The self-titled debut, spdr and Funksionslust albums were all warmly clasped to the bosom of Sound Projectors past and now a further bulletin emerges from this ever-so-slightly mysterious Swedish duo. Their website‘s strapline proclaiming “background music from the abyss” might point towards a Gloomy Gus worldview, but they’re certainly less cryptic – symbols picked out on matt black livery – and far more redolent of post-punk cellar-dwellers like Flipper, Feedtime, Plague of Toads, The 39 Clocks and The Metal Boys. But here’s the cruncher, aside from plundering the written works of Nietzsche, Yeats, Blake and Hesse for lyrical ideas, which is pretty unusual…the one vital element that separates the recorded works of those ne’er-do-wells from Vraketmen Göran Green and Tommy Lindholm is that every vraket-klang and vraket-thrum is entirely improvised. A bravura leap into the unknown that those aforementioned outfits would’ve surely avoided by hastily producing a sick note or two written by their anxious parents or guardians.

Nevertheless, it might be a little easier to play without a safety net when both parties are familiar with each other’s peculiar little foibles, which in this case they are, having both played together in an unnamed punk band from ’78 to ’82, I’d guess that they also went unrecorded as well, as there’s no mention of them within the pages of The Encyclopaedia of Swedish Punk 1977-87 by Peter Jandreus, which comes as a pretty damn extensive sourcebook all things considered. That info drought continues with 4‘s small print showing only “various equipment” being used by this camera-shy twosome. A statement as splendidly enigmatic as Suicide’s ‘voice and instrument’ credit! Secrecy aside for a moment… what can be revealed is that wading knee-deep through hundreds of cassettes of V.P.’s live workouts has, as ever, come up aces. Take a bow tape curator and ‘sparse editing guru’ Conny Malmquist. Your man-hours have not gone unrecognised.

With a clattering, wheezy drum box as our regular companion and guide, the more bite-sized incidents like “Put out my Eyes” and “Bengt Berg” which successfully superglues the head of Blurt’s Ted Milton onto the quivering body of Cab. Volt’s Richard Kirk tend to leave more of a ring around the bath than the Godzilla-sized “Reptile Brain Stomp”. Its forty-seven minutes of fuzz-pulse and sampled muezzin wail casting menacing shadows over the city’s skyline. Anyone in the immediate firing line of this massive massivity will clearly have to plan their day around it. Bring a packed lunch.

Non-conformists amongst us can sleep safely knowing that these two sixty plus year-olds (one a psychotherapist, the other a gallery owner) are still’whipping it out’ under a laudable ‘play loud or not at all’ banner, and testifying to anyone who’ll listen, to the life-affirming properties of improv, in all its guises.

These speculations are also borne out to some extent by the choice of musicians he works with. Swiss improvisers Cyril Bondi and d’incise (who are also the curators of this record label), both regulars in these pages in their group work and duo work as Diatribes, are here playing percussion, electronics, and harmonicas. There’s also the violinist Anna Lindal (member of Skogen and Granberg’s other performing group, Skuggorna Och Ljuset), while Magnus Granberg plays the prepared piano. Slow-moving, extremely precise music is the result of these calibrations, arrangements, and selection of simpatico players; every understated tone and percussive beat has its place in the fabric, is presented and realised with a certain deliberation. The subtle ever-changing repetitions and pulses are clearly the result of great clarity of thought and arrangement.

Nattens Skogar may be wistful in its mood, but there’s also a certain spirituality and a calm centre to the work; the music would be a balm to a troubled soul. While I can unequivocally recommend this to listeners who enjoy Morton Feldman (the fabric of Nattens Skogar is not unlike Feldman’s apprehension of a musical score as a Persian carpet), the specific influences in this case were the nocturnes of Erik Satie and a particular piece by Thelonious Monk. Excellent. (5/10/2017)

This time, on Sky (FIREWORK EDITION RECORDS FER 1119), it might be the air above us, the canopy of the heavens, the skies, the clouds, the galaxies and outer space, that inspire her to gape in fear and awe at what the Almighty hath wrought. At least two pieces here confirm this in their titles, including the amazing ‘Hungry Galaxy’, but it’s not implausible to read the entire record as a voyage into the inky depths of cold-hearted outer space. The cover images, abstractions of sky, clouds, and light, also are very suggestive in this direction. Her vision of the cosmos is quite unlike that of Sun Ra, who tended to see it as a benign and welcoming zone where he could live in peace as an exile from Planet Earth. Norelius takes a more pragmatic view and is keen to warn us of the dangers lurking at every corner. That friendly galaxy could turn out to be a black hole, a zone of no return.

