run out of, so let’s use it! Love it!

Track 12. Ylva Skog: Låt oron fly (Let Weariness Fly – or, like Dylan put it: Lay Down Your Weary Tune!) (2003) [4:03]

Ylva Skog concludes this brilliant CD, held together by Mårten Falk’s guitar playing, with another composition on a Baudelaire poem from Les Fleurs du Mal, from her quartet of Baudelaire compositions: Recueillement – which in English has been entitled either Meditation or Self-Communion, while an English translation of the Swedish translation of the title would be Reverence, approximately… (Jeez…)

Baudelaire’s French original:

An English interpretation by William Aggeler in 1954:

Yet another English interpretation, by Roy Campbell, 1952:

An English interpretation by Jacques LeClercq, 1958:

Robert Lowell’s interpretation, 1963:

A 1931 interpretation by Lewis Piaget Shanks:

Finally Geoffrey Wagner’s interpretation from 1974:

The contrast with the former piece – Tony Blomdahl’s crashing worlds music – is brutal. Once again, Ingrid Falk flies her vocals in golden trajectories through Charles Baudelaire’s poem, accompanied by Mårten Falk on his acoustic guitar. It’s a perfect match. The poem seems to have been born into this environment. It’s a soirée miniature; a light Lieder kind of incident, which let’s the listener descend lightly into a situation that allows for rest and recollections.

Mårten Falk’s CD The Eclectric Experience is a major contribution to contemporary music. I especially enjoy the freedom of speech (of styles, performance practices, sentiments and sonorities) that he allows himself throughout this collection of compositions that are written for him (plus one that he wrote for himself!).

Mårten Falk’s CD has made my heart lighter and my mind more transparent – and my spirit high as a kite! Kiitos, mon frère, för helvete!