Interview and reportage by Cameron Pagett. Additional photos by Kasia Zacharko.

A liberal array of red and blue light columns course across a very crowded floor. The beginning hours of morning have fallen over the city and again I am perched at the lighting desk in Volume KBH. Another year, another chapter in diy-organiser Fast Forward’s history unfolds in a smokey warehouse. The speakers are loud, it is nearing halloween and many of the patrons arrive and move with the music in outlandish costumes bringing an extra flair to the scenery and special ambiance this Copenhagen-based collective is known for.

Standing in the dj booth, tenderly and carefully managing the controls stands almost certainly Copenhagen’s most recognized techno-dj, Courtesy (Najaaraq Vestbirk), founder of the now closed renown local label Ectotherm and current creative director of new project based label Kulør. Music swirling like a ravishing tailwind after a hurricane, bodies swaying in the heat, she is taking the audience through a joyous and energetic set full of feeling, emotions and dancing bliss. The lights begin to beam as fire strobes reaching down and the familiar nostalgic and present melody from Kulør’s first release and Schake track “Automated Lover” fills the room.

From the lighting desk situated near the ceiling I feel as if the room is standing still. The mood is strong in this track, it’s the type of song that makes one feel as if you can see time unfold in slow motion while your feet move a kilometer per second. The strobes turn to glorious pillars of lightest blue and drape over the walls romantically, Courtesy sways her head rhythmically from side to side residing in her element, hands on the controls and heart seeping into the speakers. She is in a special place.

It’s the day before the online release of what looks to be a marker in the Copenhagen techno community. We are in Nørrebro Parken. New creative label Kulør, headed by Najaaraq Vestbirk, will be releasing its first project in the form of a compilation record featuring many of the most interesting local names in the 140 bpm scene. The sun is shining, and Najaaraq, my friend and I are all seated in the sun’s rays making the most of the mid-fall solar energy. We have gathered to talk about the first Kulør compilation, the new label, life stuff and the larger creative platform she now enjoys. Coffee on my lap, the sun as our guide she’s been busy this morning. Running a label, curating sets and travelling the world can certainly be hectic, yet she reflects a concentrated and focused demeanor on what she is doing and the projects she is working on.

“This label is a lot more work then Ectotherm,” she admits. “I am very dedicated to this project, it’s a big priority to me. It won’t only be about releasing music, there are a number of projects I will be revealing soon.” The sun glares into her eyes, and all but a squint crowning the halo of her temples distracts from a persistent gaze with her charismatic jawline bent on continuing a pioneering and prominent role in the local techno Community. “The point with this release was kinda to make a statement with the sound and particular scene in Copenhagen that is very different, but this is orientated to here. Everything we do in Kulør is going to be different projects.” She has big visions for the label which according to her will grow in diversity over time and cater to many artistic pursuits other then music as well. “This will not be another 140 bpm techno label. Every project will have a world on its own and that can mean a lot of different things.”

Listen to the full album here. Text continues below

Earlier in the year Ectotherm, one of the first major techno labels in Copenhagen run by both Najaaraq (Courtesy) and Sara (Mama Snake) closed abruptly with nearly no warning. The announcement was a small shock to many in the community and an event that many did not see coming.

“When Sarah decided she didn’t want to do Ectotherm anymore and we discontinued the company I was pretty devastated honestly, it wasn’t my decision.” Pausing for words, she peers down the street into a patch of new buildings. There is a gentle wind and a light ambiance from children playing and people passing. After a moment she regroups, “when I thought about it I realized that for a long time I had ideas about projects I wanted to do … things I couldn’t do in the context of Ectotherm and this was a perfect opportunity for me to act out things that weren’t possible there. Sometimes things that feel tragic or difficult end up being good creatively. It’s the start of something new. A lot of the ideas I didn’t have the right platform for, and I do now.” It’s apparent in her demeanor that the end of Ectotherm was difficult to take and hard for her to understand. So much effort and sentiment was tied up in it, and as difficult as it was for fans of Ectotherm it’s plain to see that it affected her as well. Labels come and go, and in the current climate the conception of what it means to be a label in the creative world is quickly morphing and changing.

Kulør? It’s a nice word to be sure with a positive and ambiguous meaning. It’s also a fairly bold move to use a Danish word as the title for a label directly associated with Copenhagen’s most Internationally visible techno faces. In the past, many other labels and artists have opted for English titles out of necessity and to boost accessibility. Danish is a small language spoken by a handful of people globally, featuring its own unique set of alphabet characters and no shortage of pronunciation quirks. While it may feel natural domestically, internationally it’s a small anomaly and something others may start getting used to as Danish artists continue to move and impress on the global stage. When asked about the move she remains coy, and encourages me not to look into it much, “It is a way of saying colorful in Danish and a lot of the projects we are working on are not necessarily colorful in a literal way, it’s more a statement in personality. I think it’s a word that fits well in the context.”

There is a glint of spontaneity growing in her hazel eyes, reticent still about the dismantling of Ectotherm with also a hint of precise yet wild excitement for the future. “I like to work with people, and I like to work in many different ways. I love to play music, I love the interaction on the dance floor and the creativity in that, but I also need to work closely with people.” She reflects, “I love Ectotherm, but there was a recipe in the way that releases looked, the way we did the artwork … Kulør is not like that, it’s like a living organism that can grow and morph into things that I can’t even imagine now.”

If Ectotherm is no more, it certainly helped provide a pathway for a large amount of exposure in the electronic landscape. While many of Copenhagen’s prominent techno dj’s and producers continue to grow their names and influence in many of the traditional powerhouse techno cities spread across Europe, the road for Courtesy has begun to reach beyond the more established scenes and into lesser explored corners of the techno world. From forays into North America and even Oceania and Brazil, the exploration of the global scene would seem to be magnified. For Najaaraq, it can seem difficult to gauge the more conventional sounds far abroad, but with the near constant travel she remains charmingly optimistic about reception to her musical style.

“I like to play techno that makes people smile, stuff that has a little humor in it or is emotional, possibly heartbreaking. People have said it’s nice to get a change up from dark dystopic sounds. I feel like my sets are incredibly well received, peoples reactions are positive so I don’t even know if what I play is so different.” On the same token and as a pioneer in her own city she is equally keen to point out the growing desire for more homegrown scenes across the Atlantic bringing their own take on an existing and progressing world of electronic sound. With a sparkle in her demeanor she remarks, “I love meeting these young die hard people who are just trying to start something in their own city and also there are some quite good dj’s over there (Western Hemisphere). I feel like the music I’m playing works, I haven’t experienced any place in the world where it didn’t work. I can vary in tempo, I am a fairly eclectic techno dj.”

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Eclectic and successful, time may have forgotten, yet it still remains fresh in her memory the challenges she has faced and the things she feared could hold her back in the beginning. One of a growing number of advancing dj’s who do not produce original compositions, it wasnt so long ago that she felt like an outsider in a producer dominated techno landscape. “I used to feel really pressured about it.” She says with a hint of residual stress, “I felt like a massive imposter because I wasn’t producing music. When I got into Red Bull Music Academy they knew I hadn’t produced music on my own. I was open about that in my application, but I felt that somehow they would “find out” or something. It was still in that time where people close to me would tell me I wasn’t going to make it if I didn’t make music.” Her mood shifts, and begins to drift into something far more personal as passion seems to emote from her core about a subject that has provided much growth and no small share of personal discomfort. “I love doing musical projects, I think it is the most fun thing in the world … I’m contributing and creating attention and I don’t feel like an imposter anymore, but I certainly used to. That was coming from myself and also from people close to me. They were telling me I had to do this thing, which actually wasn’t my thing.”

With a breath she admits that hours in front of a computer and a fetish for drum machines aren’t exactly her, and is quick to point out that she is not only a dj, but a creative with her own label, history and name that continues to bring exposure to her locality. Times are changing and with machinery and software advancing in an increasingly fluid music environment the producer and the pure dj continually inhabit the same sphere in the performance sector. “I think finally we are past the point where people will tell young dj’s that they have to make music.” She emits, “I feel there are enough dj’s who are doing just fine and doing things very well.” Indeed, more than ever, perfomers are finding new ways to relate and entertain a musical audience, and her sentiment feels weighted in past insecurities, yet enlivened by an exciting changing of the tide in perception of what it takes to make it in the electronic music world. “One path is not the only path for everyone else, my special thing is not producing music, its other things and I’m never gonna say never … in a couple years I might fall in love with drum machines, but its not in the cards now.” (laughs)

Along with the recognition of becoming known in the music world for something new and unique comes a different attention attached to her projects and future goals. While at the beginning of her career certain things may have felt out of reach, Najaaraq feels that she has obtained a feeling of increased equilibrium and an exciting avenue of further possibilities for creativity that comes with more resources. “I’ve had many projects in the past and now I have some money to do stuff on another level. I have the opportunity to work with people like Spine Studio that are wanting to be involved with us because we are on a different (larger) level. My creative partners in this project are very strong, and it’s fun to this time be a creative director in a company I am passionate about with what I feel is a dream team.” Proclaiming confidently and full of purpose she relays, “I like to work with people that don’t say no. I feel like anything is possible and most of the time when nothing is being done its because no-one is taking initiative. I think most people are scared of doing stuff, and I feel like I only live once, why shouldn’t I do whatever project I’ve been doing.”

Pausing for a minute to reset my recorder, our thoughts converge on a new group of buildings dotting the border of Nordvest just north of Nørrebro station. We remark on the changes in the area and it brings us to the exciting and constantly moving path of music in the Copenhagen scene. With 140 bpm becoming a characterising norm in the locality, a fresh new crop along with an established selection of artists continue to push things into new and remarkable territories. With her busy schedule and constantly evolving path at the controls I wonder with a feeling of related synchronicity while gazing upon the enclave of recent architecture how she relates to her own home scene now that she spends an increasing amount of time away from it.

Squinting defiantly into rays of direct sunlight she offers a varied and interesting explanation, “When I come home I go straight to Percy Records and I sit in the back there and I work, everyone comes in and I kinda get the catch up on everything that’s happening. That is my main access to the scene.” Pausing slightly, with a calmness descending upon her she heads into more cozy territory, “Nikolaj Jacobsen (Sugar, Fast Forward) is one of my best friends, I am very close with everyone we released on Kulør. I’m always in touch with Troels Hass (Percy Records) who is a friend of mine and Smokey, I feel like I get updates about a lot of things through them.” Apart from friends and a penchant like many locals to dwell in Percy Records she remains optimistic and also proud of the growth domestically, “I get to hear a lot of music in the early stages I have this music and I get to present it to people through my sets. I feel very blessed to be able to do that. I am sitting on a pot of gold. It looks like Copenhagen’s thriving. There are so many talented producers here, so many dj’s, so many new crews, looks like things are going well.”