It’s probably a mistake on my part to be looking for this “unified” view of Sky, however, since it’s a compilation of diverse pieces recorded over 2014 and 2015 and any connections between the themes may be unintentional. One thing is clear, she certainly thinks big, opting to work with four-channel or multi-channel systems, doing it in venues like the ZKM Klangdome (which sounds like a gloriously outsize sound arena), sometimes playing live to add an extra frisson of danger, and also composing for dance; three of the works here were originally created for a piece called Voracious performed by a Butoh company called SU-EN. The record front-loads its most portentous widescreen and grandiose statements at the start of the disc, belting the listener senseless (I mean this in a positive way but I realise I do this composer no favours with such violent imagery) with the remorseless steady throbs of ‘Ramsa’, ‘Bite Group Dance’, and the stern growls of ‘Hungry Galaxy’. True to its title, this does indeed create the sense of outer space as an insatiable monster, a force that is slowly devouring all the planets and life-forces that are unfortunate enough to enter its orbit. Norelius herself seems dispassionate about this catastrophic sci-fi fantasy; just gets on with the job of documenting that fact as best she can.

After this there’s the short piece ‘Pipare’ followed by the lengthy title piece ‘Sky’, which is not as dense as the preceding apocalyptic visions and at least contains a certain amount of oxygen and space so a fellow can take a breath. But her sky is still a threatening zone – not blue, sunlit, and carefree, but rather dark, cloudy, and laced with electrical storms. The huge clouds seem to be spitting out cobras of electricity in slow motion. Rarely has mankind endured such a desperate phenomenon, short of anything that may have transpired in the middle ages, when seers saw signs in the sky everywhere. The final epic piece ‘You Are The Flower’, is much more “minimal” after the crunchy textures endured so far, static and feedback whines and disturbing drones combined with distant rumbling as of a thunderstorm making its way towards us over the Kalix. At all times, Lise-Lotte Norelius has a strong sense of dynamics and compositional arrangement, creating satisfying thought-through pieces with structure and depth; she never allows her materials to run on auto-pilot and never settles for mindless droning atmospheres. A solid and cohesive set of statements. From 19 September 2017.

Christer Grewin’s ‘Words That…’ is a strong opener. The text materials for this come from an unknown Latin American writer, suspended in a minimal soup of electronic sounds and whispering. Meaning and context are subverted or twisted by Christer’s subtle interventions.

Lars Hallnäs’s piece is called ‘Mit einer Rede Von…’, a quite good text and computer-sound piece with a rather stilted halting delivery that is somehow endearing. I had to wince when I read it came out of a period of “defiance and rebellion” for Lars. The recording is a very Swedish middle-class notion of what defiance and rebellion sounds like, a very genteel affair based on the ideas of intellectual film-makers and philosophers of the 1970s. He cites Jean-Luc Godard, but lacks the Frenchman’s bite. Still, punk rock hadn’t quite been invented in 1974.

Roberta Settels ‘P4’ is a hot item. A very effective blast from this American ex-pat who was in Sweden at the time. There is some text, but it’s mostly a radio waves experiment, and solar flare activity comes into it somewhere. For these reasons, perhaps we can draw a line from here to Disinformation’s Stargate and Per Svennson’s Intergalactic Transmission. What I like here is the sense of imminent danger, as though we’re hearing things we shouldn’t, broadcast from a part of the universe we ought to leave alone. I’d love to hear more from Ms. Settels, but she only made one LP in 1985, which was suppressed by an established label due to its controversial subject matter (expressing apparent sympathy for a terrorist), and she ended up self-releasing it on her own Music In Crisis label.

