Face Takes Shape - Sonoloco Record Reviews

This is Andreas Bertilsson's first CD on Komplott , but the latest one I get to hear - and I don't think it's a disadvantage to approach his art in reversed order. I've had time to adapt to his music through The Bird You Never Were on Komplott and the recent release Two Abstract Paintings on Mitek . I would have thought that I'd meet a somewhat less refined and stylistically a little poorer result on the first CD - but no; it seems Bertilsson was ready and fully fledged when the first CD on Komplott hit the stores, because I could indulge in any of these three CDs and still be blown away and kicked around, or, for that matter, soothed and fondled - and at the very least feel rewarded and gratified by listening. Bertilsson offers magnificent audio all around. The beginning of the beginning (first bars of Face Takes Shape ; the title track) could be the resounding passage of a rickshaw in Quetta or a black bike in Amsterdam . It's a rattling, mechanical noise in motion at moderate velocity through a lane or an alley: - you don't have to be blind or a bat to notice the sound bouncing off of walls and a cobbled street. Pretty soon synthesized or otherwise electronically produced sounds appear in layers, while the rickshaw rattling keeps cobbling down the path. You can almost smell the sewage. The modal, very tonal organ-like protuberances contradict the dry, un-dimensional musique concréte rickshaw element and the clicking, ticking electronic nano discharges, and those well accustomed Western church room properties sweep the entire expression away into a collected gesture of fate and tradition, which surprises me in this latter-day Bertilsson audio. The majestic reference to old and mighty traditions slowly retreats into the ambience of the present, soaring and wheezing with all its potentiality, choice by choice on ahead, throwing its incantation net across the thought-forms, slowly shaping the sign of the times and the prerequisites for the future. Little Wheel pulls me into a tempting minimal fairytale; Dylan Thomas ' fern and old lichen sages in forest meadows. This beautiful stretch of electric organ mimicry reminds me a lot of Terry Riley and his album Shri Camel , with pieces like Anthem of the Trinity , Across the Lake of the Ancient Word and Desert of Ice . Like Riley 's music, Bertilsson talks in dreamy, hovering tonalities, slightly bent out of shape, into blue notes that wobble and slide, like distant figures in mirages above hot asphalt roads, or like the tilting white sails of sailing boats far out on a ocean horizon in the haze of summer. There is something lustful and tempting, yet dreamy and distant and submerged about this music; a withheld and absentminded eroticism on the periphery of consciousness, painted in thick oil on canvas. Little Wheel also conveys a transpiring feeling of age and time; vast temporal distances and some kind of insight, a too-late, all too-late kind of sensation. as you feel and sense human beings of old through a veil of sorts, which divides the here-and-now from the there-and-then, but in an elusive feeling of closeness nonetheless. It's like a music of Atlantis or Pompeii , filtered through time, reaching you in these uncertain modal structures of wave upon wave of recognition and regret and longing. I once wrote a poem about these feelings, named after an electronic piece by Gilius van Bergeijk . It's quite fitting here, so I'll include it: On Time & Death Beyond the rustling filter of Time past figures move vague in dissolving memories or clearly outlined in the mind of someone who doesn't want to forget who cannot forget while faces, voices, movements take on a painful sharpness of contours and we're all headed for the assembly points of the Past for further forwarding to the wild forests of Oblivion but if someone still in his flesh thinks about us one minute we live this minute in shuddering triumph and everything that has existed exists and everything that will come into existence exists and we raise our hands in someone's thoughts and cry: Here I am! Here I am! and Always is a vibrating cosmic Now with an expanse without meaning and all nows in the Now are illusionary positions in the void of the Now which embraces all that has happened all that happens and all that will happen simultaneously but also all that didn't happen and won't happen not to mention all that almost happened almost happens and almost will happen and which is the fuel and the propellant of all nows in this big, generous NOW! In the membrane towards emptiness, an airplane is moving stubbornly on a north-easterly path: Its relation to me is like the forest hiker's to the mycelium deep below the moss Such indifference scares me Way on high, up in the dress codes, in another time, another existence, it drags its desolate sound across sensed topographies, and the sound is transmitted down through the strata like a spill-over from another universe, and there is only the dark and the cold, and a sound of propellers finding its way down through a crack in the heavens setting my eardrums in motion, where I lie on my back in the night with the quilt pulled up under my chin, listening: Hoping to get to know oneself is presumptuous: Paint a picture to hold on to is what a man can do and the saying that time is the healer of all wounds is just a cynical laconism, when the wounds are so numerous and the time so short In Bertilsson 's timbres of Little Wheel I can feel benevolence rippling across the cracks of decades, the rifts of centuries and the voids of millennia, bridging the bottomless pits between past and present; a love that conquers everything: If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol. And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I dole out all my goods, and if I deliver my body that I may boast but have not love, nothing I am profited. Love is long suffering, love is kind, it is not jealous, love does not boast, it is not inflated. It is not discourteous, it is not selfish, it is not irritable, it does not enumerate the evil. It does not rejoice over the wrong, but rejoices in the truth It covers all things, it has faith for all things, it hopes in all things, it endures in all things. 