Pär Johansson used to be (until November 2002) the secretary of SEAMS, The Society for Electroacoustic Music in Sweden, formerly the Swedish Section of the International Confederation for Electroacoustic Music; ICEM.
SEAMS runs a recording company called Elektron. Their CDs are reviewed at Elektron’s page at Sonoloco. This issue by secretary Pär Johansson is a private release, though, which is why it is reviewed here and not on Sonoloco’s Elektron page.

Johansson has, in addition to music, studied technical as well as humanistic subjects. His electroacoustic education took place at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden) in Stockholm between 1995 and 1998, where he nowadays is the secretary and also as a teacher of sonology.

Johansson says that he often gets inspiration for his musical works in literary and philosophical sources. In The Empty Palace the overall structure is built on the theory of the five phases: earth, wood, fire, metal and water – in Chinese philosophy.
He says that his music oftentimes is narrative, and that it can include sounds that are easily recognized, even though it cannot be categorized as programmatic music as such, and nor is it a conceptual sound art, since, he says, the esthetic realization is as important to him as the underlying ideas. Johansson determines that his intention is that the music should be enjoyable even without knowledge of the ideas behind it or in it.
He explains that his ideal is close to the abstract emotional narrative of a Chopin ballad.

The inspiration for this work was retrieved from a book called The Empty Palace; An Archaeology of Ruts and Ruins from the Chinese Literary Mind [Stockholm University 1998], wherein a text by Xia Gu, referring to the hackneyed myth of the Siege of the Empty Palace in the secondary commentary [the jianzhu] to an early Ming edition of Credo Incognito [Qian fu lun] by Han philosopher Wang Fu [translated by Göran Sommardal], is found.

This may seem farfetched, but I’m very much aware that ideas and inspiration for works of art may arise out of unforeseen circumstances and unexpected places.

The Xia Gu text that Pär Johansson has decided to use as a steppingstone for his electroacoustic piece reads as follows:

Imagining this occurrence renders and eerie feeling at first, and a sense of mystery as to the complete and unaccounted for disappearance of a crowd of people, but there is also a comfortable rest in the feeling of nature simply continuing, taking back those minerals of the walls, breaking down draperies and other organic matter to nutriment, down the hazy and semi-transparent passage of time (a feeling which is nowhere in music better envisioned than in Gilius van Bergeijk’s Over de Dood en de Tijd, which has now been released on a new CD from the Dutch X-OR label).

The 24-minute piece by Pär Johansson pries into this haze of the gentle but merciless passage of time, in which vague contours and shapes appear, as if belonging only partly in the world of matter, and mostly in the submerged presence of the subconscious, from where dreams, visions and sudden insights may rise, unexpectedly.
Johansson’s music is like this; dreamy, a peep-hole into distant ages, an eavesdropping sequence of electroacoustic maneuvering into the ruins of Time and Matter, smeared out across the relativity of the time-space continuum, where life, nonetheless, is a cry for mercy and a place for longing, and Ulrike Meinhof and Jeanne d’Arc trade faces down the line…

The piece begins as a shimmering vibration across an early morning horizon, in an unfamiliar time, but the sound grows into a dim, watery space of shady, giant fern and lakeshore pebbles. A drone is present like a humming out of a beehive or a generator; a rusty, forgotten generator, still electrically alive beneath the moss, left by ancient cultures like an old thought left behind. It almost feels like some instances out of H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, as ominous, old metallic echoes rumble out of the shafts leading down to the catacombs of the Morlochs.

Sharp, scarping but articulated and varied noises grow into an infernal density of sound, eventually shifting upwards in pitch, until trembling in a high-voltage, high-velocity layer of nervous electricity high above a more physical swell of deeper sonic breaths, in a crazed counterpoint, wherein metallic tinkling and chirping birds are introduced, as the high-pitched noises again move back down in a descending glissando, and an exhaling infra sound structure eases out to leave room for the brilliant splendor of little metal inklings, tickling like flies on your skin on a summer’s day on your back in the grass, studying cumulus clouds…

Pär Johansson has a knack for spacing out his sounds to conjure up these eerie visions of something alienated, something unknown, like a sudden glimpse of a parallel universe.

There is a wonderful plasticity in the droning episodes, which sway and bulge in and out of vision, closer and more distant, onto which small, minute sonic details are projected. It’s like a merciless mudflow full of glimmering diamonds, and sometimes like a phosphoric breath of some unknown species, half present, half veiled in the shroud of history and gone-by epochs.

Some of the passages here are almost on pair with the better stuff of composers like Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle, thinking about, for example, Parmegiani’s La Création du Monde, or Bayle’s Les Couleurs de la Nuit, a couple of my electroacoustic favorites.

A repetitious creaking, crunching effect feel like termites deep inside a log cabin in moonlit nights, and if the sound had been just a little more relaxed, it could have originated in the fenders of sailboats in the harbor, resting on the swell… or perhaps these crunchy noises are just conflicting wills rubbing shoulders…

Pär Johansson’s piece once again changes appearance, into a broader movement of a planetary force, like magnetic force fields spreading in deep waves across snowfields and dried-up badlands. Later you could swear this is the force of magma boiling up through cracks in the rock… or a glacier calving into the sea, closely miked… but it eases out, dies down, to reveal much weaker sounds, smaller sounds, which sort of exist on a backdrop of near-silence.

The next moment you’re inside the sewer of some future city of the walking dead, as you hear, or rather sense, the ominous activities of dazed, un-feeling, lobotomized humans from above, roaming about smoky, littered streets with no purpose left…

Screws and bolts fall like sparse precipitation through a John Cage piano preparation, until a variety of brute sounds are dispersed in a highly spatial gesture across the listening space, while distant traces, like fragrances, of Arabian prayer calls, are sensed from afar.
The last few seconds sound like the last whirl of water rushing down a drain, leaving an empty bathtub for the cows, as spidery rustles envision a dark night of fall when a hedgehog is looking for a place to hibernate…