Jon Appleton is another American, well loved in this house due to his Appleton Syntonic Menagerie 2 CD compilation. He also made a record with Don Cherry on Flying Dutchman. ‘Rödluvan’ is his take on Little Red Riding Hood, which doesn’t work quite as well as it ought. The strongest element is the young Axel Bodin doing the reading. Appleton’s Buchla synths aren’t as exciting as they could be. Something of a throwback to an old popular classical record format (e.g. Peter and The Wolf) but slightly undermined in some way.

I’d like to pass over Eugeniusz Rudnik’s ‘Wokale’. You may have noticed that Bolt Records in Poland is doing everything they can to restore Rudnik (and the Experimental Studio at Polish Radio) to his rightful place in the history of electroacoustic music. In case you haven’t got enough material from their extensive reissue programme, here is a five minute unreleased item. And it’s a massive embarrassment to hear Rudnik vocalising a “boogie” rhythm over a clunky electronic track. Maybe it could end up being passed off by some hoaxer as a Paul McCartney out-take from his 1980 LP.

Rune Lindblad, another king of Swedish electro-acoustic music, ends this LP with an uncharacteristically “direct” piece. [1. I use the word “uncharacteristically” because so much of what I have heard from Lindblad is oblique, allusive, opaque and probably packed with poetic symbols expressed in musical form.] ‘I Want To Go Home’ attempts to address the problems of old people in society and ends up levelling an accusation at the Institution of old peoples’ homes, and the uncaring authorities who run them on behalf of the state. This is achieved with a documentary interview that reveals the total lack of compassion and comprehension displayed by a professional “carer” as he listens to the plaints of an unhappy, yet still dignified, old lady. Even to non-Swedish speakers, this much is completely clear. The piece is punctuated and decorated with restrained and fascinating electronic sounds. Remarkable work.

First, there’s ‘Announcement’ by the Hungarian composer Tamas Ungvary, who more or less settled in Sweden in 1969, gradually being seduced away from his career in conventional classical music (he was a conductor and contrabass player) towards the possibilities afforded by electronic music. His work here is early computer music, synthesising speech recordings through a program at EMS. He was directly inspired by a news cutting, a printed announcement seeking “ideas” (a reproduction of it appears at the end of this post). He was incensed that the culture had brought us to this low point, that we needed to “advertise” in order to fulfil a basic human capacity for thought. This made him speculate strangely about how, when computers had taken over the world, the machines would start to look to human beings as a source of new ideas. This theme of computer-intelligence is familiar to all readers of science fiction, but Ungvary has a twist on the tale, and is trying to say something larger about the entire culture and its insatiable need for ideas to keep progressing. A bleak prospect. The technology he used may be early and seem clunky now, but computer-generated speech has rarely sounded so disconcerting.

Dutch artist Herman Damen surfaces again (he was also on Volume 8), with ‘Psychocybernetic Performance’, another piece which is also “cybernetic” in flavour. The piece is an odd mix of aimless electronic poops and whines interrupted by distorted speaking voices, and if you feel like you’re only hearing one part of a conversation it’s probably because this is the soundtrack component of an elaborate performance piece. The notes for its performance are reproduced here, and one of the requirements is “some nudes are texted and impregnated with a cosmetic liquid”, a grotesquerie illustrated here by the black woman with the word “FEEDBACK” written on her torso. Overall this feels very dated in its theme, a sarcastic and rather laboured attack on fairly obvious targets, but the treatment is still strong and it has a nice radio play vibe.

Lars-Gunnar Bodin is without doubt one of the big Kahunas in Swedish 20th century art music. I see from the notes here that he’s credited, along with Bengt Emil Johnson, with inventing the term “Text-Sound Composition” in the first place, which isn’t to say they were trying to create a restrictive elite, but rather define a very precise description for a practice they considered to be unique. Among Bodin’s accomplishments in his homeland, he was chairman of Fylkingen and studio director of EMS; internationally, a student of Stockhausen, Ligeti, and disciple and fellow-traveller with Cage and David Tudor. No surprise that his ‘Semicolon; Seance IV’ is showcased by being given the entirety of side B, allowing its 18 minute length to unfurl like a grand flag. This full version makes up for its previously truncated release on CD in 1994.

