Kim Myhr and Kitchen Orchestra
Hereafter
NORWAY SOFA MUSIC SOFA5600 CD (2024)
In 2020, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg told all Norwegians “be prepared to lose your loved ones”, or words to this effect; presumably this was a stark and clear-eyed response to the COVID pandemic, but I can see how it might have struck the wrong note and lowered morale among the fearful populace. Still, perhaps better to hear a message of hard truth than the consistent mendacity and obfuscation we suffered in the UK from our own prime minister.
The remark evidently had an effect on Kim Myhr, the Norwegian guitarist and composer, who devised this suite of music Hereafter in 11 parts, played by the Kitchen Orchestra from Stavanger, and recorded there (with some extra work in Oslo). It’s modernist classical chamber music, featuring that mix of traditional and modern instruments that’s quite common now – synths, drum machines, laptops, electric guitars and Hammond organs sit alongside the woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings, some of which may also be amplified, and the lamb lies down with the lion. Myhr, who once regaled the world with On The Silver Globe, an inconclusive guitar suite with Lasse Marhaug, is explicitly aiming to come to terms with the possibility of a very real human catastrophe, with a view to acknowledging it and at some level accepting it. He too would like to achieve the same matter-of-fact quality that, I suppose, he may have discerned in Solberg’s speech; no matter how we may wish otherwise, there’s no getting around it and we can’t wish it away with sentimentality.
Kim Myhr perceived exactly what he was feeling in the movie Jalsaghar (dir. Satyajit Ray), or at any rate allowed it to resonate with him to bring him closer to the realisation of his score. “The framework is grave”, is his own assessment of Hereafter, where there’s an intended contrast between light and dark, sunrise and sunset, despair and hope, with a deliberate move “back to more pensive ground”. All of these compositional dynamics are indeed discernible in the music here, and the array of instrumentation offers highly unusual textures and combinations. Not really pessimistic enough for me; given the axiomatic themes of death and the afterlife, I kept hoping for moments of true bleakness and hard-won empathy, but instead the uplifting emotions keep moving to the centre of the stage. Myhr makes some odd choices of arrangement, resulting in moods and combinations that seem glib and facile, quite inappropriate to the sober theme. If this music is intended to redeem the human soul at that moment when we glimpse the eternity, Kim Myhr’s rather shallow composition is not equal to the task. (02/02/2024)