VA: Music for Tape/Band-Musik from Sweden/Aus Schweden/från Sverige (Caprice)
Purchased used at Jerry's, I think.
I ran my randomizer/limiter programming and came up with: KLM, vinyl. I decided it wasn't fair to leave out complications from the mix, therefor this qualifies as M.
Anyway, for the 3-10 people who actually read this blog (hi Dave, hi Jason) and care, I've been taken out of commission by a virus for most of the past week. Tuesday afternoon I was standing in my living room and realized instantaneously, "I'm really sick." Tuesday night was among the most awful nights I can remember, never sleeping for more than 10 minutes at a time, alternating between fever sweats and teeth-chattering chills, and on the edge of hallucination. (At least I was spared nausea). And the music that kept returning to my mind? The most recent Brown Angel album that was the subject of a previous post. I had been listening to it in the gym the day before, and pieces of it stuck. Will that album now be the soundtrack of the memory of my illness? I don't know, but I was obsessing a bit on things I had written that didn't satisfy me, and I might return to it for a redux post in the near future.
Now that it's more than four days later, I'm mostly better. Walking the neighborhood earlier today, I found myself fatigued very easily, so step by step.
I came across this LP and remembered liking it. I'm inclined to collect LPs of old school electronic music. Even if the results aren't are polished as can be produced today, I like the "sweat" on them.
I have not heard (or don't remember hearing) of any of these composers before: Sten Hanson, Leo Nilson, Arne Mellnäs, Bengt Emil Johnson, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Jan W. Morthenson. In many ways that's exciting, at least if the work is good, which in this case I would say it is. It also seems poignant to hear these composers whose work stands toe-to-toe with many of the great RTF (France) and WDR (Germany, just to be clear) artists, and I know nothing about them at all besides this LP. At least we have this.
With one earlier exception, the works date from 1969-1971 (the LP was released in 1973). The emphasis tends to mostly on musique concrète techniques, sounds derived from acoustical sources and manipulated/assembled through recording techniques. Some of the pieces cross over into poetry and sound poetry.
Sidebar: pure forms of musique concrète still are being created, but the idea of dogmatically creating in this style is old fashioned. Still, it was one of the things I felt necessary to teach to my university students because almost none of them knew what the term meant. All this access to information but so little intellectual curiosity sometimes. I know it was my job to help fill in those gaps and inspire creativity, but it felt like talking to a brick wall sometimes.
Interestingly, both sides close with entirely electronically-generated works. The album concludes with Jan Morthenson's "Ultra". The notes state that he was the first Swedish composer to realized a computer generated work (in conjunction with the engineer), and that this piec is a further development of that material. I take that to mean this is also a very early computer generated work. The effort behind this must have been immense.
I have enough of these old electronic music collections, I need to make a mental note of trying to remember these names. Who were these guys? (No women I'm sorry to say.) Only one of them might still be alive. Did they have national reputations? What is it to be known as a composer in Sweden?
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