Once I had a friend called Calle P. He was an outstanding character. Beneath a basic mild depression he harbored a most wicked kind of humor that could take you way down the twisted paths of de-sanity, I tell you. He always carried his little black notebook in his jacket pocket, and in remote corners of the sordid parties of the 1960s or at café tables with checkered table cloths in blue and white he would read random notes aloud. His wit was endless and impenetrable, like the most frantic absentmindednesses of Öyvind Fahlström’s writings or paintings. Come to think of it, The Marx Brothers sure belong to this crew! (“I don’t believe in no sanity clausal!”) (Yeah, Danny Kaye, too, in fact, if anyone remembers Manic Depressive Presents…) Aah, even Bob Dylan comes to mind:

Years later I got some of that same Calle P. feeling from Thomas Tidholm and his album Obevakade ögonblick (Unguarded Moments).

Now Joakim Pirinen – the man behind the legendary cartoon Socker-Conny (Sugar Conny; the name making me, sound wise, think of sugar canes and Sean Connery…) – breaks loose in an even more wayward kind of happy-go-lucky insanity… but, as in the case of the aforementioned minds, an insanity that works, or, for the most part, works.

Anyone playing with words, analogies and the listener’s expectations wildly like this, is walking a thin line between brilliance and cruel failure, but only a couple of times Pirinen falls on the wrong side of that line. Most of this CD is completely outstanding and perhaps unparalleled. You might want to think about some of the sound poetry or textsound compositions by Swedish gurus Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson, and for sure Pirinen walks in that tradition, but those guys seem pretty boring moderate in comparison… for Joakim Pirinen broadens and deepens the lingual and morphemic insanity wildly, taking the listener for a roller coaster ride of linguistics and metaphors that leave your eyes wet with tears of laughter and your stomach aching with cramps – and your brain jamming like an engine with all coolants boiled away…

Joakim Pirinen’s mad utterings are brought afore on the incredulous waves of sound out of Mikael Strömberg’s electronic music, into which Pirinen’s jerky statements and assertions and spiraling illogic is also brought back, slashed and redistributed through this magic sound world which takes on the apparition of a mixture of cartoon life and down home reality, of homey Swedish tradition and nightmarish vexations… Blistering!

The trick is to let your mind loose and then to know exactly when to pull at the rein, take notes, possess – and then to let go again… like having sex and postponing the ejaculation, soaring on that wave of transparent, timeless ecstasy for another brief eternity!
I’m talking about creating this kind of art – but also about taking it in, digesting it, letting it affect the nuances of the cubes of light that make up your anatomic vehicle through all these lives! Tally-hoe!

I was lucky enough to be present at Rönnell’s Antiquarian Bookshop in Stockholm a few nights ago, when the venerable establishment celebrated its 75th anniversary with a concert by Joakim Pirinen and Mikael Strömberg, performing some of the tracks from this CD semi-live, i.e. with some parts pre-fabricated on the Powerbook, or, maybe just some sounds on hand, and the way they were utilized maybe strictly live; I’m not sure. Anyway, the show was vibrant, cosmic and molecular simultaneously, definitely bringing The Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics together at least passably…
The crowd in the store sometimes broke out into laughter of a magnitude that threatened to bring down the construction of the building, so it was worthwhile! In fact, listening to this studio CD seems a little tame in comparison to the vibrancy of the live performance – but the CD is fantastic; make no mistake!

At this peculiar position of ours – in a dreamy play of shadows in a basically empty unreality between macro and micro - art like this hits home more than much else; is truer to our situation than much else… so it’s not just very fun, but philosophical too – soothing, in a way calming, comforting (like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or a painting by Brueghel!), and Pirinen is a juggler of morphemes in here, a jester of attitudes and distorted mirrorings, no less than the Mimarobe in verse 61 of Harry Martinson’s Aniara, who designs a technique of consolation in the abyss:

Track 1 is the title track; Afrika.
The beginning is deceivingly similar to a regular poetry reading, albeit admittedly strange as to content. After a few seconds breathing is added, evolving quickly into panting. The panting is varied in volume and density, even juggled around like rhythmic properties. The poetry gets immensely tighter and dazzlingly complex, swarming with daring metaphors and wildly colored wordings!

