A 24 hour version of the Ninth Symphony; a 24 hour stretching of this the great, sublime, soaring and defiant, obstinate, towards a cruel fate almost scornful expression of stubborn joy by a stone deaf Beethoven, who heard all this magnificence of human refractory determination inside his inner universe, in spite of the cruelty of circumstances… What a treat!
I am utterly overpowered, or should I say uplifted, elevated, blown away towards soaring skies, riding away on a ray of Beethovenesque light between the clouds of summer, carried over into a state of singular bliss on the radiance of a rising sun of the essence of late Beethoveneana…

Leif Inge of Norway has managed to surprise me beyond reason and beyond oblivion, punched me in my dumbstruck musical face, widened my frames of reference by several unnamed entities of space and rendered me days and days of meditation and eerie insights into my spirit… simply by letting Beethoven soar away for 24 hours instead of the usual one hour plus of the Ninth…

The wonder of it is that he does not land in some caricature of the symphony, but rather has managed to lift the essence of this music into new heights of beauty, and it makes me wonder if this is how it is to die and enter the Bardo of afterlife, which really is an in-between-life state…

I am not fully aware of the technical properties of the software Leif Inge has utilized for this tedious process, but it has got to be quite superior to anything I have tried, because a trait which has been hard to get by for me when I’ve tampered with stretching of sound is a certain distortion, grainification and loss of edge, while Leif Inge has managed to retain all of the original beauty of tone and pitch and timbre, simply letting it flow in a nameless timelessness, like the feeling of sunlight on your skin a perfect day of high summer at the sea… and a possibly unforeseen dividend of this is the auditive insights in to the micro shapes of sound, as you readily discover small, minute, short events inside these incredible stretches, in a sounding world opening up to the naked ear, revealing constituencies of sound hitherto – as least by me – not fully understood, and it must be like boring down into the core of matter with scanning electron microscopes, having world after nano world opening up their incredible riches to the mind of man, as elementary particles turn out not to be elementary particles at all, but full to the rim of other, yet smaller worlds, in an infinite succession of worlds of splendor… and this is felt all through your anatomy in this 24 hour 9BeetStretch by Leif Inge and its rays from the heart of matter, from the heart of spirit…

Listen to this wonder sound of 9BeetStretch, and drink from the Well of Youth and Eternity as the timbral essence of Friedrich Schiller’s text is rolled out in the transparence of Beethoven’s spirit like a gentle stroke through the timelessness:

Alas!

Leif Inge says about the immediate future of his piece:

"I actually will use the sound in an installation in a bedrom in a gallery in Oslo in September (2002), making the symphony into bedchambermusic. People can lay down and listen (and maybe drift)"...