Sonoloco Record Reviews

Less than forty minutes! That is unusual these days, reminding me of the old vinyl days - but even then you could press thirty minutes onto each side. However, it\'s not duration that counts, but the timelessness of the audio, no matter how long or short it is, along the axis of Chronos. There are other dimensions to artistic experiences, no doubt. I\'m a little shocked over these new issues from Komplott and some other labels. Have I completely missed a whole generation of music? I mean, this is so interesting, so different from much of the electroacoustic and acousmatic music that I have worked with, that I can truly say that it is something new. unless I have indeed missed a generation! I\'ve been listening to the three Andreas Bertilsson CDs that I know of so far, on Mitek and Komplott , and I\'ve been blown away by the poetry, the sonic handicraft, the diligence. and here I listen, for the first time, to the new release from Komplott by Andreas Kurtsson ; Busy Topic , and it, too, blows me away, far away! What is this? A new cornucopia, hidden from me until now? Have I been so occupied with the old veterans of electronic and other contemporary music that I\'ve been blind to these new artists? I don\'t know. It could be that they're breaking through the barrier right now, and if so, I\'ll be here to support that at Sonoloco , because these artists, like Bertilsson and Kurtsson , have brought new life to my listening, to my sonic environment, you bet you, yessir! Seems to me that electronic music and contemporary sound art s such has gone through a few main phases. After the initial machine shock back in the 1950 and -60s in Cologne and Paris , and the more varied - but still limited - handicraft of the 70s, the electronics of the 1980s got more sophisticated, fine-tuned, but still very artistic and genuine. This was phase 2, and in Sweden you could especially mention people like Åke Parmerud or Rolf Enström as examples of some of the best sonic artistry of that period. In the 1990s personal computers hit the market seriously, and everyone got a Mac . Software too flooded the market, and it became, all of a sudden, too easy to achieve sounding results. You didn\'t even have to be talented. This was a drawback, and records that should never have been released were. It was a serious low-water mark, having many leave the electronic scene to go completely acoustic, since the electronic realm was so polluted with dilettante garbage. However, since then, a new generation of musicians and composers who have grown up with electronic gadgets as a natural part of their environment, has hit the scene. This is phase 3. It seems they have approached sound in a much freer and more radical way, not really caring about the means, but looking for results; thus cutting right through habitual sonorities and sentimental procedures, getting right into the action, looking for what\'s there and utilizing it as is! Within this new generation of sonic artists, down-right talent has once more proven the only quality that counts; not fancy equipment - though fancy equipment of course by no means is excluded from use; if you can get it (money!) you use it. The main thing is that art is once again on the agenda, and I think more so now than ever since the mid-fifties. This is very enjoyable to observe and take part in. Andreas Kurtsson \'s new CD is a prime example of art that counts. I have no idea what kind of equipment Kurtsson uses, (unless the felling of trees that is mentioned in the booklet has something to do with it.) but the quality of sound is simply excellent, and what he chooses to do with it is tantalizing, startling! I\'m impressed and pretty goddam happy! I burn some incense and hit the volume! Holy smoke! It\'s poetry in motion! Kurtsson works with fragments of sounds, or rather; he fragments a flow of sounds into bits and pieces, like when you turn the dial of the shortwave receiver back and forth, while also turning the volume all the way down and up again really quickly (but with much more sophistication than that!) - and he juggles those flakes and sticks and blots and specks like a circus artist, with the finest gradations and the tiniest wringing, achieving ultrasonics and subsonics that blow in your ears and shake your lower chakras considerably, mostly with s sense of surfing just above the need to vomit (those infra sounds!) - but. staying above the actual act of throwing up. It\'s a bubbling, boiling experience, but without heat, like sitting on a marsh with bubbling methane rising through the mud and the sludge; a gaseous insecurity! Frans de Ward writes in Vital Weekly : " I never heard of him [ Andreas Kurtsson ], but that might be just my ignorance. From the sketchy drawings on the front cover I understand that Andreas uses two mini discs, two CD players and two turntables plus a whole bunch of sound effects to create his music. Whatever is on all of these pre-recorded material, it is not entirely clear. " Yes, there is a peculiar - veeeery peculiar - rhythmic value to this music. It\'s staggering along, just barely making it, taking the jazz-term blue-note way beyond its designed realm! The make-up of this rhythm has long out-lived any electronica stylistics. I can't say I have any sympathy whatsoever for the kind of surface music that I consider electronica, i.e. boring, pulsating teeny-pop electronics