However, sometimes Pirinen overdoes it, like Dylan in Ballad In Plain D, where he strews constructions like “timeless explosion of fantasy’s dream” around, for the obvious reason of startling, in a pubertal kind of self-adoration… Restraint may bring brilliance, while a sentence overcrowded runs the risk of pulling the hypothetically great down into the mud…

“Råttliknande humrar sidsteppar med klorna som regnbågskliare medan spjutförsedda Assegajer harklar sig i närheten av kokosgröna ulltempel för att väcka hallucinatoriska tre till åtta meter långa garderobsflickor som suger i sig sönderkokt tejp i sömnen assisterade av tyrranosaurusformade äppeljonglörer på marknaden i Ife”…

That is definitely too crowded, and without poetic or even anesthetic edge. In English it would read something like:

“Rat-like lobsters side-step with claws like rainbow-itchers while spear-equipped Assegais hawk in the vicinity of coconut-green wool temples in order to wake hallucinatory three to eight meters tall wardrobe girls who suck heavily boiled tape in their sleep assisted by tyrannosaurus-shaped apple jugglers at the market in Ife”…

Yeah, how fun is that? It’s even beyond pure puerility…
There are ways to make this an exiting and worthwhile art indeed, even these days and in this tradition, which, for example, Erik Peters (Sweden’s most interesting contemporary composer) has shown in his Allt som ligger under snön är gratis (All That Lies Under The Snow Is For Free).

However, this was just a parenthesis, because for the most part, Pirinen’s lettrist catharsis and bulimic linguistics work just fine, at least when he doesn’t seem overly calculating, and in fact, much of Joakim Pirinen’s plight reminds me of Swedish radio jiving gurus Kjell Alinge & Janne Forsell in the 1980s (Hemma hos; Eldorado) and their crunchy, chewy way of tasting the words, munching them, trying out innovative linguistic gymnastics, actually paving the way for the textsound idiom in a much broader sense than Sten Hanson or Bengt Emil Johnson could ever have expected to do. Now Joakim Pirinen kind of brings this broader lettrist, sound poetic and textsound madness back from a populist realm into a more refined, exclusive, arty environment again: small record companies, galleries, antique book stores, minuscule vinyl releases, secret Stockholm clans that group and regroup so as to confuse any random thrill-seeker from the mob that happens to stray in from the street, from the gray masses of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat… because we’re dandies of arty loftiness, aren’t we! Yes, it’s Shelley and Wilde and us! (and Leopardi and Oswald - not Lee Harvey! -up our sleeve!)

After a while in track 1 – Afrika – several new layers are added to the sound. Pirinen keeps on keeping on up front, but he also appears shaded and cut-up and permuted in Mikael Strömberg’s Powerbook - and it is in their joint effort that this CD becomes a sound poetic hit per se!

Strömberg drives his Macintosh like Niki Lauda drove his Formula 1 vehicle, but Strömberg holds on to his ears!
The shadowy remains of Pirinen pan back and forth and rise and sink in a Stockhausenesque octophony wherein sooty mind-flakes and blowing brainwash residue in the Valleys of Doris darken the sky after the implosion of the menacing Phototurb.

Even if Pirinen, here and there, falls back into his not too talented overly ambitious word sputtering (what kind of crazy things should I say next?), Mikael Strömberg saves the show with his slicings and permutations and humorous sound wizardry.

As the stuttering audio gets more confused I start to enjoy it more and more. It is easy to accommodate these cut-ups these days, as opposed to how it was with razor blades and tape, but without talent and creativity you still get nowhere. These two boys gradually get into an almost morbid state of creativity, as Pirinen’s voice suddenly appears in a chirping high-pitch bird voice, while Strömberg’s bouncing cloud-chamber audio proposes a joyous lethargy as the solution to the pain of existence. As matters grow worse, Pirinen’s poetic rage one-liners reappear again and again, each time in a lower pitch, until they loose themselves in a rumble, from where they rise again, time after time. Brilliant. You get caught in this motion, spell-bound!
Strömberg remains in the same original cloud pitch, which amplifies Pirinen’s pitch-ride. Fucked up and crazily cozy!

…and Afrika ends at the Cape of Good Hope with crumpling leaves of yesteryear and a surprise inhalation.

Track 2 is called Fikus. In Swedish that means two things, at least: a homosexual and a plant (an India rubber tree).
Mikael Strömberg’s wrangling, twisting and winding electroacoustic serpentines of caramel-colored audio open the track in a conversational manner; no words but a retained outline of speech – nagging or persuasive - very peculiar and lustful – alien and cozy simultaneously, making me wish I’d for once brought some expensive whiskey home after an intense work day of criminal investigative efforts, like Cragganmore or something. Now strong coffee will have to do…

Yeah, it sounds like Strömberg is turning some aged levers hither and thither, like in the olden days of early electronic music making – and it tickles my historical senses; my lust for oily ebonite pleasure and smoking soldering irons way out in rural Swedish circumstances… (bird song reaching you through the open evening window; curlews descending in a melancholy wetlands call of the wild; TIR long haul trucks pulling in at Tuna Motel, closing their eyes; Elvis Presley on the horizon: One-Sided Love Affair!)

