Erik Levander, Kvad, Germany, Supple 9, SUP008 CD (2023)
A chance visit to a cathedral more than twenty years ago, to enjoy the peace and quiet and to admire the building’s architecture, and ending up with a recording souvenir of the cathedral choir during a rehearsal, results in the unexpected gestation and birth of this heavenly yet surprisingly powerful work of droning ambient sound art. Swedish musician Erik Levander’s past CV probably makes him the least likely artist to have created such an astonishing opus as “Kvad”: he started out as part of a generation of DIY laptop experimentalists, working in abstract electronic pop in the early 2000s. It was actually during this time that he dropped by the Lutheran Cathedral in Lund to experience the serenity there and made a recording of the choir at rehearsal. Years later, Levander found the recording in his library and began experimenting with it, rearranging and reprocessing the material using guitar pedals and software, and layering it with other sound material.
The results of Levander’s explorations are incredible and far-reaching, more in their effects upon the listener than perhaps in the actual music itself. The choir is present in a couple of tracks early on and their singing is radiant and uplifting, even if the actual rehearsal itself might have been mundane for the choir members all those 20+ years ago. Although the album consists of seven distinct tracks of varying lengths, with the longest at fourteen minutes, “Kvad” is best heard in its entirety, as though it were one long continuous track with pauses, exploring different aspects and angles of its subject matter, going into various short and long detours throughout. For the most part the droning music is serene in its overall mood, and the tone is usually soft, but individual tracks like “In i stunden” and “End dag i taget” can have a surprisingly dark, even unstable or ominous feel, and others like “Åvilan” can have a tough, even edgy or noisy sound that adds depth, complexity and mystery to the epic, mind-expanding drones.
Final track “Någon, något” (“Something, somewhat”) is the most intriguing and inscrutable piece, developing slowly over its length (14 minutes) and only revealing itself, perhaps not fully, in its last moments. An impression of something hidden deep beneath the layers of ambient drone – something that may not really be what it claims to be, or what others claim it to be – is present in the layer of restless, shifting noise over the sighing drones and the subterranean horn stratum.
The combination of serene ambient drone and the distortions and noise effects that Levander adds to the source material makes “Kvad” even more powerful and mysterious than it would be otherwise, and takes it far away from being perhaps another generic work of church or cathedral-based sound art. The album is best heard as loudly as possible, to hear the many layers of noise and drone that Levander has added to the source material to turn it into something far beyond: something, somewhat, that is organic and even pulsing with life and a consciousness …