‘Semicolon; Seance IV’ is an electro-acoustic composition really, although voices and spoken word play a major part. Percussion and piano are to the fore, plus some clattering racket I can only allude to as “unseen banging about in a room”, but rendered in a very deliberate and composed way. The voice parts are delivered by the Svisch group, an ad-hoc ensemble featuring many notable Swedes, yapping out their avant-blather in stern manner. For instance the great Åke Hodell, whose 3-CD Verbal Brainwash is an unforgettable diatribe of harshly political text-sound attacks, is part of this team.

I wish I could get under the carapace of this difficult piece, and I suspect that even if I understood the Swedish language I would still be baffled by the utterances and sayings of the Svisch group. The text portions were apparently inspired by parapsychology, an abstruse enough field in the first place which leaves me stranded from the get-go, and the fundamental themes have probably been further mutated by passing through the complex brain filters of the great Bodin and his large cranium. An awareness of Öyvind Fahlström’s “happenings” of the early 1960s also fed into the piece, which may account for the tremendous sense of “moment” going on here. A mysterious, yet compelling series of episodes for us to process.

We’re also witnessing the rise of the EMS Studio in Stockholm as an important cultural force. ‘Semicolon’ was executed in the early 1960s at a time before EMS was as sophisticated as it now is; Bodin is at some pains to express what an achievement it was to realise the piece at all, and is effusive in his praise of Christer Grewin’s technical assistance. No wonder.

Christer Grewin opens the set with ‘Dialogi’. It happens to have been recorded at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, which is unusual considering that Grewin was an important technician at EMS when it was part of Swedish radio, and he built up a considerable set of skills in the studio and the field since 1962. I say important, because he helped a lot of composers to realise their ideas, which was crucial during a relatively naïve period when the technology barriers and practical difficulties were far more challenging than they are now. The liner notes point out how without Christer’s skills, a large number of compositions would simply not have been realised at all. [1. Maybe we can consider him to be what Kurt Graupner was to Faust.] He made his own works too, and ‘Dialogi’ is an understated jewel, an ambient mood piece with spoken-word interpolations. To put it another way, he uses interventions and hard edits to scramble meaning, and thereby undercut the continuity and meaning of a recorded conversation. Some phrases are detourned into near-musical singing. As befits this unique craftsman, the realisation here is technically very accomplished, making use of studio echo, editing, and loops to create strong and distinctive textures.

English titan Bob Cobbing again distinguishes himself with 12 minutes of ‘Sha Ma Na’, a live performance vocal piece he realised with Lillemor Lind and Ewa Svensson. A roaring, half-sung piece of lovely gibberish tumbles out like an organic force of nature, a cross between a tidal wave and an old tree stump. The trio chant, they bark, they whisper with passion and feeling. The notes here describe this lumpy monster as “directly performed, partly improvised”, which did set me thinking. The interaction on offer here is enough to put many traditional improvisers in the doghouse, yet Cobbing’s place in the history of UK free improvisation has not been researched or written about at length, as far as I know. Was he ever invited to Company Week, and if not then why not? Maybe Cobbing was too much of an ornery loner to subscribe to Bailey’s unspoken strictures and shibboleths. The title of this piece can be read as a reference to shamanism, an area of primitive religion where many dabblers dip their toe, but few come out of the pool with any credibility intact.

Maud Reuterswärd & Bengt Nyquist have concocted a highly effective nightmare piece about Vietnam, ever a popular topic for radical artists of the 1960s. ‘16.3.68’ uses quite deliberately shocking vocals effects to convey horror, outrage, and futility, contrasted with moments of serenity and calm to lull the listener into a sense of security. This short piece is a match made in Heaven between an author (Reuterswärd) and a technician (Nyquist), and the very mics of Swedish Radio bowed down before them. The specific incident that triggered this piece was the Son My massacre (more popularly known as My Lai), understandably a frequently chosen theme for creators making radical protest works about Vietnam. Few such works are as heart-stoppingly direct as this one, though. Maud Reuterswärd goes for the jugular, reminding the listener of our own humanity in a way we can’t ignore.