Halfway through Fikus Pirinen appears, explaining the title by his firsts sentence, in which he explains that his (or perhaps the fictitious narrator’s) mother called him her little “Humlegårdshumla” (Humlegård bumble bee), instantly turning him into a homosexual. The Humlegården park in Stockholm used to be a hangout for homosexual men, Pirinen explains.

Contrary to his appearance in Afrika, Joakim Pirinen simply stands up and tells a story here; magnificent after Strömberg’s growling honeycomb beginnings! However, the story quickly derails pleasantly, as Pirinen explains that the bumblebee gayness began in 1864, adding his homosexual years up to a staggering 135… the longest gayness duration so far…

As the story unfolds through Pirinen’s unaccompanied voice, clear and close, it becomes apparent that he never practiced his homosexuality, and he goes on to account for his different employments: police, baker apprentice, chef, restaurateur, politician, county council official, teacher, gardener – and according to his confessional story he has tried to switch profession each year… but he asserts that he never ever utilized any of his mighty power. (I come to think of a poem by Gunnar Ekelöf in which he says: “How seldom man has the power to refrain from power”: “Hur sällan människan har makt att avstå makt”)

He explains his dietetic habits: water, hazel nuts and grated dehydrated figs. He says he’s been married four times, in spite if his leanings, and that life has been tough, periodically…

With two minutes to go Mikael Strömberg teams up with Pirinen, sprinkling showers of tiny metallic grains over the vicinity. Pirinen gets more austere, more surreal, as he begins to talk about the herds of people with torches that wouldn’t leave their positions in front of his house for six consecutive years in the late 1940s and early –50s, and he ponders their dirty underwear (since they never got away to change). The story gets out of whack inconspicuously but convincingly here, reminding me of a real-life story of mine when one of my old friends was out canoeing with me and my 4-year old son in the late 1980s, and my friend suddenly got very irritated at the occasional passenger jets that crossed the sky way up, leaving their white streaks, as he believed they flew by with the sole intention of disturbing his meals… Apart from that sudden give-away, the guy seemed perfectly orientated in space and time and reason…. Pirinen fucks up beautifully in the same manner here!

His apparition was strange back then, 270 centimeters tall, weighing just 18 kilos… He walked through the crowd as if treading sharp rocks on the shore… (and he must have looked like a very frightened bittern)

When talking about bitterns, I simply have to insert a story of my own about bitterns, in Swedish (I’m not going to translate it just yet, if ever… since especially our warmongering American cousins are so puritanical…):

Pirinen continues the story, explaining that the aforementioned all ceased in the 1970s, when he just waited to dissolve into the chilly spaces of the Arctic Ocean, where the tinkling ice always repeats it’s transparent “queer, queer, queer, queer…”

I’ve never heard the word “bög” (queer) repeated in this fashion before, slowly turning into a hypnotic rhythm and later a sound-poetically layered dream of permuted disgust that pours down like a bucket-load of ice cubes over your innocence… but here I hear it! Masterly!

Track 3 is Gösta. Perhaps Gösta is an old computer, because that’s the way he sounds; like one of those first speech synthesizers that you could play around with on the early Mac Classic. In fact, I had my bittern story (above) fed into a Classic way back in the early 1990s, and it sounded a bit like this, even though I had to spell the Swedish words in a way that it would come out right in the English speech synthesizing software…

Of course, working on a fresh Powerbook, Strömberg takes these meager and primitive beginnings and stirs them up madly, causing a tempting effect for any connoisseur of electronic music and sound poetry!

Slowly you begin to realize that there is a text in there, stuttering and rattling as the environment gets more and more electric, thunder-clap-like – yes, Goofy turned pedophile ducking in a storm shower in a suburb of Dallas (Duncanville).
However, Pirinen comes across bright and clear in a while, with a story about “a little shithead” called Gösta Jamberts who used to hang around in downtown Stockholm offering slimy mushrooms to passers-by. He didn’t manage to sell even one in 83 years. Touch luck! (as Pirinen has it…)

Here is an example of how Joakim Pirinen brings his affinity for cartoons into sound poetry and electroacoustics, and the result is just startling; really outrageous. This is some kind of new art form or niche (cartoonoustics) in the avant-garde that Pirinen can claim for himself. I love this! It’s violently fun and dangerously talented! This figure Gösta also falls prey to drug addiction, using all kinds of drugs with names that resemble known vices, albeit with their brands bent out of fashion and shape, into this mirrored cartoonscape lingo that is Pirinen’s, but that still, somehow, are recognizable to contemporary Stockholmers that roam the circuits of the metroplex.

