KOMPLOTT music label.
KOMPLOTT music label. 
On his new album Bremort, Hans Appelqvist seeks an alternative
technique of musical story telling, a search which seems to be founded
in a sort of restlessness or maybe a mise en cause of those simple and
solidly established parameters which have been established in
instrumental and conventional popular music. Appelqvist mainly derives
his particular form of musical story telling from feature film, where
the music is paralleling the story so as to amplify it or comment it.
It is in this form, where sound and image converge, that Appelqvist is
conducting his search for unexpected emotional expressions.
Bremort
is the name of a fictitious city where the listener takes part in
scenes in the lives of the people of this average Swedish town. The
album has no comprehensive theme but is rather built up around several
small episodes, which have nothing in common other than the fact that
they all take place in this same fictitious city during a limited
period of time. The depictions are accompanied by different musical
themes in which the beige existence of some of the inhabitants of
Bremort are portrayed and linked together in recurrent intermezzos. As
such Bremort is in a way a place of refuge, a sanctuary for the
commonplace.
Appelqvist's music infuses the debate on the
musical qualities of music. The newness of his acoustic image, where
the choice of sounds are not always evident or natural in there
context, makes the listener react, certain musical nuances might
generate strong emotions while others leaves the listener indifferent.
The same is true for Appelqvist's scheme of using untrained,
hand-picked voices, a device which by many might be construed as
provocative. It raises the question of whether we are actually
listening to music and/or taking part in a staging. The crude voices
are intimately interlinked through the underlying narrative and bring a
dimension of agitation on top of the melancholy and suggestive coulisse
of sound.
Komplott, May 2005