The Museum for Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark, has devoted its energies to new music, sound art and the classical avant-garde since the beginning in 1991. It has added a new dimension to its activities with this highly interesting and enjoyable CD of Nordic soundscapes, or maybe just plain sound adventures.
krydsfelt began in 1998 as an initiative by the curator Hans Sydow in collaboration with the director of the museum; Marianne Bech, and has engaged in a number of happenings wherein different Nordic sound artists have created new sound art, also presenting it to the audience at the museum.
Come to think of it, maybe The Museum for Contemporary Art in Roskilde could take on the plight that Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen mentioned in a break at the seminars he held at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm of May 2001, when he said that he wanted to see a Nordic music center in Denmark founded, where for example electronic – and other – works could be rehearsed and performed for more extended periods, whereas the case these days mostly constitute one or two performances, and then something else happens, or nothing. Considering the time and effort it takes to rehearse a piece that involves live music as well as electronics, and the effort it takes to balance everything perfectly when it comes to the electronic gear and the loudspeakers around the room, and the settings of the mixing console and so on, it would be good, said Stockhausen, to have a music center for all the Nordic countries, where a performance, once having reached perfection, could be performed for longer periods. I’d suggest that The Museum for Contemporary Art in Roskilde gets in contact with Arts Association of March 85, Skorkaervej 8, DK 6990 Ulfborg, Denmark, and its passionate directors Sune Joergensen and Grete Flintegaard, who are engaged in a number of large Stockhausen projects at the time. With so much good intention and so much administrative talent in Denmark, Stockhausen’s idea might be realized. Get on with it!
The first track on this CD is “Opiate” by Thomas Knak. “Knak” in Swedish means a creaking sound, and strangely enough, the initial sounds are those of creaks! A rhythmic base of bass is added, while the creaking, sounding also like static off a vinyl record (like on Kent Tankred’s CD “Ordinary Things” [Fylkingen Records FYCD 1004]), or some electrical discharges, remains. Tankred’s piece [“Lap of Honor”] is more inventive though, not resorting to this annoying rhythmic bass, which reminds you of the pop scene, which always demands a steady beat of some kind to make the music listenable. This is not pop music, and if it hadn’t been for that sorrowful bitch of a bass rhythm, this piece would have been quite interesting.
Good old Fuzzy – known for his partaking in The Culture Quartet and its successor The New Culture Quartet (also that quartet obsolete since a few years), with people like Folke Rabe and Jan Bark, is next. His real name – I didn’t know this before – seems to be Benny Robert Jørgensen. I haven’t heard too much from this poet of sounds, but I remember a piece called “Electric Gardens and Their Surroundings” from a CD named “Electro-Acoustic Music from DIEM” (Marco Polo/Dacapo DCCD 9101) (1991), with pieces by Fuzzy, Ivar Frounberg and Jørgen Plaetner produced at the DIEM studio in Aarhus, Denmark. “Electric Gardens and Their Surroundings” was a dark force with angelic overtones, on a backdrop of scat-painted figures of shorter durations. It showed resemblances of both Pierre Henry and Jean Schwarz, and was a very interesting piece. Hopefully it is still available somewhere.
Fuzzy’s piece on krydsfelt | norpol is “b9 vs. fuzzy”. It reveals itself to be a powerhouse of electronic music, blending dark, relentless standing waves of sheer force with more high-pitched sounds and even exclamative vocals, and a humorous cow-herding quality worthy of the infamous Space Cattle Herders from Dallas and Austin. It doesn’t stop there, as beautiful, sparkling displays of prismic values well forth in fan-contoured diffusions, after a while landing in a post-post-whatnot techno district of Bombay or New York or Björk’s Reykjavik! Keep-on-keeping-on, Fuzzy! We’re with you every step of the way, through burning coal, hot geysers and stuttering outbursts of tobacco-stinking exhausts out of the oral cavities of an intoxicated sound poet!
Jonas Olesen appears with “Jonas Olesen vs. Christian Marclay” or “MSIC ANASYS”. With a title like that Olesen raises expectations of a wild mixture of all kinds of material, and I can’t say he disappoints you in the richness of the material. He doesn’t, however, let all the fragments fall down on the kitchen floor at complete random, because you can clearly make out at a composer’s orderly mind here. I don’t know if that is good or not. Some parts of this work does remind me of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix”; the original version with floured tapes in Italy – and some parts of Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge”… but the orderly distribution of the random material puts me off a bit. Olesen should have let the material act more on its own. Now it’s just a pseudo-fragmentation, a pseudo-randomness, making it sound as if the composer was only trying to put on a style. He should perhaps take a listen to Americans like Rotcod Zzaj and Matthew Ostrowski, to see what fragment composition is all about. This doesn’t mean the piece isn’t interesting; it is!
