Andreas Hiroui Larsson
Seduced by (a) last year
SWEDEN Thanatosis Produktion THT14 CD (2022)
Seduced by (a) last year is an interesting melding of composition and jazz and text and spoken word and improvisation. It is rather an “artistic method than a conventional musical composition.” Furthermore, Larsson aims to “…tell the collective history of the members of my ensemble and me in digital archives on USB flash drives to be improvised with on laptops…” A truly multi-media project, then.
Andreas Hiroui Larsson describes himself as an artist, musician and researcher who “…conducts an interdisciplinary practice, in which his art, music and philosophy practices enter each others’ fields, perform each others’ roles and fulfil the purposes of one another.” The collective in question is made up of Andreas Hiroui Larsson on cymbals drum and voice, Johanna Arve on Beamer, laptop, speaker, usb flash drive, voice and Johan Jutterström on saxophone, laptop, speaker, usb flash drive and voice. I didn’t know what a “Beamer” is in terms of a musical instrument, unless Arve is referring to the software application Beamer upon which one can create slideshows for presentations. Having read the sleevenotes, it becomes apparent that Johanna Arve’s role is to provide access to her archives, and we learn that “…most of the materials in her archives are of photographic and textual kind and represent works that we have made together…” You might ask “do we really need to know what type of file storage hardware the musicians decided to bring with them?” Well, the material of this project is a dense accumulation, partly made up of voice performance/readings/sample playback going on, presented by a trio of performers, exploring the role of technology and how it relates to creativity, so perhaps it makes sense to be specific about how this was achieved.
The nuts and bolts of this single piece of audio includes heavy use of a technique of overlaying live and pre-recorded spoken word texts, repeated phrases uttered by different voices, any meaning of which is obscured by the process: presumably a deliberate strategy. The piece starts this way for the first eight minutes or so, whereupon a jazz trio becomes the medium with which to attempt to press the listener into contemplation. This gives way to timpani or bass drums struck with supersoft malletts, then more voice and voices samples until around 18 minutes there appears field recordings of traffic and distant chanting, followed by more voices. The voices speak in English and Swedish, all on top of each other, so nothing is fully heard; no sense is made – the listener’s understanding is fragmentary. We are then treated to a variety of feedback techniques, possibly utilizing amplified drumheads, transducers and/or contact mics and the like. This creates a welcome calming interlude. Then at around 32 minutes, overlaid voices are back accompanied by rapid actions on the rims and shells of the kit. Phrases leap out suddenly only to disappear back into the background, like patches of primed canvas poking through the thickly applied pigment of an oil painting. This gives way to a return to saxophone and drums. It is intriguing that the piece should finish with a melodic top line; the significance – if any – evades me, however. Perhaps Larsson’s art is the pursuit of a dream-like version of reality of the kind the film director David Lynch espouses.
A complex and dense, curious artefact; equally captivating and disorienting. Clearly a message of some kind is being transmitted, but what that message might actually be is being obscured, which is saying something about our existence perhaps, perhaps not. If this sounds like your bag, you should know that Larsson is also gainfully employed as drummer with the Alex Zethson Ensemble, Crime Scenes, J/L Duo with Johan Jutterström, and he has a duo with the artist Joakim Forsgren, whose album Vending Machine is also released by Thanatosis. His “metaphysical novel” Souvenir was published by Firework Edition in 2023 and he contributed a chapter to the anthology People And Places edited by John Chantler and published by Ideell Editions in 2022.