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A few weeks later at Volume, the red and blue lights climb and orb across a concrete garden of ravers under LED lights, there is a bit of a lull echoing across the melodic portion of “Automated Lover.” The time in the track (around 6 minutes) has come when you seem to feel time connect your present situation with all your future possibilities and past experiences. With a sultry beat, and a light, yet laser sharp dimensional ambiance its small wonder it was one of the tracks first sampled to the public in the maiden musical release of Kulør. Dancing, bursting and beaming like a newly formed ball of fire conjured by a festive Najaaraq Vestbirk with one hand on the controls, the other rested at her side she surveys what the fast Copenhagen techno scene has grown into. A glint of disco lights flickering in her eyes, it’s been awhile from her early days with Mama Snake releasing then little known first timers like Rune Bagge and Martin Schake. It’s a different atmosphere now, and one filled with unprecedented growth and a greater musical and artistic mobility between local artists and crews then what could have been projected only a few years ago. Presenting still new material as she has from the start, it feels as if she could jump from the dj booth and into the sprawl of raving dancing limbs.

During our talk in the sun at Nørrebro Parken a few weeks before the Fast Forward Halloween Party she offered a thought that now feels so much more poignant and compelling then when first spoke. “You have to find your special thing as an artist,” she states “Whatever makes you special. If it’s making music that is unbelievable, if it’s your ideas, your ability to finish projects, being really good at Instagram, the way you dance when you dj, or your activism … whatever is your special thing you work on that. If you are constantly looking at what everyone else is doing and try to mimic that you won’t be happy, your going to be insecure because your competing not with your own strengths but with what everyone else is good at.”

Back on the floor beaming in the booth, diminutive yet firm in presence, you begin to feel what she means. A new label and a progressing era swirl around her at a rapid pace. What remains constant is Courtesy’s capacity to present and interpret creative material while making new roads of possibility for herself and those around her. “I feel I owe her everything,” a former Ectotherm producer admits, “in a way she started all of this.” The track wanes and she transitions from “Automated Lover” into a drop and the start of a new track that hits the floor with a delicate fury and I can’t help but feel that something magnificent has just happened. A full floor, a new project, a new track and an artist loving every moment of it. Headphones on and heart bursting through the speakers, she is home, operating still in her own place.

Info: Kulør 001 came out in October 2018. The 2LP-compilation features Schacke, Sugar, IBON, Repro, Rune Bagge and Funeral Future. Future announcements will take place on the label’s Facebook-page.

Af Alexander Julin

Selskabet Infinite Waves har længe været en fremtrædende figur indenfor den danske eksperimentelle musik med et mangefold af båndudgivelser såvel som enkelte LP’er over de seneste år. Specielt de seneste års udgivelser har haft et stilistisk slægtsskab, idet de på forskellig vis har arbejdet inden for og undersøgt ambient-musikkens potentialer.

En bølgende og ofte æterisk fornemmelse, der meget generelt kan siges at gøre sig gældende for ambientgenren som sådan, går igen på størstedelen af selskabets udgivelser, såsom Soft Armours “Multi Terrain”, Birchs “Doldreams” eller Futuras “Live at La Blanca“, for blot at lave nogle enkelte nedslag. Det samme kan siges om selskabets nye udgivelse, “Still Water”, der ligesom sin forgænger “Underwater Gestures” (2017) er en tredobbelt båndkompilation med seks forskellige, fortrinvist danske artister, nye såvel som velkendte Infinite Waves-navne.

I anledning af den nye kompilation bringer vi et interview med Infinite Waves’ bagmand, Bjarke Rasmussen, om udgivelsen, der tæller Kai Oke, Grøn, Miro, Antti Tolvi, C.R. Hougaard og Birch.

P/A: “Still Water” byder bl.a. på to nye Infinite Waves-navne Miro og Kai Oke. Hvem står bag dem, og hvordan adskiller de sig i din optik fra de øvrige artister på kompilationen?

BR: “Kai Oke er en duo bestående af Astrid Fabrin og Sofie Birch (som også medvirker på compilationen). Men hvor Birch normalt arbejder med enkelte numre, tager hun sammen med Astrid på nogle lidt længere rejser.

Bag projektet Miro er Mikkel Rørbo. Han har tidligere udgivet musik på labels som Posh Isolation, Total Black, Janushoved osv. Men dog i en helt anden grøft. Jeg har fulgt ham i mange år, hvor han har arbejdet med de ret grove genrer gennem projekter som Alleypisser og Knækkede Stemmer. Nu har han bevæget sig væk fra båndoptageren og den ødelagte elektronik og over i et mere digitalt univers, der passer virkelig godt ind i Infinite Waves’ univers. Bare frasen “Care is Important”, som Miro-samlingen på udgivelsen også hedder, rammer virkelig en følelse af noget, jeg med det samme kunne identificere med Infinite Waves.”

P/A: “Still Water” er den fjerde kompilation på Infinite Waves. Hvordan repræsenterer den Infinite Waves profil, som den har udviklet sig over årene?

BR: “En af de ting, som har ændret sig over årene, er, at Infinite Waves nu hovedsageligt arbejder med lokale artister. Jeg synes, det giver meget bedre mening at arbejde med folk, der på den ene eller anden måde kan mødes, spille koncerter sammen og være en del af det samme miljø.

Rent musikalsk er der også blevet strammet op. Det er f.eks. længe siden, jeg har udgivet rock. Det er, som om Infinite Waves er begyndt at tage mere form. Jeg ved ikke, om det er farligt, for da jeg startede, havde jeg en klar ide om, at jeg ikke ville være et label, der kun udgav musik med sorte og hvide covers. Jeg følte, at jeg var nødt til at træde ved siden af for at bringe noget nyt til bordet. Ikke i den forstand, at det var uden for min personlige smag. Det er kun min personlige smag, der sætter grænserne i det her foretagende. Men i den forstand, at det godt måtte skille sig ud og nødvendigvis ikke skulle ligne en garderobe fra én, der læser for mange modeblade.

I dag er det helt bestemt blevet mindre spraglet, og den grafiske linje er også blevet mere ens. Men jeg føler stadig, at jeg arbejder med et rimelig bredt udvalg af artister, der ikke nødvendigvis ligner hinanden, selvom det nok er strammere sammensat i dag, end da jeg startede. Og jeg er stadig ikke bange for at lade min indre trang til new age komme til udtryk.”

P/A: Du medvirker bl.a. selv på kompilationen under dit alias Grøn. Hvordan vil du sige, at din egen lyd har ændret sig, og hvordan kommer det til udtryk på de fire numre på “Still Water”?

BR: “Jeg startede Grøn for lidt over seks år siden. Dengang arbejde jeg udelukkende med båndloops på 4-spors-båndoptager. Med tiden blev det mere og mere hardware, jeg arbejdede med. Nu er jeg vendt tilbage til 4-spors-båndoptageren, dog med en ny viden om komposition. Den unøjagtighed, man opnår, når man arbejder med et analogt medie som bånd, tiltaler mig en hel del og hjælper mig med at give lidt slip og lade nogle ting være op til tilfældighederne. Mediet i sig selv opløser lyden på en helt særlig måde, men samtidig også kompositionen.”

P/A: Udgivelsens første og sidste nummer af hhv. Kai Oke og Antti Tolvi er begge omkring 20 minutter, mens numrene imellem er markant kortere. Har der ligget nogle bestemte overvejelser bag kronologien på udgivelsen?

BR: “Både Kai Oke og Antti Tolvi arbejder med lange kompositioner, så det gav mening at lade disse to indkapsle udgivelsen. Men når man udgiver en næsten to timer lang compilation, er det ikke tænkt, at man nødvendigvis skal lytte til den samlet. Så tanken er, at hver båndside har hver sin identitet, men sammen fungerer de som en helhed.”

P/A: Vand og havet er et gennemgående tema i de seneste tre kompilationer. På hvilken måde afspejler kompilationens titel det musikalske indhold på “Still Water”?

BR: “Vand har altid inspireret mig og har på mange måder de samme kendetegn som den musik, jeg udgiver. Derfor er det et passende emne. Ligesom navnet Infinite Waves – jeg har altid tænkt “waves” som både lyd og vand, måske et møde mellem begge emner. Til en vis grad forstår jeg mig godt på, hvad begge kan indeholde, og samtidig er jeg også klar over,  at begge dele indeholder ting, jeg aldrig kommer til at forstå. Der er frekvenser, jeg ikke kan høre, og dybder under vandet, jeg aldrig får at se.”

Info: “Still Water” udkom som 3xCS på Infinite Waves i oktober og er desuden tilgængelig på de forskellige streamingtjenester.

An evening w Graham Lambkin, Vilde Tuv & Paisajes at Mayhem. 29. november 2018 – Reportage af Claus Haxholm, foto af Yuko Zama www.erstwhilerecords.com

Aftenen startede med Paisajes, der betyder landskaber – og navnet både som klang og betydning passer ganske godt til en ret retrospektiv form for ambient musik – akustiske pianoer, der bliver afspillet over skyer og tåger af støj og mere harmoniske flader. Fladerne bestod dog vist mere af rumklang end synths, der var iblandet lave field recordings, eller måske var det støj fra båndmaskinen. Det var svært at regne forholdet mellem computeren og båndmaskinen ud. Et relativt minimalt set-up med en bærbar og en båndmaskine, begge af flot design. Jeg troede først, der var en skarp konceptuel tilgang til deres forhold, men ret hurtigt viste det sig at være mere poetisk baseret. Det, jeg havde sværest ved i den første koncert, var Paisajes’, i mangel på bedre ord, “underdanighed” i forhold til ambientmusikkens arv.

Jeg havde desværre meget, meget svært ved ikke at tænke på en vis brite, som havde en anden form for narrativ/samfundsrelateret struktur at lægge det hele på. Det manglede lidt, og jeg havde håbet, at der så ville være et tankespil mellem de to teknologiers møde, og det skete også til sidst, da båndmaskinen – utilsigtet, går jeg ud fra – begyndte at brumme, samt at computerens lyd begyndte at fade ud.

Jeg tror ikke, det var planlagt, og ellers var det en pointe, der kom meget sent i forløbet, men lige dér begyndte der at ske noget. Der kom en skuren; et forhold, som stak i flere retninger eller i det mindste imod sig selv; noget, der kunne undersøges. Og så stoppede koncerten, så altså ikke meget Erstwhilesk auditiv materialeforståelse, og fred være med det, om end jeg savnede det lidt. Meget fin og rolig opstart på aftenen, der i øvrigt var ret stille og rolig hele vejen igennem med stolerækker, te og vafler.