As the jagged story unfolds, Pirinen also takes on the guise of the worst kind of racist Swedish fatboy, denouncing all these immigrants that were protected by the state and who threatened him… He moved to Africa for a while to “get back at the state” (don’t ask me how…). He lived in Angola as an aide worker for, moderately estimated, 67 years. The only thing he could think about was attaining peace between the UNITA guerilla and the government. “He completely forgot to fuck!”, as Pirinen explains, even though “12000 cunts ran past his window every day…”. Pirinen further explains: “When he came back to Drug-Sweden again he was completely black, like the federal pooh-pooh…”

Mikael Strömberg provides a whining, wind-like but grainy, percussive backdrop to Pirinen’s story, as if he stood in a gravel pit while talking, or high up under twinkling stars…

During the last minutes Strömberg takes full control with a boiling, flowing and winding mud storm of audio, still caramel colored and gluey, sticking to trees and ice age rocks as it wells forth, making it strenuous to walk through the landscape in Nokia rubber boots.

Hemmakväll (Domestic Night) is the longest track with its almost 11 minutes.

This wobbling glass world bewilderment, which is one of Mikael Strömberg’s specialties, grabs hold and swirls you through a roundabout submarina, space flexing as gravitational waves pass through the dream of matter.

The composer sounds as if he’s gotten access to some of Harry Partch’s big glass instruments or some spoils of war… Strömberg’s sound world – at his best – is generous in a dehumanized way, like reflections in the steel of a lonely rail through dark Swedish forests; gnats dancing for no one as the rail curves by a lake and disappears into John Bauer realms.
Strömberg takes on the guise of a giant goblin towering over the jagged spruce horizon, playing a colossal glass organ surrounded by a gathering of prog bands; Garden of the Elks, Trees, Grass & Stones, Gunder Hägg, Kebnekaise, Hoola Bandoola Band… harvesting a full measure of the magic of a Scandinavian summer’s night, when anything… anything! – is possible and even… likely! (Hugo Alfvén broods in the periphery!)

I don’t know if Mikael Strömberg has ever heard of Ross Bolleter from Australia, but this guy found an old, wasted and deteriorated bar piano out in the Australian Outback. It had been abandoned decades ago, and left to itself, exposed to sun and wind and dust. Bolleter encountered the piano in a tractor shed at the Nallan Sheep Station. The instrument was too brittle to be moved, so Ross Bolleter recorded it right there, with portable equipment.
As he played, ants came out and formed concentric circles on the front panel of the 1920’s Jackson piano. He called the resulting piece Nallan Void.

Mikael Strömberg’s sounds in Hemmakväll are somehow related, in a distant way, to what Ross Bolleter got out of that Jackson piano at the Nallan Sheep Station. It’s a sense of aged poetry rising out of dusty, forlorn conditions, or seeping out through a crack between the dimensions, in auditive properties akin to the slow motion of thick honey running down the outside of a jar… and nobody is in any hurry…

Even in this gluey smearness and bulging perceptual distortions a shock hits, as the sound gets it all together and bangs you over the head without mercy – and Joakim Pirinen kicks in with about five minutes to go, actually starting to describe a night at home… His voice is quite granulated, husky and electronically hoarse.
The story gets morbid in a hurry. While husband and wife sit around to play a game of Jatzy, blood seeps out of the wife’s ear. The electronic music suddenly sounds threatening, like the smell of the air right before lightning hits…

The scene turns surreal, as blood starts gushing and the ear detaches, while the electronic music gets invasive too, scarring your skull as it saws through it with piercing, penetrating lashes on the backdrop of Arctic winds.

A terribly invasive infant cry shrieks at you as the wife explains that she’s performed surgery on herself, removing a bump behind her ear. The music moves in massive blocks of illuminated granite; holy artifacts from prehistoric temples.

The sink catches fire with a torch-like eruption – and all these terrible occurrences are related by Pirinen in a laid-back, matter-of-factly voice, as if he was talking about mowing his lawn… The discrepancy makes it all the more morbid, as the music deprives you of all hope for a good outcome…

A psychotic neighbor steals one of the loudspeakers, bringing it out through a circular hole in the window, which he had made with a diamond ring. The kids cry, escaping into the bookshelf as a badger roams their room, tearing their toys to shreds. It’s rabid.