Öyvind Fahlström was a well-known visual artist and perhaps one of Sweden’s more famous exports…he was associated for a time with American Pop Art, and indeed the first time I saw his name in print was a caption for one of his Krazy Kat mobile-painting pieces, derived from George Herriman’s comic strip. But before that he was a pioneer of concrete poetry and electronic music in Sweden in the 1950s, and regarded by many as a major influence on the sound-poetry genre. Here on the LP we have his piece ‘The Difficult Journey’, originally written in 1954 and first published in a book in 1966. This “piece for mixed speaking-choir” delivers an unusual combination of free-form vocalising and singing, although it comes over a tad too “arty” for me. This might be because it’s a “proper” choir doing the performance (Camerata Holmiæ), trained singers who have a tutored approach to dynamics.

The American Charles Amirkhanian closes out this LP with a couple of three-minute gems. I’ve got a copy of his Lexical Music LP, containing numerous early 1970s compositions, which I don’t play often enough. Not just because of his speaking voice and his confident grin in the photo here, his American presence asserts itself almost at once in this company, especially where many of the other creators on this LP has a very ambiguous and exploratory feel to their work. Amirkhanian’s pieces are evidently structured in a way that most of what we heard so far is not. ‘as erson’s onal tte’ makes clever use of overdubs to create simultaneous read-through of three separate poems, to produce a rush of complex information. The poems themselves also used a composed, near-Cagean method in their construction, deleting selected letters from found texts and compressing words into nonsensical strings (though this method also feels a bit Lettrist in its approach). On ‘Sound Nutrition’, the work is again quite structured, this time made by cutting up some rather unlikely found sources (promotional announcements from the Dairy Council of California) and arranging the edits very thoughtfully. In both cases the deliberation is reflected in Amirkhanian’s very assured speaking voice and confident delivery.

Given the creators involved on these records, and the nature of the work which often focuses on the human voice, one is tempted to characterise the material as “sound poetry”…but even that is quite a nebulous term. I recall listening to the Revue OU boxed set which reissued most of Henri Chopin’s audio magazine and which naturally tended to favour the French school of this most marginal of 20th century art forms, showcasing important works by Bernard Heidsieck, François Dufrêne, Raoul Hausmann and Chopin himself. However, it’s always been an international movement, and the American, English, and Swedish wings were represented in the box too. When writing about it, I struggled as I tried to edge towards a definition of what “sound poetry” might be, and to this day it remains elusive. To me the “purest” form would be the human voice dramatically transformed through use of tape and amplification, but based on what I hear on these four Text-Sound Compositions LPs, the activity could legitimately include electro-acoustic composition, performance art, free improvisation, radio plays, electronic music, noise, and more. Swedish Radio and EMS Stockholm had a big part to contribute. But it’s not all Swedish; these four LPs are also very inclusive in terms of nationalities, as we shall see.

On Volume 8 (1971) (FYLP 1039), poet and composer Bengt Emil Johnson kicks off your day of strange listening with ‘Under the rejoicing of the audience’. Crowd noises are fed through filters, including what sounds like the phase effect, and edited into perplexing snippets. Odd and slightly unsettling. Johnson regards these emotional expressions of the crowd as a “collective language”, which he might be trying to decode as he studies and works with the grain of what finds on his tapes. Tape manipulation has rarely sounded so subtle and understated.

Gust Gils turns in ‘Making Out in Windy Stockholm’. I never heard anything by this Belgian-Dutch poet, and on this evidence he seems to have been a pretty far-out loon. He drew inspiration from experimental literature, science fiction, and surrealism. Some or all of these influences might show up in this weird clutch of symbolist free-form poems, which amount to a sprawling, free-form narrative of some sort. On the surface, he’s rewriting classical history and legends on his own terms – there are snippets of the Prometheus myth, glimpses of Christians fed to lions, a political prisoner being tortured. If there’s a linking theme, it might be something to do oppression of minorities by the authorities. Gils had a spare style, not overdoing the use of tape loops, overlapping voices and electronic processing. The only off-putting aspect is the slightly smug “hippy” tone to his reciting voice; he’s not working very hard to convince us of his thesis, and kind of assumes we’re already on his side.