Graham Lambkin startede med at fortælle, at til koncerter plejede han normalt kun at gøre én ting, men at i aften ville han gøre tre forskellige/adskilte ting. Han startede med en tekst – et digt kan man vel næsten kalde det – fremført med hans typiske dybe rolige røst, som snart gik over i at blive mere og mere opløst, som rene lyde, uden dog at blive direkte improv-ekspressionistisk. 

Så skulle der rykkes på sten, primært mursten, og samtidig begyndte en optagelse af Graham og en ven på en strand. Man hørte bølgerne et sted derude, naturen. Ligeledes hørte man tydeligere, når der trådtes på sand, og at der blev rykket rundt på sten, i den ene virkelighed (vores) blev stenene rykket rundt på en dynamisk og ekspressiv måde, nærmest kantet og demonstrativt, mens de på optagelsen syntes at have et lidt mere tilfældigt og luftigt smidende liv – ligesom i teksten forinden blev der talt om bevægelse, mest igennem skibet som metafor og som et reelt fartøj, bølger og steder. En art associative samtaler.

Mens optagelsen kørte, lavede Graham forskellige handlinger. En flaske blev gledet på vægge og andre objekter, der blev rykket på flere sten, og så tog han en 12-strenget guitar frem og trommede på (guitar-)kroppen – og fra at have ligget og vugget imellem poetisk og en eller anden form for kommenterende adfærd blev koncerten herfra mere og mere poetisk og centreret om klangmaterialet (og altså ikke, at det ikke havde handlet om det før, men der var også andre lag i spil på en anden måde); at det pegede mod et trancemoment, er måske så meget sagt, men det er heller ikke helt ved siden af. Trommen på guitarkroppen med den runde dumpende klang blev ved og ved, og der begyndte at blive rykket lidt på strengene, men fokus var klart på det rytmiske element. Afslutningsvis landede vi med stemmen igen, som kom ind i den sidste del, hvor guitaren blev stillet pænt tilbage igen, og der var mere luft til stemmen i rummet. 

Til trods for at flere af elementerne i sig selv virkede lettere akavede (dog rimelig intenderede), må jeg bare sige, at det blev fremført med en ærlig jordbundet attitude, der trak det væk fra en kunst-magisk højstemthed til en ganske særlig britisk type eksperimental musik-attitude, jo ofte blander den matte domestiske gråhed med vis lune, vilje og poetik. Det gjorde, at det bare virkede – altså at vi alle, som publikummer, ville det her, hvilket også gjorde, at “koncerten” eller “performancen” (alt efter hvor man er i sit liv) bar mere præg af en mærkelig slags læringtime. 

Det handlede for mig på mange måder mere om forståelse (altså som “tolerance” og ikke analyse) end om et hermetisk lukket tidsligt objekt, som vi kunne stå og kigge på og nyde og så gå hjem igen.

Ikke at det ikke var æstetiske handlinger, men der var altså også andre ting på spil, som gjorde oplevelsen helhjertet og problematisk; der var noget, der blev spurgt om, kommenteret og ikke mindst forhandlet. Rigtig, rigtig dejligt at se og være med til.

Sidst, efter et par vafler og at snakken havde gået, spillede norske Vilde Tuv en mærkelig koncert. Altså, det var ikke mærkeligt som sådan. Det var et klart og utvetydigt koncertformat med Vilde Tuv på gulvet med sin computer, guitar, fløjte og mikrofon og et lille fint tæppe, og var der også lidt stemningspynt/talismaner/support-objekter? Nå, men det mærkelige bestod måske mere i den meget personlige og ret harske blanding af new age-musik og 90’er-trance-mellemstykker. To typer musik, der har haft revival de sidste par år, hvoraf den sidste nok ikke helt er brændt ud endnu, og dermed fungerer disse genregreb som kulturforbrugerens halvkolde rester. En slags zombie-kannibalistisk musik? Men ud over at have den funktion, som jeg er i tvivl om var bevidst eller ej, så virkede det hele også stærkt sentimentalt – hvilket lydmaterialet taget i betragtning nok ikke var så mærkeligt.

Men også fordi Vilde Tuv synger sange over på. Sange, der tydeligvis betyder noget for hende og er følelsesladede på en måde, der gør, at jeg det meste af tiden stod og lige dele grinte, tænkte og fældede vemodstårer for så at tænke og smile af det meget umage par, der udklang foran mig. Fin, fin musik, om end igen lidt mærkeligt forbundet med Parsajes’ retrospektive holdning, tør man sige “undersøgelse”? Nok ikke rigtigt, men dog med meget mere på spil, både personligt (hvilket ikke nødvendigvis er bedre i sig selv) men også igennem dét, at hun potentielt i hvert fald bruger sin egen historik, nok ikke så meget i forhold til new age-musikken, men jeg kan snildt forstille mig, at der har kørt halvgamle trance-baskere på en storebrors værelse eller noget i den dur, som på den måde er kommet ind og blevet en del af cocktailen Vilde Tuv.

Tja, måske en lidt grov analyse og lytning, men der var absolut en eller anden semiotik, der blev spillet med, og i kombinationen med følelsesladede sange blev det en ret dejlig/mærkelig/uforløst rebus, man kunne stå tænke lidt over. 

Alt i alt en virkelig god aften, og noget, som jeg synes fortjener også at blive kommenteret, er selv arrangementet, som på en sjov måde var som selve aftenen – fuld af minder, mere avantgardiske tendenser, smuk og mærkelig i sin sammensathed.

Vi skal efterhånden ret langt tilbage, før jeg husker et program, der var været så uensartet, uden at der gik idioti i den. Samtidig passede alting nydeligt sammen, alting lettere ambient osv., men bevæggrundene for hver af de optrædende virkede (jeg ved jo ikke, om de reelt er) himmelvidder fra hinanden. Så dermed vil jeg bare sige til Alfredo Benutti og Frans Ibon: Supergodt set og booket, sat sammen og lavet og ryddet op (håber jeg!). Det var fornemmelsen af en venners aften, som formåede at række længere ud end vennekredsen, og så synes jeg, det er helt fint at bruge dem, man kender og holder af.
Hvis jeg skriver flere koncertanmeldelser, tror jeg, at jeg vil begynde at se meget mere på programkurateringen; det gav den her aften mig i hvert fald lyst til med sin lige dele intellektuelle og poetiske balancekunst.

Info: Graham Lambkins seneste udgivelse udkom på det amerikanske eksperimentallabel Erstwhile den 24. november, “Green Ways” af Áine O’Dwyer/Graham Lambkin.

By Javier Orozco

I spent the last 14 months without a stream-on-demand music service, which unsurprisingly affected how and what I listened to throughout this period. It created a sensation of being behind, records I read about that I did not get to listen in their entirety or that had to be pulled from other sources (a YouTube ad-blocker turns out to be the greatest of allies). My year was not truly defined by music released this year and now that’s about to fade it feels as if I spent most of my mornings listening to Hiroshi Yoshimura.

I appealed to the radio, not in the traditional sense and surely in a very specific manifestation: NTS. An endless portal to musical exploration that offers a restricted sense of agency, but also of community and chance.

Thanks to their InFocus series I truly paid attention to David Sylvian, and discovered a vocal version of Sakamoto’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” under the title “Forbidden Colours”. Lee Hazlewood arrived through these same means. Como La Flor focuses on bolero, cumbia and salsa, a gateway towards the music heard at my grandparent’s home. Surely there were some classic NTS tunes as Hafi Deo (a Charlie Bones Show classic) and Shadows From Nowhere (which I plucked form Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s monthly show). There was something thoroughly enjoyable about diminishing my control over what I listened.

Since this feature is about 2018, a year that felt like walking on a tightrope without an umbrella, here are a couple of records that captured some of fissures of these 365 days. Paraffin (Backwoodz Studioz) is Armand Hammer’s third record. The hip-hop duo comprised of Elucid and Billy Woods (who have respectable catalogues of their own) released another triumphant record that grasps the current grimness and unrest. Ka paired with Animoss as Hermit and the Recluse for Orpheus vs. The Sirens (Obol for Charon). Animoss’s rich and eerie production offers a soulful and rusty canvas for the veteran rapper to paint his sooty narratives, a blend of equal parts hoodlum tales, greek mythology and street wisdom.

Af Mikkel A. Kongstad

2018 har været et markant år for musikken. Et år med en himmelråbende diskrepans mellem den faktiske virkelighed og det, jeg i den mediebårne, politiske verden efterhånden har lært at forstå som den “virkelige virkelighed”: den virkelighed, som man subjektivt fremkalder gennem sin egen politiske observans for derefter at kunne tilbyde rigtige løsninger på den virkelige virkeligheds problemer. Det går bedre end længe for musikken. Både nationalt, internationalt (og her snakker vi ikke kun i Vesten), hos kvinder, hos mænd og så videre. Især hvis man kigger på den kunstneriske kvalitet af musikken for 2018, også selvom vi er så langt inde i et neo-liberalistisk, kapitalistisk mareridt, at det er et udtryk for noget så farligt som smagsdommeri at forholde sig til kvalitet. Og dét vel at mærke i en tid, hvor der nærmest ikke er et tv-medie i verden, der kan formidle indhold eller et emne uden at gøre det igennem en konkurrence.

Nå, men diskrepansen. Det er den, jeg forholder mig til lige nu. 2018 har været et markant, musikalsk år.

Imens musikformidlingen hos flere af de etablerede medier (de landsdækkende aviser såvel som DR) efterhånden syntes at være beskåret drastisk, har landets kulturminister varslet yderligere nedskæringer på den regionale spillestedsstøtte. Og uden at gå ind i en større debat om spillestedsstøtten, så virker denne omprioritering som endnu en spareøvelse, der rammer den danske musikformidling. Det er her, man fristes til at indskyde, at det kan da også virke relativt ligetil for en dansk kulturminister at konstatere, at der ikke er nok gang i den danske musikscene, hvis man bare åbner for DR eller et af de landsdækkende dagblade for at finde … ja, hvad? Noget interessant om musik? Glem det.

I år får du fra denne signatur 200 af verdens bedste plader, kassettebåndsudgivelser, trippel-album, mini-album og så virkelig meget videre samlet på en årsliste for 2018. Det er nødvendigt. Både at blande formaterne og ophav (nationalt som internationalt, kvinder som mænd, techno som jazz, etc.) sammen, men også at forsøge at dokumentere og videreformidle noget af al den grænsenedbrydende, fællesskabsskabende og globale kultur, der florerer på musikscenen lige nu. Det er nødvendigt, fordi det fordrer en fordomsfri og åben lyttetilgang til materialet. Dét at nøjes med en top 10 eller 20 vil spille ind i en altmodisch, kanoniserende musikformidling, der på sigt er med til at skabe altoverskyggende fortællinger om gamle dinosaurer, der åbenbart nærmest på egen hånd skabte og definerede musikhistorien, imens en potentielt mængde relevante revolutioner ville blive efterladt i skyggen og dermed være pokkers svære at opdrive for fremtidens nysgerrige ører, der vil søge tilbage i historien for at finde glemt guld.

