Stina Stjern
Vivid Peace Restored
NORWAY SUSANNASONATA SONATA090 LP (2024)
Excellent album here of experimental sounds made with cassette tapes.
Norwegian genius Stina Stjern comes to us from a rock and jazz pathway – she sang in Supervixen (an all-women four piece rock group from Oslo) and studied the latter genre in Trondheim, and before this record she released Days Like Waves in 2011 and Kap Herschell in 2018, but both of these (never heard them) may have been continuing the indie rock thing to some extent. Vivid Peace Restored has been made from recycled cassette tapes (including found tapes and recordings of her own voice) and as such, it would probably bring nods of approval from Mark Vernon and Felix Kubin, to name but two – although Scott Foust is one who made a plausible claim for Mark E. Smith’s uncanny skills with cassette tape art in the 1980s, as evidenced on the LPS Grotesque and This Nation’s Saving Grace.
Some takeaways about Stina Stjern’s approach – she uses every possible form of distortion (tape hiss, wobble, wrong speeds, playing backwards) to create this “intentional blurring” effect, in which she invites us to immerse ourselves and lose our way; she refuses any kind of “hierarchy” in her selections and edits and collages, regarding every sound as a sign of equal value; and lastly, she was very fulfilled by the practical hands-on side of handling tape materials, which is likened here to the art of handwriting. This last aspect resonates most strongly here in TSP mansions…about time we saw a return to tangible objects instead of living inside the virtual world of the hard drive, preset sounds, and workstation edits…plus, this old codger would welcome a return to hand-written letters (preferably with a fountain pen) as an antidote to text messages and emails. The press blurb is quite right to refer us back to DIY cassette tapes and bedroom experiments of the 1980s, often claimed as a “golden period” for radical free music.
What I’m also digging on today’s spin is Stjern’s gentleness, her lightness of touch…she’s not aggressively repurposing her sources, nor making deliberately jarring juxtapositions, nor trying to make some goal-oriented point about experimentation, but rather bringing out the nuances and character of the chosen sounds, within each magical and expressive miniature. It seems she brings deep intuition and empathy to her tape loops and Walkmans, plus oodles of spontaneous creation, with highly rewarding results. We might also point out that Susanna Wallumrød, fellow Norwegian, not only assisted with the recording and production of this splendid release, she also released it on her own Susanna Sonata label…I see she has been well represented on the Rune Grammofon label for over 20 years and must investigate further…even the mastering for this LP was done by a woman, confirming the welcome colonisation of avant-garde music production in a continuing effort to restore gender balance…very high recommendation for this exceptional record…from 05/02/2025.