With a timeframe of production somewhere between Brian Wilsons legendary album SMiLE and Electric Café by Kraftwerk, Komplott presents 2600 Virginia Avenue, the new electronic album by the swedish composer Erik Mikael Karlsson.
"It took me ten years to create 2600 Virginia Avenue and something that could be called the first progressive-electronic album in a very long time" says Erik Mikael Karlsson "It has all the classical ingredients of its typology, the conceptual framing, the long epic tracks and a somewhat spaced-out attitude"
2600 Virginia Avenue starts off in the turmoil of the american seventies. The Watergate-affair is full blown and shortly after, a man involved in the break-in at the Democrats, escapes Washington DC in order to disappear in Hong Kong with a new identity as a magician. This is the odd and rather bizarre story that creates the backdrop for 2600 Virginia Avenue; but through this alter ego, Erik Mikael Karlsson creates a highly personal soundtrack. The melancholia is immanent in the view of the city.
The album is something completely off from the music usually associated with the composer Erik Mikael Karlsson, a nowadays classic, abstract and dramatic music strongly connected with the french musique concrète. The new album 2600 Virginia Avenue is fully another kind of music; an atmospheric, shimmering and multilayered music that in many ways pays hommage to artistic influences as Vangelis, Michel Legrand och Yellow Magic Orchestra.
2600 Virginia Avenue is completely created with a classical digital Synclavier 3200. The sound of the legendary synthesizer, aswell as use of the vocoder, supercharges the music with references, atmospheres and images intentionally used to create resonance through decades of electronic music and cinematic soundtracks. The music appears as a film whithout pictures, a soundtrack creating a world through our memories.
Erik Mikael Karlsson is a producer of a Swedish radio show Monitor for electroic music and of the european radioevent Art’s Birthday. He has a background as a composer and sound artist and has worked at many of the studios and institutions of contemporary music in Europe. Erik Mikael Karlsson lives and works in Malmö since ten years.
Recorded in Malmö, Bourges, Köln och Paris.
Mastering: Rashad Becker, D & M Berlin.
Cover: Kumi Yamashita
Having developed her very own language, the Swedish sound artist and composer Hanna Hartman creates music that are exclusively made up from authentic, unprocessed sounds that she has recorded on various locations around the world. Through new constellations of sounds taken out of their original context – and thus perceived in their purity – she creates an extraordinary music revealing hidden correspondences between the most diverse auditive impressions.
Since 1990 Hartman has composed works for radio, sound sculptures and numerous performances all over Europe. More recently she started also to write pieces for instrumentalists. Her many awards and grants include Prix Europa (1998), the Karl-Sczuka-Preis (2005), the Phonurgia Nova Prize (2006), and a Villa Aurora grant (2010). During 2007 and 2008 she was Composer-in-Residence for Swedish Radio. Hanna Hartman lives and works in Berlin.
“H ^ 2” is Hanna Hartmans third CD on Komplott.
Bare Signs
About Hanna Hartman
Of course, you listen differently, if you have seen how Hanna Hartman dissects the sound, how she scalps it from its surroundings and frees it from all remains of its original meaning. You listen differently, if you have seen how she slowly shifts her body weight, so that the old timber piling under her feet begin to sing, and how she then lets the microphone glide over the ground, in order to capture this wooden song in its abstract beauty.
In Hartman's work, sound quality and sound source come undone in a peculiar way. She creates an aural inter-space, that rises above the banality of everyday noise, while it refuses immediate access to the musically conditioned ear. It is difficult not to associate the flutter in Messages from the Lighthouse with a bird, even though it is quite clear that this bird doesn't exist. Instead this passage is more about the "par excellency" of the flap itself, about a form of listening that transcends the object by the means of sound, about a jumpy and dry tremolo as an aural entity of its own. From this entity then a music arises, that is charged with meaning, but that obliterates the deixis of the concrete sound by completely abstracting it. The sound becomes a bare sign, in need of the composer's interpretation.
Of course, you listen differently, if you have seen with what care and long sight Hartman collects sound, how she auscultates every conceivable object with regard to its sound potential, from a rubber duck to a grommet.
When Adorno spoke of an "disenchanted world", he implied that music would be able to reconstitute this lost magic as a result of its mimetic power. Hartman's magic disintegrates the relationship between things, creating a counter-world in which the object-hood of an artifact is nullified by its sound.
The fact that instrumental recordings form the basis of all five pieces on this CD is unusual and indicates, that Hartman has in fact shifted the coordinates of her aesthetics over the past years. The individual sound language of the musicians prefigures the pieces, up to the subtle irony of confronting Ida Falk Winland's well trained opera soprano with the sound world of car racing.
Björn Gottstein
journalist and writer, Berlin
The first release in the Komplott Maginot Series is Very Friendly by the Swedish sound artist Ronnie Sundin.
Very Friendly is a comic book project that subjectively collects its material from the world of experimental electronic music and will mix stories of an autobiographical nature with historical accounts. In other words; the reader will get a chance to meet some ofSundin's musician friends and colleagues as well as take part of some historical events where a classic recording or performance took place.
The first issue of Very Friendly, released in April 2009, presents stories on Sundin’s first meeting with the legendary Norwegian noise musician Lasse Marhaug in Trondheim back in 1998, The outrageous world premiere of Desérts by Edgard Varése in Paris in 1954 and a very strange gig by Throbbing Gristle at the Cryptic One Club in London in 1978.
This issue also includes 7” vinyl with a soundtrack to the Trondheim story provided by Lasse Marhaug himself.