Lad os endelig omfavne og dokumentere den umådeligt store verden omkring os, imens den stadigvæk er her. Præcis sådan er tanken bag filmprojektet og soundtracket “Small Island Big Song”, der er dedikeret til at fortælle historierne om, og ikke mindst dokumentere og videreformidle, de sang- og musiktraditioner, der forbinder Oceaniens mange små udrydningstruede øer og befolkningsgrupper. Samme ræsonnement ligger bag musiker og producer, Laurent Jeanneaus (aka King Gong), “Music of Northern Laos” og “Music of Southern Laos”, der består af næsten et helt årtis arbejde med feltoptagelser i fjerne kroge af Laos, hvor Jeannau forsøger at indsamle og videreformidle den immaterielle arv, der ligger i de lokales traditionelle sange, der aldrig tidligere er blevet optaget og indtil nu kun er gået videre i arv til de lokale.

Også i år har kvindernes manglende repræsentation på festivaller og spillesteder været genstand for debat. Igen synes en af de mest slående misforståelser i hele debatten at være misforholdet mellem virkeligheden og “den virkelige virkelighed”. Ved en nærmere optælling består denne top 200 stort set af lige dele mænd og kvinder, så ja, der kan muligvis stadigvæk være et godt stykke vej til at få endnu flere kvinder ind i musikverdenen, men vi behøver til gengæld ikke bekymre os om at finde forbilleder og fantastiske kvindelige musikere. For de er der i den grad. Hvad enten du er til jazz, free jazz, pop, techno, kunstkollager, noise, soul, avantgarde, psych, spiritualistisk musik, minimalisme, afro-pop etc., så er det alt sammen på denne top 200. Fra danske CTM, Clarissa Connelly, Astrid Sonne, Puce Mary, Tanja Vesterbye Jessen, Nanna B., Signe Dahlgreen og Frk. Jacobsen med hver deres helt eget musiske sprog til internationale navne som Park Jiha, Jessica Lauren, Lucrecia Dalt, Deena Abdelwahed, Fatouma Diawata, Cucina Povira, Hiro Kone, Kate NV, Nubya Garcia, Kelly Moran, Rosalía og sågar Mariah Carey, der endelig fik hevet sig tilbage til at fokusere på musikken og måske ligefrem har bedrevet et af sine fineste, mest sammenhængende album nogensinde med dette års “Caution”.

Årets plade, der efter min mening må betegnes som en ny dansk milepæl inden for sangskrivning, er fra Cæcilie Trier aka CTM, der med den mesterlige “Red Dragon” gav os en æterisk balancering af sangskrivningen som værende noget, der eksisterer i et drømmestadie, hvilket tillader, at man konstant er i forhandling med forskellige konkrete og abstrakte faser uden at miste sit melodiske anker og sit øjeblikkelige nærvær. Årets næstbedste kommer fra det fremragende portugisiske label, Príncipe, der igen i år viste vanlig høj kvalitetsbarriere inden for feltet “inverteret traditionel portugisisk folklore og rytmik konverteret til spraglede, dansegulvsudvidende og globale techno-størrelser” med udgivelser fra bl.a. P. Adrix, DJ Lilocox og Nídia. Men det er Niagaras mildt abstraherende meditationsmusik/fourth-world synth-psychedelia, hvor fremtidens endnu ikke etablerede minder flyder sammen fortidens ikke helt fortabte ditto, på albummet “Apologia”, der løber med mest fortjent opmærksomhed i år. Årets tredjebedste er Yoruba-præsten Abraham “Aby” Rodriguez, der med projektet Okonkolo og pladen “Cantos” formidlede et sjældent tiltrængt skud religiøs musik i en tid, hvor verden synes styret af dét kaos, ukontrollerbar kapitalisme skaber. “Cantos” er brygget på ekstatisk religiøs musik og spirituelle, transatlantiske fællesskabsrytmer, der fortæller historien om Yoruba-folkets vandring (flugt) fra Nigeria videre til Cuba og Caribien for til sidst at lande i bl.a. New York, hvor “Aby” Rodriguez administrerer arven og fortællingerne om, hvordan befolkningsvandringer og de religiøst fordrevnes flugthistorier er med til at danne en global samvittighed og et nødvendigt fællesskab i musikken.

Derudover afspejler årets top 200 Londons jazzscene, hvor et af de helt store, bemærkelsesværdige album er den britisk-indiske trommeslager og percussionist, Sarathy Korwars, tredobbelte liveoptagelse “My East Is Your West”. Her fejrer Korwar sit britiske visum ved på kærlig vis at minde det Brexit-ramte land om dets kolonimagts wrongdoings gennem en revitalisering af den britiske indo-jazz-fusion-historie, som Korwar så i øvrigt parrer med den spirituelle jazz. Et forbløffende godt og suverænt udført match mellem protestmusik og altruistiske alliancer på tværs af ophav og tradition. Ligeledes er der politiske under- og overtoner at finde i DJ Khalabs afro-futuristiske opkog af techno og jazz, “Black Noise 2048”, samt på Sons of Kemets magtdemonstration “Your Queen Is a Reptile”. Londons jazzscene har efterhånden etableret sig som et af de stærkeste narrativer i musikkens verden for tiden, og der er virkelig meget guld at finde fra selskaber som Gearbox, Back Focus og On The Corner, men det er efterhånden også en fortælling, der begynder at give et større hyr med at navigere i kvaliteten af de mange outputs. Hvilket f.eks. – desværre – betød, at Ill Considereds stunt med nærmest at udgive en plade hver anden måned i 2018 gjorde det svært at adskille og filtrere de mange indtryk, som bandet ønskede at give. Samme uheldige tendens er ved at tegne sig for Kamasi Washington, der gerne må udgive et enkelt album næste gang.

Der var til gengæld 200 procents træfsikkerhed hos Chicago-jazzen i form af Jaime Branchs impro-synth-avantgarde-duo Anteloper og Makaya McCravens hovedværk, “Universal Beings”, hvor forskellige strømninger fra diverse jazzscener og aktører blev flettet sammen til et imposant værk af sammenflettende beat-meditationer over ny jazz.

Derudover skal der gives et stort skud ud til den københavnske technoscene, hvor Lyra Valenza står som en af årets helt store åbenbaringer, imens den danske improrock-/whatever-duo H E X fik pustet tiltrængt liv og energi ind i, hvad end vi efterhånden forstår ved konceptet live-rockmusik. En sidste salut går ud til Ugandas Nyege Nyege Tapes, der fik samlet op på Jako Marons politisk sitrende og inverterede electro-mayola “Les Experiences Electro Maloya de Jako Maron”, ligesom de præsenterede uafrystelige momenter med Bamba Panas “Poaa” og Kadodis hypnotiserende sammenfletninger mellem antik og futuristisk beatmekanik.

2018 er et markant år. Det er ikke sikkert, alle indtrykkene er bearbejdet helt endnu, men nu har jeg i al fald samlet 200 plader – alle størrelser er lige store – ind på en årsliste, der forsøger at afspejle den enorme diversitet, trodsige energi og det høje kunstneriske niveau, der eksisterer på såvel dansk som internationalt niveau lige nu. Noget ligger uden for radaren og den “virkelige virkelighed”, hvor det tilsyneladende står langt værre til, end hvad faktisk er tilfældet.

Årets internationale og nationale udgivelser 2018

CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Niagara “Apologia” (Principe)
Okonkolo “Cantos” (Big Crown Records)
Jako Maron “Les Experiences Electro Maloya de Jako Maron” (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Tal National “Tantabara” (Fat Cat Records)
H E X “BLDG” (Wetwear/Momeatdad Records)
Clarissa Connelly “Tech Duinn” (Brystet)
Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
Anteloper “Kudu” (International Anthem)
Kate NV “для FOR” (Rvng Intl.)

Jonny Greenwood “Phantom Thread” (Nonesuch)
Sons Of Kemet “Your Queen Is A Reptile” (Impulse!)
Eli Keszler “Stadium” (Shelter Press)
Frk. Jacobsen “Thin Dirty Sticks” (Eget Værelse)
Ricarda Cometa “Ricarda Cometa 2” (Nefarious Industries)
Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver” (Petrola 80/Black Opal)
V/A “Music of Northern Laos + Music of Southern Laos” (Akuphone)
Makaya McCraven “Universal Beings” (International Anthem)
Arp “Zebra” (Mexican Summer)
DJ Khalab “Black Noise 2048” (On The Corner)

Sarathy Korwar “My East is Your West” (Gearbox Records)
Fahmi Mursyid “Tanah Merah” (Ultraviolet Light)
Park Jiha “Communion” (Tak:til/Glitterbeat)
Ramzi “Phobiza vol. 3: Amor Fati” (FATi Records)
Iku Sakan “Life Signs in Staccatissimo” (Open Hand Real Flames)
Tom Richards “Pink Nothing” (nonclassical)
Nídia “Nídia E Ma, Nídia E Fudida” (Principe)
Jessica Lauren “Almeria” (Freestyle Records)
Rezzett “Rezzett” (The Trilogy Tapes)
Altin Gün “On” (Les Disques Bongo Joe)

Kali Malone “Organ Dirges 2016​-​2017” (Ascetic House)
SVIN “Virgin Cuts” (Momeatdad Records)
Skee Mask “Compro” (Ilian Tape)
Hailu Mergia “Lala Belu” (Awesome Tapes From Africa)
Yngel “Indonesia” (Insula Music/Abstract Tits)
Daughters “You Won’t Get What You Want” (Ipecac)
Lucrecia Dalt “Anticlines” (Rvng Intl.)
V/A “Small Island Big Song” (Not On Label)
Saloli “The Deep End” (Kranky)
Gabor Lazar “Unfold” (The Death of Rave)

Fatima “And Yet It’s All Love” (Eglo Records)
Aisha Devi “DNA Feelings” (Houndstooth)
Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)
Emanative “Earth” (Jazzman)
Fatoumata Diawara “Fenfo” (Shanachie Records)
Bamba Pana “Poaa” (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Sunwatchers “II” (Trouble In Mind)
Szun Waves “New Hymn to Freedom” (Leaf)
Tanja Vesterbye Jessen “Feeling Love” (Cat Corp. Box)
Eleventeen Eston “At the Water” (Growing Bin Records)