Hans Hansen’s contribution is called “URO I E”. Clearly, this is elf music, fairytale music, with a sweet jazz aura over the lark-spangled fields of a spring turning into summer. The surprising sound web surprises you even more as this sweet atmosphere is cut up with static, electric current failure and electronic haywires, glissandi making you seasick and the return of sweetness. Very innovative, and not quite sounding like anything I’ve heard before, and just that fact separates this piece from much I’ve heard. It is very original, in and out of style, passing through a maze of different rooms, different atmospheres, different times, banging everything shut, only to pen a secret door in the wardrobe to an eerie landscape of Alice-In-Wonderland qualities. Great stuff!
“pause” is the title of Jacob Kirkegaard’s piece. This starts like musique concrète, with some really intriguing lines of sounds, close and far off, making the diverse distances work as a pulse, a pattern, in a grainy appearance of a malfunctioning respirator through which a dying person enters into the Bardo Thödol. Eventually “pause” moves on to something reminding me of Larry Kucharz's techno New York dreams, but Kirkegaard’s piece is way more inventive, blowing the lid off and sweeping you across vast polar expanses of ice and snow and treacherous winds.
Runar Magnusson’s “feelings & emotions” (what is the distinction between those words!!!) flutters and vibrates like the nervous system of a butterfly in ultra-violet light or the Northern Lights on a cold February night in Lapland… or maybe… just maybe… it is the progression of the deceased through the stages of the Bardo Thödol mentioned above. It’s a dreamy feeling of olden remembrances, like an inward vision from times gone, when Gunnar from Hlidarende roamed the Icelandic crusted lava. Is that old Njal trampling the ground, so forceful and determined? Some completely wonderful overtone segments invade the listening space, like some kind of out-drawn wind chimes without the actual attacks of the sound, and electrostatic percussive sounds pan madly, while a waterfall is passed on your journey. This dreamy music is completely spellbinding. Some of it reminds me of the really early stuff by Ralph Lundsten, like Erik XIV and so on, but this is furthered, developed, into dreamy fairytale proportions of the Icelandic Tales, the way I hear this music. It’s devastatingly beautiful in all its intriguing postures of uncanny sound ingenuity. Completely original, almost scary in the way it comes across, even though the last section may make me think of some of the finest stuff that Swedish electroacoustic guru Rolf Enström has made, like the shamanistic piece “Tjidtjag and Tjidtjaggaise”. We’ve got to hear more of Runar Magnusson!
Biosphere (is that Geir Jenssen? I don’t really understand the credits given on the sleeve) is the last contributor here, with “Vi kan tenka digitalt, vi kan tala digitalt”)”We Can Think Digitally, We Can Talk Digitally”). Now, this really commences in the concrete vein of things, with street traffic, soon adding excerpts, fragments of a woman, then a man, talking in Swedish (not Danish or Norwegian, but Swedish…) on a backdrop of loud noise-sounds in a wall of a standing-wave-swooshing, lurking ominously just across the street or in the back of your head. It brings on a very peculiar feeling, since you can only hear fragments of the speaking people, which also sharpens your attention and your listening. This is cleverly and tastefully done, electroacoustically speaking, and I enjoy it a lot, a lot!
This is a very interesting CD with very few drawbacks, and the really good stuff on here – Fuzzy, Hans Hansen, Jacob Kirkegaard, Runar Magnusson and Biosphere – turns this issue into a must for anyone remotely interested in the modern day Nordic poetry of sound.
URLs:
Resonance: www.resonance.dk
Marianne Bech, Director of The Museum for Contemporary Art: www.mfsk.dk
Hans Sydow, Curator krydsfelt: www.krydsfelt.dk
Thomas Knak: www.hobbyind.com
Jacob Weigand Goetz: www.contemporanea.dk
Fuzzy: www.musicsystem.dk/b9 and www.fuzzy.dk
Jacob Kirkegaard: www.aeter.dk
Geir Jenssen (Biosphere): www.notam.uio.no/~geirje/
Email:
Jonas Olesen: club_nuts@hotmail.com
Hans Hansen: tempotanken@worldonline.dk
