Released 1978, recorded at the start of the 1970s. Give it a listen, it's immense
What blows my mind is that by the time this came out, Sven had turned his Bäck to the Future and gone back to the traditional composerly palette of orchestra, choir, etc
So many avant-gardists of the post-WW2 surge into the electronic and tape-music unknown did this coming-home drift back to the acoustic. Nono, Ann Southam, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Lansky, Stockhausen to a large extent...
It's like a film maker deciding to go back to black-and-white. Or to forego sound, revert from talkies to silents.
But perhaps they felt that electronics had been taken as far as they could.... or that something of the human touch had been lost.
Well, some who dabbled, gave up very quickly - Ligeti, Penderecki, Takemitsu - feeling that it was tonally impoverished or unwieldy.
Perhaps most mystifying of all to me is the gentleman who did it just the once, superbly, creating what might be on some days my favorite piece of tape-music: Henri Sauguet.
"Aspect Sentimental" appeared on this landmark compilation
But once was enough for Henri
Back to Bäck...
Confusing matters, Fylkingen, the Swedish label that put out Sven-Erik Bäck's Electronic Music, put out another album called Electronic Music eight years later, by Pär Lindgren. Also worth your ear time.
In the gap - which could be as much as 14 years, given that the Sven-Eriktronica was recorded in the early 70s - "this kind of thing" has got a lot more crisp and spatialized. I'm not sure if it's made digitally but it certainly feels like it.
I'm impressed but I don't like it nearly as much as the Bäck or the Sauguet era work which is much blurrier and ethereal.
I wonder if the difference between Bäck and Lindgren ere loosely corresponds to the Mark Fisher distinction between eerie and weird.
The Sventronica edges into formlessness, recedes from our touch, is gaseously ghostly - it's eerie
The Lindgren is fully formed in its strangeness, an alien object, starkly contoured, at once obtrusive and opaque, dropped into our reality from "outside" - it's weird.
Lindgren's repertoire of shredding, contorting, torsioned and toroid-al, rubbery-squeaky sounds remind me a bit of SOPHIE - which complicates the claims of futurism, given the at least 30 year gap between "Houdinism" and "Faceshopping".
I guess the future is unevenly distributed, or it is lagged... so many things the IDM-ers in the 90's, or the conceptronica-ists, in the '10s, did, were actually preempted by the post-WW2 vanguardists or the early digital composers of the 1980s.
But then Lindgren too went back to using the orchestra, on Fragments of a Circle, 1992
I remember reading in Harold C. Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers that electronic music was initially heralded by some composers as the hammer of a sonic revolution, but the excitement subsided very quickly, with electronic sounds becoming seen as just another instrument to use. That might be the healthiest perspective to have. So the idea that a "reversion" to acoustic sound represents a step back in time strikes me as the wrong analogy. Or would a poet writing a sonnet after a lengthy piece of free verse be rejecting modernity, instead of simply following the muse to where it took them?
ReplyDeleteI don't know a whole heap about poetry and poetry critics, but i should imagine most of them would regard doing a sonnet in this day and age to be a throwback, a reversion to a historically obsolesced form.
DeleteAn example of what you are talking about - one step back, two steps forward or maybe two steps sideways - in terms of composers is Stravinsky, who had a phase mid-career where he went back to baroque ideas, the sonata form, etc not simply replicating but trying to do new things within them and deconstruct them. This was sandwiched between a period of savage energy (Rite of Spring, Russian folk influences) and a later period of stringent modernism (serialism). Both the wild pagan irrationalist energy phase and the baroque-y neo-conservatism were harshly criticized by stringent modernist Adorno.