Tonga Boys “Vindodo” (1000HZ)
Laurence Pike “Distant Early Warning” (Leaf)
Danielle Dahl “Loosening Orion’s Belt” (Abstract Tits)
Laurel Halo “Raw Silk Wood Uncut” (Latency)
Autechre “NTS Sessions 1-4” (Warp Records)
Sarah Davachi “Gave In Rest” (Ba Da Bing!)
Hizuru “Hizuru” (Musilogue)
Cucina Povera “Hilja” (Night School)
Prins Emanuel “Diagonal Musik” (Music For Dreams)
Deena Abdelwahed “Khonnar” (Infiné)

Kokoko “Liboso” (Transgressive Records)
Dinosaur “Wonder Trail” (Edition Records)
Kamaal Williams “The Return” (Black Focus)
Embassador Dulgoon — Hydrorion Remnants” (Nonlocal Research/Psychic Sounds)
Jung An Tagen “Agent Im Objekt” (Editions Mego)
Objekt “Cocoon Crush” (Pan)
Grouper “Grid of Points” (Kranky)
Koray Kantarcioglu “Loopworks” (Discrepant)
Mark Fell Performed By Drumming Grupo De Percussão – “Intra” (Boomkat Editions)
Rosen & Spyddet “Memoria” (Janushoved/Posh Isolation)

Hiro Kone “Pure Expenditure” (Dais Records)
Binker and Moses “Alive in the East?” (Gearbox Records)
JPEGMAFIA “Veteran” (Deathbomb Arc)
Elysia Crampton “Elysia Crampton” (Break World Records)
Bixiga 70 “Quebra Cabeça” (Glitterbeat)
Hieroglyphic Being “The Red Notes” (Soul Jazz Records)
Steven Julien “Bloodline” (Apron Records)
Kenneth Knudsen/Oliver Hoiness “November Tango” (Stunt Records)
Xenia Xamanek “Envase” (Anyines)
Alison Cotton “All Is Quiet at the Ancient Theatre” (Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records)

Dustin Wong “Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu” (Hausu Mountain)
Ammar 808 “Maghreb United” (Glitterbeat)
The Dwarfs of East Agouza “Rats Don’t Eat Synthesizers” (Akuphone)
V/A “Embrace” (Petrola 80)
Ill Considered “Ill Considered 3” (Ill Considered Music)
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)
V/A “Kadodi” (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Tatu Rönkkö “Spheres” (Sonic Pieces)
Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, The Alchemist “Fetti” (Jet Life Recordings/ESGN Records)
Tony Allen/Jeff Mills “Tomorrow Comes the Harvest” (Blue Note Lab)

Rosalía “El Mal Querer” (Sony Music)
Puce Mary “The Drought” (Pan)
Orchestra of Spheres “Mirror” (Fire Records)
SOPHIE “Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” (Transgressive)
Shelter “Profondeur 4000” (Growing Bin Records)
Kelly Moran “Ultraviolet” (Warp Records)
RP Boo “I’ll Tell You What” (Planet Mu)
Fofoulah “Daega Rek” (Glitterbeat)
Pusha T “Daytona” (G.O.O.D Music/Def Jam)
Dengue Dengue Dengue “Semilero” (On The Corner)

Jlin “Autobiography: Music From Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography” (Planet Mu)
700 Bliss “Spa 700” (Halcyon Veil)
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids “An Angel Fell” (Strut)
Auntie Flo “Radio Highlife” (Brownswood Recordings)
Vanishing Twin “Magic and Machines” (Blank Editions)
Ratgrave “Ratgrave” (Apron Records)
Stine Janvin “Fake Synthetic Music” (PAN)
Joe Armon-Jones “Starting Today” (Brownswood Recordings)
Daniel Avery “Song for Alpha” (Phantasy Sound)
Eiko Ishibashi & Darin Gray “Ichida” (Black Truffle)

Aqueduct Ensemble “Improvisations On an Apricot” (Last Resort)
Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada & Friends “FRKWYS Vol. 14: Nue” (Rvng Intl.)
Adrian Younge “Voices of Gemma” (Linear Labs)
Renick Bell “Turning Points” (Seagrave)
Nat Birchall “Cosmic Language” (Jazzman)
Vadou Game “Otodi” (Hot Casa Records)
Helena Hauff “Qualm” (Ninja Tune)
Marie Davidson “Working Class Woman” (Ninja Tune)
Khruangbin “Con Todo El Mundo” (Night Time Stories Ltd)
Gaye Su Akyol “Istikrarli Hayal Hakikattir” (Glitterbeat)

Hampshire & Foat “Nightshade” (Athens Of The North)
Speaker Bite Me “Future Plans” (PonyRec)
Sonido Gallo Negro “Mambo Cósmico” (Glitterbeat)
Josephine Foster “Faithful Fairy Harmony” (Fire Records)
The Internet “Hive Mind” (Columbia)
Clarice Jensen “For This From That Will Be Filled” (Miasmah)
Low “Double Negative” (Sub Pop)
Teresa Winter “What the Night is For” (The Death Of Rave)
Imarhan “Temet” (City Slang)
Georgia Anne Muldrow “Overload” (Brainfeeder)

Smerz “Have Fun” (XL Recordings)
Signe Dahlgren “Kunki Snuk” (Insula Music)
Ash Koosha “Return 0” (Realms)
Kadhja Bonet “Childqueen” (Fat Possum Records)
Caterina Barbieri “Born Again in the Voltage” (Important Records)
Repeater “Athrá Titim Gach Rud” (Not On Label)
Nanna B “Solen” (Jakarta Records)
Suba “Wayang” (Offen Music)
Jessica Moss “Entanglement” (Constellation)
Pink Siifu “ensley” (Not On Label)

Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange “Selftitled” (Wax Museum Records)
Insólito UniVerso “La Candela Del Rio” (Olindo)
Ras G & The Afrikan Space Program “Stargate Music” (Leaving Records)
Gia Margaret “There’s Always Glimmer” (Orindal Records)
Colin Fisher “v le pape” (Geej)
Sudan Archives “Sink” (Stones Throw)
Felicia Atkinson “Coyotes” (Geographic North)
Lolina “The Smoke” (Not On Label)
Mary Lattimore “Hundreds of Days” (Ghostly International)
SØS Gunver Ryberg “Solfald” (Noise Manifesto)

Kemialliset Ystävät “Siipi Empii” (Leaving Records)
Lucy Railton “Paradise 94” (Modern Love)
Jorja Smith “Lost & Found” (Famm Limited)
M Geddes Gengras “Light Pipe” (Room 40)
Eszaid “Eurosouvenir” (Collapsing Market)
The Necks “Body” (ReR Megacorp)
Johann Johannsson “Mandy” (Invada/Lakeshore)
Jerusalem In My Heart “Daqa’iq Tudaiq” (Constellation)
Gazelle Twin “Pastoral” (Anti-Ghost Moon Ray)
Quin Kichner “The Other Side of Time” (Monofonus Press/Astral Spirits)

Maria W. Horn “Kontrapoetik” (Portals Edition)
DJ Nigga Fox “Crânio” (Warp Records)
Mako Sica & Hamid Drake “Ronda” (Feeding Tube Records)
Angelique Kidjo “Remain In Light” (Kravenworks)
Asmus Odsat “Ecstatic Half Truth” (FALK)
Black Spirituals “Black Access/Black Axes” (Sige Records)
Noordra “Pylon II” (Sige Records)
Jimi Tenor “Order of Nothingness” (Philophon)
Mariah Carey “Caution” (Epic)
Emma Jean Thackray “Ley Lines” (The Vinyl Factory)

Kamasi Washington “Heaven and Earth” (Young Turks Recordings)
Jon Hassell “Listening to Pictures” (Ndeya)
Mabuta “Welcome to This World” (Inpartmaint)
Sinjin Hawke & Zora Jones “Vicious Circles” (Planet Mu)
тпсб “Sekundenschlaf” (Blackest Ever Black)
Palmbomen “Center Parcs” (Dekmantel)
Melaine Dalibert “Musique Pour Le Lever Du Jour” (Elsewhere)
Teyana Taylor “K.T.S.E.” (G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam)
Karou Inoue “Em Paz” (Groovement Organic Series)
Chongo “Visions in Non-Retrograde” (Cosmic Compositions)

Jean Grae & Quelle Chris “Everything’s Fine” (Mello Music)
Heroin In Tahiti “Casilina Tapes 2010|2017” (Boring Machines)
Praed “Doomsday Survival Kit” (Akuphone)
No Name “Room 25” (Not On Label)
Moses Boyd “Displaced Diaspora” (Exodus)
Neneh Cherry “Broken Politics” (Smalltown Supersound)
Lotic “Power” (Tri Angle)
Eartheater “Irisiri” (Pan)
Kali Uchis “Isolation” (Universal)
Toshio Matsuura Group “LOVEPLAYDANCE” (Brownswood Recordings)

Nubya Garcia “When We Are” (Nyasha)
Brigid Mae Power “The Two Worlds” (Tompkins Square)
Yonathan Gat “Universalists” (Glitterbeat)
Black Milk “Fever” (Mass Appeal)
Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet “Landfall” (Nonesuch)
Gacha Bakradze “Word Color” (Lapsus)
Sarah Renberg “Night Sands” (Antiquated Future)
Julia Holter “Aviary” (Domino)
Web Web “Dance of the Demons” (Compost Records)
Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma “Limpid As the Solitudes” (Shelter Press)

Info: Mikkel Kongstad er skribenten bag ‘Det Glemte Guld’ og Dagens Album.

Årets bedste genoptryk, antologier og nyfundne, fortabte optagelser i 2018 – udvalgt af Mikkel A. Kongstad. Billede af Robert Cox aka. Rimarimba.

“It’s hard to know if it’s some sort of large trend that will eventually die down, or if more people than ever (undoubtedly with the help of the internet and social media) are just starting to discover these many hidden worlds of music, and decide to crawl down the rabbit hole with the rest of us freaks.”

Sådan sagde Jed Bindeman fra Freedom To Spend om genudgivelseskulturen i et interview med P/A’s Alexander Julin tidligere på året. Midtimellem tiltag som Record Store Day og deluxe edition, malingsplettede vinylgenoptryk af den gamle rock-kanon, som virker til at være den etablerede, kommercielle branches mest sikre vej til fastholde magtandele på musikudgivelsesfronten (og dermed historiefortællingen), dér er et selskab som Bindemans eget Freedom To Spend et af mange vægtige eksempler på små selskaber, der har valgt at tage kampen op mod den klassiske og ikoniserende musikformidling til fordel for en mere dybdegående, horisontudvidende fortælling om alle de glemte mini-revolutioner og forsømte musiske eksperimenter fra den nærmeste fortid, der i høj grad synes at gå i forhandling med nutidens musik. Det handler om et opdyrke musikkens g(l)emte verdener og bringe dem ind i en meningsfuld relation til såvel nutidens som fremtidens historieskrivning.