with a beat that always gives it away and brings any good intentions down into the gutter of uselessness. A couple of times Kurtsson approaches these vile strains, but he never crosses the line to cheapness; he always backs up and stands off, to veer this way or that into really exotic, bumpy and disjointed patterns of various dynamics and with a content of trashy noise and static blurs mixed in with extremely modal timbres from sonic mimicries of rising soap bubbles with summer cloud reflections and trembling ripples of blue Glenn Gould rubber bolls bouncing out of big black speakers, eventually filling the room with color blue and matter rubber! In all these swaying, staggering, tripping sonorities, there is a streak of utmost contemporary poetry; a poetry without sentimental or melancholic throw-backs; simply a poetry of the present, alive and breathing, kicking the shit out of populist pastimes! Here we go tumbling through the moment, on fire with lust and elegant formulations - in sound; Anemone Hepaticas in your spring and both hands full of clay; be happy! Get old! What does it matter! Sit back! Let the room adapt to My Busy Fingers or Polka Tiger ! It\'s like taking a footbath while your lover is reading Kalevala to you till the water gets cold or the mind runs out. A senseless ingenuity of this new way of stitching acousmatique together is the way these artists - and for sure Andreas Kurtsson - make so ample use of meager means. Kurtsson finds a few appealing - or appalling? - sounds or automated riffs or found paraphernalia, and he sets out to work with them, actually widening the scope of possible sonorities, pitches, rhythms and timbres wildly, starting with almost nothing and ending up with a whole world, while also, tolerably, keeping the sprawling lot together, without applying deadly force. Magnificent and mad! My Busy Fingers is an excellent examples of meager means - some short fragments of unknown static/interferential source circled unevenly in parallel loops, on a backdrop of some household appliance that hums comfortably, albeit being switched on and off now and then; not too often. The magic is how Kurtsson handles his means; i.e. masterly. He really creates something very much worthwhile with these means, unlikely as it may sound - and unlikely it sounds! It would be all to easy to fail in this endeavor, because it is hard, very hard, to handle minute details in a valid way, an, on top of that, deliver a viable work of art. The process involves innumerable choices - concerning sounds to use, and then how to use them - and I believe it is in this restraining discrimination, this final, stripped-down choice that involves a lot of killed darlings, that true artistry does reveal itself. I believe there is a misprint on the back of the CD cover, because there number 2 is Polka Tiger , while, on the press release, number 2 is Girl Bag . Impossible to tell, I suppose, from the sounds, but given the durations, I think the press release is correct and the CD cover faulty. Therefore I assume that track 2 is Girl Bag . Girl Bag opens in an ambient environment, like a coffee shop, a mall or a restaurant or a store or a beauty parlor, not too busy, a few people talking in the background. A creaking sound keeps on keeping on, the ambience of the closed but rather spacious place remains - and inside this setting Kurtsson lets some extraneous sounds grow, emerge, precipitate, slowly, entering almost imperceptibly, gradually gathering momentum and force, craving more headroom and more air - more attention. These extraneous sounds, close-up and intimate, consist of tingling, jerky little electric sparks and a recurring modal figure of softly colored percussive properties, a little like those pause signals or station calls that were common in the old days of DX-ing, when I used to spend evenings listening to Radio Tirana , Radio Moscow and so forth. The occasional - rare - occurrences in this bit of a police radio trill, simply place this hypnotic dream right there in the present; a contemporary daydream in a mall setting; perhaps in one of those small hole-in-the-wall places that you find in railway stations and shopping areas in the cities; a quick black coffee and a cheese sandwich - defining, also, the transient state of the music, of our daily lives and circumstances; the elusiveness of it all, or, like Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf has it: Du säger 'jag' och 'det gäller mig' men det gäller ett vad: I verkligheten är du ingen. Så jaglös, naken och formlös är verkligheten! Det var i skräck inför den du började klä dig, började uppföra dig och kalla dig 'jag', klamra dig fast vid ett halmstrå. I verkligheten är du ingen; [.] en plats, ett plagg, ett namn. In my English translation it spells: You say 'I' and 'it concerns me' but it concerns a bet: In reality you are no one. That is how I-less, naked and formless reality is! It was in fear of it you started to dress, began behaving and calling yourself 'I', catch a straw. In reality you are no one; [.] a place, a coat, a name. There is always more to find in this music; more associations set in motion inside you by Andreas Kurtsson \'s sound art. He is a great painter of scenarios on the inside of your eyelids, a great visionary of events inside your depths. Fascinating and. beautiful - because all this considered, the music, perceived as is, without