Carl Michael Von Hausswolff / Jason Lescalleet / Joachim Nordwall
Enough!!!
POLAND MONOTYPE RECORDS MONO069 CD (2013)
I was most struck by the cover image of Enough!!! and thought it was worth looking into. It’s the work of the 20th century Icelandic sculptor Einar Jónsson, a fellow who got a lot of commissions for public outdoor sculptures of heroes and warriors, and also drew on Nordic myths for inspiration. His conventional story-book images of helmeted Norsemen aren’t very interesting to me, but I was intrigued to learn of his later phase, when he became something of a religious recluse. It might be that the Mother Earth sculpture, seen on the cover here, came from that period. It has a vague spiritual aura and symbolist tendencies. However, it is worth seeing other views of this unusual piece of sculpture, just to get the whole picture. It’s two figures, of which the larger one nestles a smaller figure in its long arms; the smaller figure may be asleep or dead, and has her arms folded over her chest. The larger figure is looking down on her charge with a gesture of solace and compassion which is quite moving.
The above may not be clear from the way that CM Von Hausswolff has photographed the sculpture for Enough!!!. He took the photograph in 1991, and ensured that a printed credit for him appears in the release. He’s taken it from an angle to emphasise the sharp perspective, and it’s also lit so that the head of the larger figure is all black – its face is not visible at all. And at first glance, it may be possible to miss the sleeping figure at rest in the arms. In Von Hausswolff’s version, there appears to be a concrete wall in the background, whereas another rendition of the same sculpture (there may be many castings) is in the open air. In short, CM Von Hausswolff’s cover image is clearly intended to disturb us; it suggests a prisoner in cell with a black bag over their head, possibly with hands bound in front of them. If my reading is half-correct, the cry of Enough!!! on this record could be interpreted as a humanist plea, demanding an end to government-approved torture, political prisoners, or indeed any regime that oppresses the human spirit; with a cover image that harks back to the sort of thing they used to do to IRA prisoners in the 1970s. I’m thinking of sensory deprivation chambers, aggressive sonic techniques to sap a man’s will. And when I’ve written about bleak minimalist electronic drone music (like this release) in the past, that’s one of the images I’ve reached for.
Enough!!! is a single 49-minute composition produced by Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Jason Lescalleet, and Joachim Nordwall. All of them are past masters of inscrutable sound art, perhaps none more so than the Swedish maestro CMVH, who executes stern long-form works of an unblinking sternness, never allowing the work to become distracted from its goal. Nordwall (also of Swedish persuasion) has always impressed us with his reverb noise escapades as one half of The Skull Defekts, and more recently his work on Monstrance came close to achieving the burnished perfection of a bronze cube sculpture in a modernist art gallery. The American player Lescalleet is one I’ve tended to associate with minimalist improvisation, based on his numerous releases on Erstwhile, but he’s clearly entered into the spirit of this particular work. Grim, but strangely beautiful and compelling, Enough!!! may appear at first to be a single grey monolith of drone but is in fact heavily treated with multiple textures, pulsations, and overlaid tones; and it casts a mood of perpetual expectation (bordering on insufferable tension as you wait for something to happen), at the same time smothering the listener in a thick mist of vague, abstract tones.
That’s pretty much all we can tell you, except the release is the document of a live performance captured in late 2011 at a venue called the Project Room in NYC; and that there was another version broadcast on Touch Radio (#85). Arrived here November 2013.