Muddersten
Triple Music
NORWAY SOFA MUSIC SOFA 599 CD (2023)
Third album from this trio comprising Norwegian players Håvard Volden and Martin Taxt with the Swede Henrik Olsson. I freely admit to being baffled by the inscrutable practices of these fellows, and years later am still scratching my noggin over Playmates, their second album from 2018. It’s never quite clear what they’re doing, or what we’re hearing.
Well, let’s look at the facts…Triple Music is kind of a “lockdown album”, because the group were thwarted in their plans to go to Japan in 2020, where they hoped to collaborate with Akiko Nakayama. This astonishing Japanese creator has developed his own unique approach to painting – he does it live before an audience, using digital projection and a system that creates ever-changing colours and shapes, that respond to external stimuli in a way that Cezanne and Monet never dreamed of. Nakayama built a “colour-organ system” called Fluid2wave for this practice, which he calls “Alive Painting”. From this I get some sense of why our Scandinavian threesome were keen to work with him. Instead of doing it live, Nakayama sent them a “video triptych” – presumably a multi-screen projection experience of some kind – and the players used this as the basis for a musical performance. I expect we can see details from this visual feast on the panels of this digipak – blue abstract swirls representing a 21st-century digital update on a psychedelic “liquid light” show so prominent in the 1960s in both popular music and avant-garde performance milieux. As far as I can make out, Muddersten used it as a score, working very spontaneously in real time.
So far so good. Muddersten are credited with their usual instruments (Volden – guitar, Olsson – piano, Taxt – tuba), but there’s also a lot of electronics on the album – more specifically, loops, prepared tapes and sound events, and turntabling. These are called “sonic readymades” in the press notes, and we’re given to understand they could be read as corresponding to the objects and shapes in Nakayama’s alive-paintings. Even more specifically, Henrik Olsson (the turntabler in the group) used the notorious Fyloop LP from 2013, a completely bonkers release that contains 360 locked grooves, provided by Fylkingen artistes. Adventurous indeed to introduce such an unpredictable, risky device into live performance. In the finished results, Muddersten exhibit remarkable restraint and subtlety, creating very gentle undulating shifts in tones and textures; the “minimalist” tag doesn’t quite cover it, as there is a lot going on here, just rather slowly and methodically. “Have no plan and stick to that, no matter what”, is one guiding principle articulated in words by Olsson; “greater flexibility in the musical practice” is what they strove for.
This is in response to what Henrik Olsson perceives as a wider ever-growing international crisis, and not just related to the Covid epidemic (see above), but threats to the climate and the biosphere, “an overwhelming amount of obstacles”, as he stoically puts it. How can improvisation respond to this? Olsson is clear: “we will all need to be flexible improvisors and find a way to cope with…our own abusive behaviour,” he warns us, advocating humility, acceptance, and an adaptational approach to the rigours of life. Gotta admire the clarity of Olsson’s statements, but I’m not feeling much clarity in the grooves of Triple Music, where the main takeaway is “life is uncertain”, and the response to this uncertainty appears to be taking baby-steps and making incremental, provisional moves towards the unknown (or away from it, perhaps). In short, Muddersten don’t really exhort us into direct action, rather invite further reflections, pauses, and guesses. To learn more, bend an ear to Triple Music. From 2nd Feb 2024.