På Passive/Aggressives top 50 over de bedste genoptryk, antologier og nyfundne, fortabte optagelser, finder du nogle bud på de mest overraskende, nysgerrige og komplet egenrådige lydverdner, der i år blev bragt ind i den store fortælling om musikkens mange små revolutioner. Her kan man med begejstring notere sig, at to danske selskaber har etableret sig som indflydelsesrige aktører på området for genudgivelser og vægtig, historieudvidende lydarkæologi.

Frederiksberg Records, der også stod bag bl.a. Gunner Møllers “Stoned” og Carsten Meinert Kvartets “To You”, udgav tidligt på året Suzanne Menzels “Goodbyes & Beginnings”, lavet i samarbejde med Klaus Schønning. Pladen udkom i sin tid kun på et private press, da ingen selskaber tilsyneladende var interesseret i Menzels kompromisløse mix af psykedelisk folk og sværmerisk new age-pop, men som i dag lyder forbløffende meget som netop en plade, der ville udkomme i 2018. Ligeledes har Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi (IDL) markeret sig i år med flere bemærkelsesværdige fund fra den nærmeste fortid i form af glemte fortællinger om eksperimenterende dansk kompositionsmusik og avantgarde lydkunst via Henning Christiansens “Satie i Høj Sø” og Per Nørgårds “Expanding Space”, men det er måske antologien “Danske Båndamatører – Danish Tape Amateurs 1959-1976”, der må tage prisen for mest imponerende udgivelse fra IDL i år. Her dokumenterer IDL et glemt stykke af dansk lyd- og musikhistorie, hvor amatører eksperimenterede med båndoptageren til at skabe alt fra obskur elektronisk musik til lydcollager i deres fritid, og antologien giver derfor også et unikt indblik i en tidlig demokratisering af lydteknologien, hvor amatørmusikere med båndoptageren som instrument, kunne skabe og komponere i hjemmet og dokumentere det, uden nødvendigvis at få adgang til de etablerede kanaler eller fornemme studieindspilningsmuligheder.

På den internationale scene er det labels som Habibi Funk, Freedom To Spend, Stroom, Music From Memory og Analog Africa, der har sat sig i spidsen af den musikalske historieomskrivning med en række relevante og horisontudvidende udgivelser af glemt materiale. Alle udgivelser med en væsentlig ny fortælling og ofte en særlig lyddimension at føje til den musikhistorie, der i disse år synes at være mere og mere forhandling med sin fortid, men på en anden og mere inspirerende, udviklende måde, end for eksempel tilfældet var med 00’ernes retromaniske rock, der blot virkede som en direkte kopiering af fortidens dyder uden tilføjelsen af nyt liv.

Hvadenten det er via obskure vestlige popsensationer, forsømt europæisk eller amerikansk minimalisme, eller det er endnu et vægtigt indspark fra den ikke-vestlige musikscene, så tegner der sig efterhånden et billede af en verden udenfor den kanoniserede populærmusik, når det kommer til innovation og frygtløse genremutationer. Og så var det også i år, at vi fik adgang til glemte optagelser fra nogle af jazzens største navne som John Coltrane og Charles Mingus, hvor især sidstnævnte fik en bemærkelsesværdig tilføjelse til kapitlet om hans 70’er-år, der ellers er betragtet som Mingus’ svageste og mest – ja – sure, fordi han angiveligt aldrig helt forstod sig free jazz og avantgarde-jazzen. Den holdning viser sig på “Jazz in Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery/46 Selden” ikke helt at holde stand, da vi her oplever Mingus netop tage favntag med samtidens free jazzede strømninger på en række intenst sydende live-optagelser fra Chicago i starten af 70’erne, hvor Mingus gjorde comeback efter flere års pause.

Af andre bemærkelsesværdige bidrag fra den nærmeste fortid, der gjorde indtryk 2018 og sandsynligvis vil indgå i meningsfulde relationer med nutidens og fremtidens musik, finder man obskur popmusik i form af bl.a. Music From Memorys antologi “Uneven Pates: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991” og Soundways’ ditto “Onda de Amor: Synthesized Brazilian Hits That Never Were 1984-94”. Men der er også forudgribende eksperimenter i form af Strooms udgivelsestrilogi fra den belgiske kultgruppe Pablo’s Eye, hvor albummet “Bardo For Pablo” viste, at vi ikke bør være færdige med at afdække 90’ernes glemte grænseland mellem psykedelisk techno og global ambient. Ligeledes var genoptrykkene af dele af Haruomi Hosonos bagkatalog, hvor “Philharmony” må betegnes som den mest markante, med til at åbenbare markante potentialer mellem avantgarde, kubistisk techno, synth-pop og weird exotica, skabt på baggrund af banebrydende arbejde med sampling, loops og improvisation.

Året 2018 gav os det længe efterspurgte genoptryk af Raul Lovisoni og Francesco Messinas okkulte minimalisme og tidlige elektroniske kompositioner på “Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, Dennis Youngs biorytmiske new-age for marimba og elektronik på albummet “Quest”, den belgiske art-rock-gruppe Aksak Maboul’s fortrinlige jonglering af kompositionsmusik som en evigt muterende, rastløs størrelse på “Un peu De L’Ame des Bandits”. Ligesom vi endelig fik fysiske udgaver til menneskepenge af blandt andet Tita Duval Y Nuevo Ritmo De Bobby Reys outrererde hippe-psychedelia møder cumbia på “Cumbias Internationales”, de ikoniske library music udgivelser fra KPM Series, vidunderligt øm japansk yacht-rock på Hiroshi Satos “Orient” og psykedelisk, ritualistisk dronermusik fra østrigske Bird People på “Water Buffalo”.

Derudover markerede 2018 sig også med en endnu en række unikke genreinnovationer og dybt rørende rituelle klange fra det afrikanske moderkontinent i form af blandt andet Stella Chiweshes “Early Singles”, Dur Dur Band of Somalias “Vol. 1 & 2”, Ekuka Morris Sirikitis “Ekuka”, Gyedu Bley-Ambolleys “The Message”, Mushapata’s “Saba Saba Fighting” og på antologien “Two Niles To Sing A Melody: The Violins and Synths of Sudan”. Vi fik ritualistisk nærvær og omsorgsfuldhed fra Sosena Gebre Eyesus, og ikke mindst spirituelle lydsider fra Australien, New Zealand og Bali i form af antologien “Midday Moon: Ambient and Experimental Music From Australia and New Zeland” og Saron Luang Alit Semara Dahana’s “Suara Semara”.

Og på trods af – eller måske rettere i relation hertil, er det dog alligevel Freedom To Spends imponerende arbejde med genudgivelsen af hele bagkataloget plus et ikke tidligere kendt album “Light Metabolism Number Prague” fra den minimalistiske outsider Rimarimba, der tager prisen som årets bedste. Robert Cox aka. Rimarimbas bagkatalog er en kraftigt underkendt tilføjelse til historien om minimalisme og ambient. Bragt hertil 2018 fra 80’ernes DIY-scene som en legesyg og eventyrligt hjemmebrygget syntetisering af vraggods fra den formodede ideologisk allierede, Moondog, og så Steve Reichs mønstermusik, samt ambient á la Eno. Genudgivelsen af Rimarimba Collection er et vægtigt argument, der bør minde os alle om, at der i selv de potentielt mest syntetiske, plastiske sider af den frie og under radaren-udforskende del af DIY-historien stadigvæk kan findes vidunderligt anakronistiske systemer og glemte lydverdner til fremtidig inspiration.

1. Rimarimba “Rimarimba Collection” (Freedom To Spend)
2. V/A “Danske Båndamatører 1959​-​1976” (Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi)
3. Charles Mingus “Jazz in Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery/46 Selden” (Strata/BBE)
4. Saron Luang Alit Semara Dahana “Suara Semara” (Insitu Recordings)
5. Suzanne Menzel “Goodbyes And Beginnings” (Frederiksberg Records)
6. Henning Christiansen “Satie i Høj Sø” (Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi)
7. Dur Dur Band of Somalia “Vol 1 & 2” (Analog Africa)
8. Ekuka Morris Sirikiti “Ekuka” (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
9. Raul Lovisoni / Francesco Messina “Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo” (Superior Viaduct)
10. Stella Chiweshe “Early Singles” (Glitterbeat)

11. Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Kesh” (Freedom To Spend)
12. Sosena Gebre Eyesus “Sosena Gebre Eyesus” (Little Axe Records)
13. Dennis Young “Quest” (Daehan Electronics)
14. V/A “Onda de Amor: Synthesized Brazilian Hits That Never Were 1984-94” (Soundway)
15. François Bayle “Electrucs!” (Transversales Disques)
16. Gyedu Blay Ambolley “The Message” (Analog Africa)
17. Per Nørgård “Expanding Space” (Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi)
18. Giuliano Sorgini “Africa Oscura” (Four Flies Records)
19. V/A “Midday Moon: Ambient and Experimental Music from Australia And New Zealand” (Bedroom Suck Records)
20. Michele Mercure “Beside Herself” (Rvng Intl./Freedom To Spend)

21. The Entourage Theater and Music Ensemble “Ceremony of Dreams, Studio Sessions And Outtakes, 1972-1977” (Tompkins Square)
22. Aksak Maboul “Un Peu De L’Ame des Bandits” (Crammed Discs)
23. Troupe Ecole Tudu “Oyiwane” (Sahel Sounds)
24. Joe Hisaishi “Kisshō Tenyo” (Lag Records)
25. Pablo’s Eye “Bardo For Pablo” (Stroom)
26. V/A “KPM Reissue Series” (Be With Records)
27. Ayalew Mesfin “Hasabe “My Worries” (Now-Again Records)
28. Haruomi Hosono “Philharmony” (Light In The Attic)
29. Abo Obaida Hassan “Abu Obaida Hassan & His Tambour: The Shaigiya Sound of Sudan” (Ostinato)
30. Mkwaju Ensemble “Ki-Motion” (We Relaese Whatever The Fuck We Want Records)

31. Bitter Funeral Beer Band With Don Cherry & K. Sridhar “Live In Frankfurt 82” (Black Sweat Records)
32. Tita Duval Y El Nuevo Ritmo De Bobby Rey “Cumbias Internacionales” (Vampi Soul)
33. V/A ” Two Niles To Sing A Melody: The Violins and Synths of Sudan” (Ostinato)
34. V/A “Brasil” (Soul Jazz Records)
35. Zamaan Ya Sucker “Exotic Love Songs And Instrumentals From Egypt” (Radio Martiko)
36. V/A “Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991” (Music From Memory)
37. Hiroshi Sato “Orient” (Wewantsounds)
38. V/A “Hafla! “A Rough Guide to Jaffa’s 70’s Sound” (Ha’achim Music)
39. Il Guardiano Del Faro “Oasis” (Time Capsule)
40. Mushapata “Saba Saba Fighting” (Akuphone)

41. Moses Taiwa Molelekwa “Genes & Spirits” (Matsuli Music)
42. Bird People “Water Buffalo” (Ikuisuus)
43. Orquesta De Las Nubes “The Order of Change” (Music From Memory)
44. V/A “The Library Music Film “Music From And Inspired By The Film” (Légère Recordings)
45. V/A “Levanta Poeria: Afro-Brazilian music & rhythms from 1976 “2016” (Jazz & Milk)
46. John Coltrane “Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album” (Impulse!)
47. V/A “Jura Soundystem presents: Transmission One” (Isle of Jura)
48. Shams Dinn “Shams Dinn” (Smiling C)
49. Orchestre Abass “De Bassari Togo” (Analog Africa)
50. Kamal Keila “Habibi Funk 008: Muslims and Christians” (Habibi Funk)

Info: Mikkel Kongstad er skribenten bag ‘Det Glemte Guld’ og Dagens Album.