I realize, as I listen, that this story is nightmarish, i.e. perhaps modeled on dreams that the author might have had. He opens the bedroom door to get his shotgun, but the room is gone. A large portion of the building has given in, fallen away. The narrator explains that he starts to sing a kletschmer melody that he’d learned, dancing and hollering.

About here Strömberg invades Pirinen’s voice, cutting around the words, shortening them, giving them less and less space, having his story – now accompanied by fierce, raging firestorm electronics and a speeding kletschmer violin – rush forth in peculiar shreds, without a breath, as everything on the surface of the celestial body is burned away, Armageddonish.

Yssen is wonderful little story about some kind of creature – I imagine fuzzy – that is called… Yssen. In this laconic story Yssen and a rye bun falls in love. The story doesn’t tell whether they got it on too…
A panning grainhood soars up to a beginning. This is, again, Strömberg showing off in a magnificent way. Tiny bounces of steel or hard plastic bounce around - but maybe more likely ping pong balls.
Yssen was loosing his life slowly, even though he dreamt about participating in the Monte Carlo rally, and he sighed silently to the books in the shelf, which never heard him. The rye bun was of a kind you call Rysse.

The live version at Rönnell’s Antique Bookstore was much livelier and substantially more vibrant than this CD version, which is tame in comparison. These kinds of stories work better in a live stage situation, with a receptive audience.

Nessy is the sixth entry. It begins backwards. As you can see, the title is Yssen backwards…This was also done live in the store in May 2005. There Pirinen explained that he had written the text backwards, then read it backwards and finally played it forwards, and on top of that he recited it live along with the recorded part. It was outstanding – and with Strömberg’s electroacoustics… well, up-rooting!

In this CD version you only get the raw version without the extra live, explanatory layer. It is almost even freakier that way. The language gets wringed out of the oral cavity in the process, falling out of the mouth curled-up and sideways, just remotely resembling their original state. Again; distorting mirrors, flexing the so-called reality this way and that.
Mikael Strömberg carefully applies a thin layer of noises, sounding like an engine that won’t fire properly – but… backwards, in reverse…
Pirinen returns, but madly layered and permuted by his colleague!

Evert Taube is one of my absolute favorites here. Evert Taube is a Swedish icon; a poet and singer and lute player of a magnitude that hasn’t been seen since the days of Carl Michael Bellman. He resides in the Swedishness of the Swedes. His songs are archetypes of summer and coastlines, of meadows and archipelagos and courtship – and of the Swedes’ romantic notion of South America, especially Argentine…

In this piece by Joakim Pirinen Evert Taube (who died in 1976) is imagined at the bottom of the sea, not far from the Bismarck, where he calls for his wife Astri and expatiates upon life and art and romantic adventures from a long life as a poet and a traveler and a lover and a gentleman.

For anyone accustomed to Taube (i.e. all Swedes), this piece is extremely funny, and very well done. It was even better when Pirinen and Strömberg performed it live in the bookstore on 13th May 2005, along with the hollering laughter of the audience, permeated with true love for Taube! It’s marvelous here too, though, on the Afrika CD.

I once wrote a paraphrase on one of Evert Taube’s most known songs, Rosa på bal. I’ll submit it hear for the benefit (?) of the Swedish readers. It deals with the old tradition of burning the wifes along with their deceased husbands in India (i. e., my paraphrase does; not Taube’s original text…):

The electroacoustics contains exclusive recordings of the sounds of fish, but it commences in a roaring, rumbling, submarine tour de force of tormenting pressure, into which Pirinen’s madly jolting Taube impersonation is introduced. Yessir baby! Great!

The last piece on this startling and destabilizing CD is Resenärerna (The Travelers).
Here you find yourself in some public space; a restaurant or an airport lobby or something. Some stupefying coughs and chuckles are emitted. Someone screams in horror way off, and then closer.

The narrator kicks in, describing a round-the-world trip, while all kinds of indecent sounds are strewn around the story, which mostly recounts geographical names in a super jet set ranting. It’s almost worse than the contents of those group mails you get from former Swedish Prime Minister and Right Wing leader Carl Bildt (a nice guy!), who used to send his accounts of world politics from planes in flight between distant places. There is a Swedish joke about Calle Bildt: “Vet du att Calle Bildt har flyttat till Skottland och bytt namn? Nu heter han Balle Kilt”...

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