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 I had no idea I would be sent into the cities of Atlantis and Pompeii by Andreas Bertilsson 's music, nor did I envision myself turning the pages of the Bible to find those words of love - but it's amazing how strongly you can be influenced by music, when you're receptive and sensitive and allow your feelings and associations to guide you. Bed On My Back brings crunchy, grating and rasping events into focus, like flocks of sea horses rising through the currents, exchanging dire messages in spiraling, meandering expressions, light seeping down from the closest star. Bed On My Back is a very attractive piece, presenting a sound world that I don't think I've heard before, at least not to this extreme extent. These little grating screws, seeds of alien tree forms, bore deep inside the soundscape, in a churning, dark chocolate kind of way. This is probably the sounding equivalent of a chocolate box, if it was left undisturbed. Wonderful - but the piece is much too short. This idea could be developed and extended into a full-length CD all by itself, in chocolate bars! New Garden is introduced in a soundscape environment, i.e. an ambient outdoors milieu, and the character of the music is reminiscent of a Trinidad steel band. or, after a while perhaps more of a midday restaurant beat lost in a hall of sonic mirrors. The rhythms are intricate, bouncing and reflected in each other - and this really swings. This is perhaps as close as Bertilsson gets to \"music\" in its downgrading significance - but that doesn't make it unpleasant. This is an ear-catcher, you bet you, but unusually secular, so to say. NoteBook is a sprawling, uneven sequence of randomness, but with a stumbling recurrence of a beat that holds it together. Yes, meager means! Perhaps not the most interesting of Bertilsson 's pieces, but with a fluent simplicity that calls for some attention; dark twists and turns way down in the garlic and sesame oil cracks the chopping-board in your kitchen; your nose in low-level flight over the tomato-wet surface, homey and smelly! Back Pages Of Mine first of all had me take a break from writing, heading out into the other room listening to My Back Pages by Dylan - but now I'm back at the Mac, collecting my Son of Clay thoughts once again. Bertilsson 's Back Pages commences in the most delicate ripple of soft timbres in the upper pitches, as was he fingering some kind of touch controls lightly, gaseous dreams rising like smoke around you, and this ambient streetscape, perhaps in India ; the hawkers under the trees, small fires lit, incense carried in the warm breeze to your nostrils; darkness deep in the alleys. cow dust hour closing down. Yes, Back Pages Of Mine seems to serve as a precarious precursor to a night raga on the loom, Pandit Pran Nath raising his hands and his voice through the Rajasthani evening. The peace that this Bertilsson tune evokes is filled with anticipation, never explained nor understood - and that's not necessary. Trapped Like A Rat In A Pack is some title! Dark, bent, sculptural sounds - sometimes springy, Jack-in-the-box-like - twirl and twist inside an imaginary metallic chamber, short echoes; like down a well. Some kind of procedure seems to be going on; some kind of work, something being jacked up, put in place. This is one of the most refined pieces on the CD, reduced and stripped bare; indeed ascetic. Bertilsson applies a method of reduction that goes farther than most things I've heard in electroacoustics, with some few exceptions. I'm thinking of s few entries by Luc Ferrari , for example. Andreas Bertilsson creates this enclosed, murky chamber of defiant activity, which nonetheless gives the impression of being important, or at the very least determined and stubborn, like I remember my son at age eight setting booby traps for me all over the apartment! There's a dirty trick somewhere in this music! Road Turn To Purple, You Turn To Me is another weighty title! Light, chatter-box kind of discharges open the ambience of a small sphere, as were you traveling inside a soap bubble moving on up across the backyard - and some jackdaw obtrusions amplify the backyard scenario, maples and all. However, after a while an accordion - or its electronic shadow; who knows! - paints a harmonious and all but hilarious backdrop for the murky, quirky chatterbox practices that never give in or give up; a completely absurd sound world - so we like it! It's a cool, smooth little investigation! Okey Tone , on the other hand, gets into position and moves ahead like a sidewinder in the desert outside Windhoek , slithering across minimal dunes in a passage that has you almost nauseous. The music jots and scribbles the tiniest little remarks of tones across a backdrop of a slightly wobbling drone, sounding a bit like some kind of toy instrument. The dreamy aspect is here again, like so often in Andreas Bertilsson 's music; a gluey film of surreality that refracts your view of what's sensible. Two Polar Sleds has a tingling ring to it that associates to bells or wind chimes; gamelan timbres spreading concentrically in exquisite air compressions that reach your tympanic membrane in poetic pleasure, lighting up inside your brain like rotating golden Buddhas. This is a very sensual piece of music that could be extended for the longest time. I think I'll even transfer it to my hard drive and prolong it for the duration of a whole CD. It is senselessly beautiful! It has the ring of gamelan and bamboo. Yep, I know, that has nothing to do with polar environments - but I follow my own inklings, and they brought me rotating Buddhas! The last piece on this CD is called For Astrid . I suppose the Astrid referred to is Astrid Svangren , who has designed the cover of the CD. The beginning makes me think of Philip Glass ( Openings ) or perhaps Steve Ingham ( Forging ) - pieces that made a deep impression on me in 1986, when I first heard them through radio broadcasts from an organ festival. Andreas Bertilsson 's work has the same lofty, trans-real property, shamanistically transporting the listener through more attuned levels of consciousness, towards a possible state of bliss. A kind of sad insight permeates these solar flare organ timbres, like the compassionate facial expression of a bodhisattva looking back at his unruly disciples before he leaves for the mountains, rising above the temptation and the futile grasping of Samsara.