(c) Alle fotos af Martin Breidahl. København 2018.

Årets 10 mest værdsatte danske LP’er fra 2018 i vilkårlig rækkefølge – ifølge redaktionen på Passive/Aggressive

CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Cæcilie Triers ”Red Dragon” er i høj grad sin egen, og det er umiddelbart svært at pege på noget lignende. Skulle man pege, kunne man pege på Frank Oceans ”Blonde” (2016), der på samme måde kredser om Oceans vokal og også byder på et splintret sangkompleks, hvor det afrundede og færdige kun dukker op i små, søde bidder og viger pladsen for et andet mere rummeligt og broget udtryk. Med markante gæstebidrag fra Coco O., Frederikke Hoffmeier og Soho Rezanejad udspiller ”Red Dragon” sig på et stort anlagt spektrum mellem det enkle og det komplekse – det koncentrerede og det spredte. Det er smukt, imponerende, forvirrende og lidt uhyggeligt. (Morten Hviid Melsen)

Xenia Xamanek “Envase” (Anyines)
Man kunne skrive meget om Xenia Xamaneks konstante udforskning af kunstneriske praksisser og udtryk (Equis, Astrid Sonne Ephemeral, Boujeloud, C.Cell, Af Med Hovedet, Union for Open Vocalism), men hvis man begrænser sig til i år, så udgav hun to glimrende soloalbums. På trods af at “Envase” er udgivet som en souvenir-samling på Anyines, så er den i min bog årets mest visionære værk på dansk jord alene for sit musikalske ‘indhold’. Xenia dyrker som komponist og producer både vokalmanipulationer, synthesizere og maskinel techno, som hun blander med tre-fire optagelser af sin afdøde morfars acapella-sang i et smukt postmoderne minde. (Simon Christensen)

Puce Mary “The Drought” (PAN)
Med sin første udgivelse på det anerkendte Berlin-label PAN har Frederikke Hoffmeier opnået at vise, i højere grad end nogen af de tidligere udgivelser, hvor stort et potentiale Puce Mary-projektet har. Med udgangspunkt i noise og power electronics formår “The Drought” alligevel at vise emotionel tyngde samt kompositorisk og udtryksmæssigt stor diversitet inden for en stadig minimal og stringent palette, som viser, hvor langt Hoffmeier har udviklet projektet igennem årene. (Mikkel Rørbo)

Hjalte Ross “Embody” (Wouldn’t Waste Records)
På “Embody” er den 21-årige nordjyde Hjalte Ross formelt af eget dåbsnavn og åbenlyst af gavn trådt i karakter som singer-songwriter i kraft af en mere essensorienteret søgen og en nedbarberet tilgang til det at skrive sange. Inspirationen fra den engelske singer-songwriter Nick Drake er svær at overse. Både Ross’ vokal og hans arpeggio-prægede spillestil på den akustiske guitar er strøet med adskillige referencer til Drakes særegne fingerfornemmelse for små, raffinerede synkoper i de brudte akkorder, der glimter som små juveler i de aldrig forcerede, men aldeles skønne klangharmonier. (Lasse Skjold Bertelsen)

Rasmus Juncker “Ophold” (Kingdoms)
Rasmus Junckers album, “Ophold”, er én af årets helt store debutant-overraskelser. Foruden den unge elektroniske producer og multiinstrumentalist selv er albummet indspillet af et ensemble, der bl.a. omfatter strygekvartetten Halvcirkel. Med et udgangspunkt i bl.a. den klassiske minimalisme, Gilles Deleuzes læsninger af Immanuel Kant og lyddøde rum, eksperimenterede Juncker med muligheden for at oversætte en fravristelse af sanserne til sin musikalske proces. Dette mundede paradoksalt nok ud i et dragende og sanseligt pirrende debut-udspil, der både fremstår veludført og personlig i sit udtryk. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)
Birk Gjerlufsen Nielsen og Victor Kjellerup Juhls femte udgivelse som Vanessa Amara, “Manos”, er en klar forlængelse af det dvælende udtryk, de tidligere har dyrket på en serie bånd- og LP-udgivelser på posh isolation de seneste år. Det er den samme deformerede klassicisme, den samme elegiske stemning og den samme optagethed af den mekaniske reproduktions fejlbarlighed i form af båndstøj og forvrængning. Som bandets tidligere udgivelser bevæger “Manos” sig i et slags pseudo-sakralt univers, hvor kirkerummets lyde (orgeltoner, rumklang) står i centrum. (Nils Bloch)

Spost “Monkey Face” (selvudgivet)
Kan man kalde Spost et band? Måske ikke. Det er i hvert fald en noget anden lyd end de fleste andre bands, Spost frembringer. Men guitar-tromme-bas-setuppet og frontmand på vokal tegner alligevel konturerne af et band. På “Monkey Face” lyder Spost stadig som Spost. Udgangspunktet er fortsat impro-støj med hoppende, hakkende og larmende guitarfigurer og -flader (ved Claus Haxholm, Jan S. Hansen, Kristian Poulsen og Mathias Sæderup) samt Jonas Okholms strøm af mere eller mindre ituslået sprog i fremtrædende roller. Det afgørende nye er dog introduktionen af trommemaskine i stedet for trommesæt på størstedelen af pladen, hvis mere maskinelle temperament giver nye udslag. (Morten Hviid Melsen)

Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
Den klassisk uddannede bratschist Astrid Sonne har med effektpedaler og elektroniske kompositioner placeret sig på tærsklen til et internationalt gennembrud. Med alsidige og livlige kompositioner har Astrid Sonne på sit debutalbum, “Human Lines”, skabt et værk, der både bærer præg af improvisation og en velovervejethed om, hvordan værkets numre komplementerer hinanden – stilistisk, kompositionelt såvel som stemningsmæssigt. Astrid Sonne dyrker gentagelsen uden at udelukke muligheden for fornyelse og uforudsigelighed. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Taphos “Come Ethereal Somberness” (Blood Harvest)
“Come Ethereal Somberness” er et skånselsløst dødstogt med imponerende mange temposkift. Taphos har en sublim fornemmelse for balancen mellem smadrende brutalitet og tempi, hvor melodier og stemninger kan bryde frem. “Dysfori” og “Obitum” er velvalgte akustiske mellem- og slutspil, der fremhæver de dominerende, hensynsløse overfald. Men også i de enkelte numre er der en formidabel bølgegang mellem den tørre rytmegruppe med voldsom tyngde, de frenetiske guitarriffs, der ublu bøjer over i episke, hylende soloer, og det hæse, gutturale growl. (Kim Elgaard Andersen)

Boli Group “N.P.D.S” (Posh Isolation)
Boli Group er et ensemble, der består af fem musikere, som udover primus motor Asger Hartvig tæller Nina Cristante, Thea Thorborg, Cæcilie Trier og Holger Hartvig. Dét, som for mig står allerklarest på især den første del af albummet (men som dybest set er gennemgående), er, hvordan Hartvig i sine kompositioner typisk lader ét instrument opretholde en form for klangligt og rytmisk fokuspunkt, mens de resterende instrumenter væves ind og ud både tonalt og forløbsmæssigt for konstant at problematisere netop denne sikkerhed. Dette er bl.a. tilfældet på albumforløberen “Toxica”, hvor en enormt indtagende saxofon “forstyrres” af både orgelklange og knipsede bastoner, og på “How To Play”, hvor afdæmpede, ophøjede klaverakkorder klinger over en violin, der, lavmælt, men bestemt, skærer igennem som en bilsirene i et søvnigt bylandskab. (Emil Grarup)

Redaktionens note – Denne årsliste over de mest værdsatte fuldlængde udgivelser bringes i vilkårlig rækkefølge. Den i de kommende dage følgende årlige oddsize-liste omfatter ep’er og andre værkformater. Årslisten er ikke baseret på en kollektiv afstemning eller konsensus-afgørelse på redaktionen, da vi ikke er tilhængere af et mediesystem, hvor “flest stemmer” og “flest lyttere” er lig med “det mest værdsatte” eller “det bedste”. Der er pt. omkring 15 skribenter og/eller redaktører tilknyttet Foreningen Passive/Aggressive.