Herman Damen made four minutes of ‘Magic’ – in some ways sound poetry in purest form, if you agree with my generalisation above. Language pared down to the basics; just syllables, breath, coughing, snorting, and mouth sounds, bordering on absurdist Dada grunts. Real nice work. It was improvised, but improvised onto multi-track tape, and Damen worked to a careful structure with a deliberately limited range of syllables available to him. This Dutch visual artist has a rich history of unusual ideas, including intriguing areas like “kinetic language”, semiotic theatre, the use of a three-dimensional alphabet…all in the name of expanding our idea of what language might be, pushing the envelope in wild ways. Both he and Gils are described by Rozenhall as creating “verbosonies”, which is a wonderful word.

The last quarter of Volume Eight is given over to the great Bob Cobbing, a man who it’s fair to say was the first name in English sound-poets, and was also a pivotal figure in avant-garde 1960s London in terms of publications, happenings, performances, and poetry readings. In my fantasy life, I often dream of travelling back in time and visiting Better Books, a hub for the UK underground in London. Cobbing was also represented on Revue OU; Trunk Records collectors who purchased the Jeff Keen Noise Art LP in 2012 may be interested in Cobbing’s contributions to Keen’s Marvo Movies. Here, on ‘Trilogy Three’, Cobbing was joined by John Darling to produce the most near-musical piece on the LP. Eerie overlaid and simultaneous voices using much primitive tape echo, creating a sort of monstrous chorus. No words, just mouth sounds and wailing, amounting to an almost song-like effect, both dreamy and grotesque.

His ‘Dreaming In Darkness’ from 2005 is one of those classic electro-acoustic pieces that slam together different timbres and tones to create strong aural contrasts and a sense of continual forward movement, a movement which comes to a sudden stop with each timbral shift. The piece mostly swims in an unreal fantasy zone, apart from those moments when “real-world” recordings seep in, mostly playing a sound-effect role in this radiophonic drama – footsteps on wooden floorboards, church bells, and doors slamming. The piece almost tells a story and evokes sensations of sleep-walking and delirious consciousness. It’s based on the idea of what a blind person might dream about, and the move “from representative sounds to the more abstract and musical material” in this piece is wholly planned and composed. It began life as a collaboration with Natasha Barrett (British composer based in Norway; her Peat + Polymer is reviewed here), whose work may still leave residual traces on the finished item.

‘ReVoiced’ from 2009 isn’t really anything to do with these oneiric themes, but it certainly does create a surreal effect. Composers of this ilk love to do treatments on the human voice (it is quite a familiar trope in this field, ever since the 1960s, I make bold to claim) and take spoken words out of context. Parmerud began this piece in 1992 when he conducted a world tour and recorded as many voices as he could from all over the globe, mixing them together in an almighty wodge called ‘Grains Of Voices’. Perhaps he was looking for commonality in the scattered elements of the human race, trying to solve problems which the United Nations cannot. However, not all the recordings made it into the composition, so the left-over segments have been recycled into ‘ReVoiced’. Aboriginals, folks singers and shamans all join in this virtual choir; the entire geography of the world from North to South is represented. I don’t suppose Parmerud was looking for the same things an ethno-musicologist or folk song collector would seek, nor does he strive to represent the original context accurately, but he does weave a powerful magical-realist episode from these sources.

I was hoping for a more supernatural undercurrent to ‘Necropolis – City of the Dead’ from 2011, but it turns out to be a cut-up piece of orchestral stuff, sourced from recordings of famous classical music pieces. Parmerud bolsters his idea by writing a short blurb which casts him as a fictional tour guide or carnival barker, showing tourists around imaginary catacombs where they will see and hear the ghosts of music past, warning us that they are in a state of “decomposition”. Groan, at that pun. Yes, I’ve heard that joke about Beethoven in his grave too. Actually this can be quite thrilling if you experience it as a ghost-train ride through a selective history of classical music, but the technique is not an original one, and listeners of a less conventional leaning are bound to find more satisfaction in the layerings and juxtapositions that People Like Us does so well, with her plundering and subversion of the history of pop music. Parmerud, by contrast, is just a shade too respectful to his sources and the culture of the “great composers of the past”, thus unable to produce anything more than a polite and rather literal-minded collage of sound; like hearing 200 radio sets all tuned to Classic FM at once. From 10th March 2016.