any side-glances or philosophical speculations, is very, very beautiful! Polka Tiger (as I assume) at track 3, opens in a more melodious vein - which always makes me seriously suspicious or at least apprehensive - but the way Kurtsson handles his percussive little fragment of a melodic vice rids it of any electronica guise that might deter me. Instead I hear short-echoed reflections of kitchen duties; the sorting out of forks and knives, the kitchenware represented by small, sharp, shrill brute sounds, while the timeline is written in soft-spoken, dark or semi-dark drum patterns. The sharpened fork-and-knife ordering grows into a more piercing irritation as the piece progresses - and there is an undeniable beat to the progression, albeit far from any electronica staining, luckily. If this would remind me of anything - which it hardly does - it would be a piece from Paul Lansky \'s CD Homebrew , called Table\'s Clear . You Make Me Fun is an undeniable source of audio pleasure. Very harsh incisions, as if lifted off of malfunctioning electric devices or corroded circuits, are placed in a recurring, uneven spatiality, tripping and stumbling forth in a wretched, disjointed rhythm that lives off of its imperfections. These white noise interferences - or perhaps gray - constitute the staggering substantiation of this work, with the added pleasure of embellished Christmas ball suspensions, flying about inside the cut-up mist of distortion like the spheres of old Macintosh screen-savers! Rattling, corrugated impressions enter as the Christmas balls retreat somewhat, and the whole show goes on a calm and collected rampage that is downright relaxed sexy! You name it, we like it! Speck It / Späcka Det at track 5 seems to wind up via a slowly spinning rear wheel of a racing bike, at least the way my old Gitane 10-speed from 1982 sounds. The spinning of the wheel picks up in speed, and later I think it comes on doubled - but this only constitutes the glue that gives a sense of direction and aim, albeit utterly unknown as to its real intentions. Again Kurtsson utilizes short, very short, distorted sounds, which he handles in a percussive way that also has a property of hypnosis. It\'s all too easy to be swayed by this music, to be lured into circumstances that you can't really steer yourself. The atmosphere of these curly, abrasive and lustful sounds in the spinning racing bike wheel scenario places you in a summery setting of 8-minute old light rushing in from our closest star, and it\'s best to sit back and enjoy the smell of cow dung that also fits pretty good into this rural vision. he Smell of Technology is a signal-to-noise exploration, in the best of meanings and intents. The mimicry of between-stations static is utilized from a sordid shortwave realm into the refined studio handicraft situation, gallantly and - seemingly - effortlessly spread across the sonic canvas in transparent layers of lighter colors on top of darker, rumbling hues; all short and walking about with fingertips tripping over uneven surfaces, as if a blinded - not blind - person, finds his way along a rough church wall while the jitter of the atoms under his fingers and in his fingers by some works of a miracle are perceived in prickly acupunctural sensations. Diskot hits it right off with slashing bamboo sticks rattling down on rocks or other mineral matter, while sequential static noise or amplified atmospheric ambience is served in little portions, clean-cut and abrupt. The variation of sounds - even here a mixture of timbre-rich events and white/gray noise - increases, while all the while remaining quite rhythmic, in Kurtsson \'s peculiarly staggering, stumbling style, supporting himself with all extremities, like a Lapland mountain hiker leaning on walking sticks on his way up the valley from Kebnekaise mountains station to the Tarfala hut. In Many Style (not Many Styles!) is the shortest piece on the CD, with its less than three minutes. As we've stated before, that has nothing to do with anything. Beautified Silver Apples of The Moon ( Morton Subotnick ) metal spheres tumble about in sparse, open-air vicinities, while select static noise pans wildly, sometimes hinged to sweeping thinocular bands of semi-attached fragments of interferences. Mighty pleasurable! This mixture of glaring, shiny metal or glass spheres with sweeping, misty semi-transparencies makes for a darn penetrating experience! The last work is Do Or Rood . It seems to commence in the gasping shortness of someone\'s breath, madly repetitious, so fast it\'s just short off turning into pitch - well not quite, maybe -, but then an amusing craze hits things off in a tiny toy melody of forced, manic exhilaration that could as well just be the other side of sugar addiction. A staggering - as usual - and swaggering little march of animated figures with candy trumpets and caramel whistles moves down a sweets for my sweet alley, and you can almost envision all the dental work down that path. So, all considered, these 39 something minutes opened more aspects on life to me than, for example, the four hours of Morton Feldman \'s 2nd String Quartet , showing how little meaning duration really has in art - which, by the way, was precisely Feldman \'s thought too, however, in his case, leading to the opposite effect; very long durations! Congratulations from the Sonoloco team on a marvelous release, Mr. Kurtsson !