Impressive set by the Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund which he calls A Walk Into The Future (AURORA RECORDS ACD5116). Yes, it’s orchestral, played by the Oslo Philharmonic and conducted by Olari Elts, but it’s enhanced with gobs of synth playing, guitar feedback, and samples.
We never heard Øyvind Torvund before, but I’m forming the impression he’s a fellow with a good sense of fun – eager to blend all sorts of unlikely musical styles, genres and modes in his vats. I’m reading here that he’s a fan of noise music, Norwegian folk, and even incidental snatches of theme tunes he might hear on the telly. If he were a gallery artist, there’d be large paintings with bright colours and appealing shapes. Tuning into the twelve parts of ‘Sweet Pieces’, originally composed in 2016, there’s evidently an interest in the so-called “exotica” genre, which also happens to be on his list. I mean the easy-listening music made in Hollywood in the 1950s, by Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny, Les Baxter and others, but at first gazoon these ‘Sweet Pieces’ sound just like … Disney. A Walt Disney soundtrack that never was, where all the changes in dynamics and tempo and the clever short phrases might have been made to accompany the action in a full-colour animated cartoon from around the time of Disney’s Cinderella. Øystein Moen contributes the synth additions here – in fact the full instrument credit list is mini-moog, Prophet, and mellotron – but they’re merely decorative, part of the overall pastel-coloured saccharine experience. If the plan was to incorporate electronic experimentation into the fabric, I’m not feeling it.
I’m getting a shade more of the rough edges I seek from ‘Archaic Jam’, which makes a feature of the feedback guitar playing of Jørgen Træen, melting his sound into the orchestral stabs and additional sampler bursts. If you were hoping for a Hendrix-inspired moment when you saw the word “feedback”, you may need to manage your expectations a bit; you’ve never heard such tidy, well-mannered guitar noise. I see now looking into the back catalogue that Træen has already collaborated with Øyvind Torvund in 2019 on something called The Exotica Album for Hubro – haven’t heard it, but it indicates they might have form in their shared love for Living Stereo and 1950s hi-fi LPs from Capitol. ‘Archaic Jam’ isn’t as chaotic as I was hoping for, but you’ll never get bored by its restless ever-shifting surfaces. For some reason it reminds me of a Dr Seuss drawing – impossible landscapes with not a perpendicular line in sight, all strange curves and undulations.
Also here is ‘Symphonic Poem No. 1: Forest Morning’, where once again the Disney motif is inescapable – it’s both Fantasia and a Silly Symphony, filtered through ambitions to pass for Delius, with its pseudo-pastoral themes. By this point I am finding the rich sound of this album somewhat cloying, but there’s no denying Torvund’s flair for trying out odd combinations, and stitching together his short musical fragments into some kind of coherent shape. ‘A Walk Into The Future’ from 2019 might be his signature piece in that regard; it’s both a jigsaw and a fairground ride of musical pastiche. Again the electronic effects are little more than decoration, and sometimes verging on the comical, but the composer exhibits considerable elan and attention to detail.
In all, this falls far short of the kind of thing Sam Pluta has been doing in New York with much more rigour, and I get the impression Torvund, by contrast, isn’t a very enthusiastic modernist, or a serious experimenter. But it is a fun record. (05/02/2025)