Årets 10 mest værdsatte internationale LP’er og to special mentions fra 2018 i vilkårlig rækkefølge – ifølge redaktionen på Passive/Aggressive

Niagara “Apologia” (Principe Discos)
Trioen Niagara vendte i 2018 tilbage med deres fjerde udspil på portugisiske Príncipe i form af debutalbummet “Apologia”. Albummet – og gruppens musikalske udtryk som sådan – fremstår uden tvivl hjemme på det portugisiske pladeselskab, men adskiller sig fra majoriteten af de mere dansable udgivelser ved i højere grad at dyrke en mere sumpet og semi-psykedelisk musik. Det er det ideelle medium til at fortrænge den bidende kulde og nivellerende gråvejr, da “Apologia” snarere lyder som feberdrømme og hallucinationer, der udspiller sig i hjertet af en imaginær urskov. Et både ekstremt fængende og sært forstyrrende værk. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)
Hvis man var af den overbevisning, at ‘less is more’ efterhånden var blevet en reduceret til en tom floskel, så blev det om noget modbevist på Tirzahs debutalbum, “Devotion”. Albummet er produceret af Mica Levi og giver et troværdigt portræt af umådelige store følelser gennem minimalistiske produktioner, klaver-loops og ikke mindst Tirzahs stemme. Hvis man skulle sætte projektet på formel, ville det muligvis se røvkedeligt ud på papiret. Men “Devotion” indkapsler et umådeligt skrøbeligt og inderligt udtryk, ofte nærmest så intimt, at det tenderer det indadvendte, men uden på noget tidspunkt at kamme over i hverken det patetiske eller uvedkommende. Tirzah minder mig om, at de stærkeste stemmer ikke nødvendigvis er de største. I stedet besidder hendes stemme en nøgenhed, der netop gør den ideel til at skildre de store følelser, som enkelte kan nå med sang, men aldrig med ord. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Maria w Horn “Kontrapoetik” (Portals Editions + Xkathedral)
“Kontrapoetik” is an album of tactile timbre and textures. That might not come as a surprise for anyone familiar with Maria W. Horn’s previously work. She draws on a dramatic palette of sound. A combination of Puce Mary, Pan Daijing, Yves Tumor, and Pharmakon would be suitable musical equivalents in terms of the sonic signature. No matter how dark the sound gets, at no point do you feel disoriented. “Kontrapoetik” shows the growth of Maria w Horn’s sound, work, and expression. It is not only a sonic reflection of her revisiting her home region’s past but also a warning of what might await if we do not succeed in dismantling the patriarchy. (Sandra Borch)

Armand Hammer “Paraffin” (Backwoodz Studioz)
“Paraffin” is Armand Hammer’s third record. The hip-hop duo comprised of Elucid and Billy Woods (who have respectable catalogues of their own) released another triumphant record that grasps the current grimness and unrest. “This is a record that’s uniquely attuned to the political, physical, and ethical realities of 2018 without being weighed down by its pop culture arcana or its attendant industry concerns.” (Javier Orozco)

Lucrecia Dalt “Anticlines” (RVNG)
Den colombianske, Berlin-residerende sangerinde, komponist og multiinstrumentalist, Lucrecia Dalt, præsenterer på sit sjette album en ret så enestående verden af lyd og ord. Det er næsten unødvendigt at understrege det, men vi har at gøre med et album, der nærmest ikke kan findes referencepunkter til. Men hvis du nu forestiller dig Laurie Anderson, Daphne Oram, Visible Cloaks, Annea Lockwood og Carl Gustav Jung, der i fællesskab udforsker underjordiske strukturer og symmetrier i jagten på en større bevidsthed, så er vi tæt på at være i nærheden af lyden af “Anticlines”. (Mikkel A. Kongstad)

Jonny Greenwood “Phantom Thread” (Nonesuch)
With “Phantom Thread”, director Paul Thomas Anderson paints an illuminating portrait both of an artist on a creative journey and the women who keep his world running. The film’s soundtrack includes eighteen compositions by Greenwood. It was recorded in London with a sixty-member string orchestra. “We talked a lot about ’50s music, what was popularly heard then as well as what was being written and recorded. Nelson Riddle and Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings were the main references. I was interested in the kind of jazz records that toyed with incorporating big string sections; Ben Webster made some good ones.” (Boomkat)

Hermit and the Recluse “Orpheus vs. the Sirens” (Obol for Charon)
The Brooklyn-based rapper Kaseem Ryan made it to our year end list two years ago with his Samurai-inspired collage “Honor Killed the Samurai”. This year Ka paired with Animoss as Hermit and the Recluse for “Orpheus vs. The Sirens” (Obol for Charon). Animoss’s rich and eerie production offers a soulful and rusty canvas for the veteran rapper to paint his sooty narratives, a blend of equal parts hoodlum tales, greek mythology and street wisdom. (Javier Orozco)

Тпсб “Sekundenschlaf” (Blackest Ever Black)
“Sekundenschlaf” er en umådeligt fængende og stærk udgivelse fra start til slut. Тпсб formår at skabe en stemning, der indbyder til momentan selvforglemmelse og verdensfjernt dagdrømmeri, men paradoksalt nok kræver musikken ofte lytterens tilstedeværelse på grund af de raserende og insisterende rytmefigurer, der pløjer gennem de luftige synthflader på numre som “Matted Feathers” og “Pacifier Habits”. Ambivalensen i den ambiente jungle og breakbeat på “Sekundenschlaf” er som at blive kærtegnet og pryglet på én og samme gang. En følelse, man overraskende nok har lyst til at blive i. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Low “Double Negative” (Sub Pop)
Indrømmet, jeg har ikke rigtig lyttet til en Low-udgivelse siden 90’erne, men et eller andet fik mig til at lytte til “Double Negative”, og en tidlig morgen, med solen kæmpende sig gennem disen, brød Parkers og Sparhawks smukke vokaler gennem en mur af digital støj på min bilstereo. Det lyder, som om optagelsen af pladen er sunket ned i et digitalt syrebad. Det er producer BJ Burton, der står for gentænkningen af det mormonske par. På mange måder har deres vokaler aldrig stået smukkere end bag den knitrende mur, han har bygget op. (Kim Elgaard Andersen)

JPEGMAFIA: “Veteran” (Peggy/Deathbomb Arc.)
Den Los Angeles-baserede Baltimore-rapper Barrington Hendricks har udgivet en stribe albums under navnene JPEGMAFIA, JPEG og Peggy. Med det totalt selvproducerede “Veteran” tager han prisen årets mest opfindsomme hiphop-album, som Hendricks selv har beskrevet som “a snapshot of my random thoughts on everyday life in a country ruled by a man that is the same color as Frank Ocean’s first album.” Det støjende og fragmentariske album runger af vrede og apati over landets tilstand. (Kim Elgaard Andersen/Simon Christensen)

Special mentions:

The Caretaker “Everywhere At The End of Time” – Stage 4 and Stage 5 (History Always Favours the Winners)
On the fourth in a series of six albums on “Everywhere At The End of Time” that is cataloguing the effects of early-onset dementia, The Caretaker slips into the first “post awareness” stage. The ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror; the beginning of a process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition and rupture. Penultimate, 5th Stage of “Everywhere At The End of Time” charting severe levels of musical/mental deterioration and sensory detachment through four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces. (Boomkat)

Autechre “NTS Sessions 1-4” (NTS Radio/Warp Records)
Autechre weigh in the labyrinthine 8 hour “NTS Sessions”, parsing the guts of their hard drives for gold and other precious materials dating back to 2011. The duo were initially commissioned to do a DJ residency on NTS, but what transpired is closer in approach and results to a super extended Peel Session, featuring stacks of reworked material along with exclusive new notions generated by their infamous ‘System’ of software patches. Given so much time to roam, they explore a full spectrum of meters, tones and alien machine feels ranging from succinct hyper-symphonies to an hour long closing passage of unfathomably deep ambient music, […] that reach deep into the most abstract, amorphous nooks of their sound in a way comparable with visionary work from Roland Kayn or Iannis Xenakis. (Boomkat)

Redaktionens note – Denne årsliste over de mest værdsatte internationale, fuldlængde udgivelser bringes i vilkårlig rækkefølge. Årslisten er ikke baseret på en kollektiv afstemning eller konsensus-afgørelse på redaktionen, da vi ikke er tilhængere af et mediesystem, hvor “flest stemmer” og “flest lyttere” er lig med “det mest værdsatte” eller “det bedste”. Der er pt. omkring 15 skribenter og/eller redaktører tilknyttet Foreningen Passive/Aggressive.

Årets mest værdsatte danske kassettebånd, oddsize-udgivelser og kompilationer fra 2018 i vilkårlig rækkefølge – ifølge redaktionen på Passive/Aggressive.

GEL “Drama Tools” (CS, NESM)
Overordnet fremstår “Drama Tools” som en undersøgelse af evindelige opbygninger og nedbrydninger, hvilket især understreges af et nummer som “Down”, hvor den hvæsende percussion abrupt genstarter gang på gang i stedet for på nogen måde at skabe et sikkert rytmisk fundament eller føre til en kompositorisk opbygning. Numrene fremmaner en stemning af vanvid gennem kompositorisk ustabilitet og melodiske passager, der gradvist forvrænges mere og mere, ikke meget ulig Kleins ligeledes uforudsigelige loop-baserede kompositioner. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver” (12”, Black Opal/Petrola 80)
Duoen Lyra Valenza har ikke blot ændret navn, men også udviklet et markant anderledes udtryk siden det mere techno-orienterede debutudspil “Synkronudspring i Tomt Bassin”. “Scan, Deliver” trækker i stedet på elementer fra bl.a. trance og jungle. Der dyrkes en bombastisk lyd og accelerationistisk tilgang til kompositionerne, der ofte lyder, som om de er på randen til at eksplodere af den energi, de akkumulerer i løbet af deres spilletid. Det er et af årets mest euforiske og intense udspil, der i kraft af sin ekstreme energi og gennemgående patos også ender med at fremstå mere humoristisk end selvhøjtidelig. Det er et tiltrængt og overraskende udspil, der fremstår unikt sammenlignet med det ellers varierede output af dansk elektronisk musik i 2018. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Nyredolk “Demo” (CS, Caligari Records)
Det er ikke til at stampe information op af jorden om københavnske Nyredolk og deres demoudgivelse på italienske Caligari Records. Men det føles heller ikke vigtigt, når man gnaver sig igennem deres fire kradsende tracks, der elegant placerer sig et sted mellem den ondere variant af hardcorepunk, blackened crust og god gammeldags kassettebåndsblackmetal. Det er firkantet, udynamisk og lige ud af landevejen i en rustvogn, der kører i den forkerte side af vejen. Nyredolk er i øvrigt offentliggjort til Metal Magic Festival i Fredericia i 2019. (Klaus Hedegaard Nielsen)

Erna “Pan” (CS, Wetwear)
Kassetteudgivelsen “Pan” er en intens percussion-oplevelse, der består af fire korte numre og to længere. På de fire første numre findes en eksplosion af lag og rytmer – et hektisk og forpustet mylder af forskellige slagtøjsinstrumenter. Men det er ikke et tilfældigt kaos, der bliver skabt. Tværtimod viser Kristian Paulsen og Anders Bach i trommeduoen Erna en utrolig fornemmelse for at sammensætte rytmer med sådan en præcision, at de efterlader lytteren i et altomsluttende og fortættet lydrum. (Ida Selvejer Faaborg)

Sufie Elmgreen “James” (lydværk, Works for Radio)
Sufie Elmgreen har vist sig som en yderst nuanceret kunstner, både med tidligere solo-projekter og som forsanger i ekstrem-impro bandet sæNK og senest også Bearth. Med sit radioværk “James” leverer Sufie Elmgreen en kombination af drum’n’bass og jungle i et ekstremt dystopisk univers. Dette er på mange måder sigende for Sufie Elmgreens øvrige virke, der dyrker det groteske på en overlegen facon og ignorerer konventioner, generelle spilleregler og tilslører skillelinjen mellem kunst og musik. Netop dette er “James” et eksempel på. (Sandra S. Borch)

Kasper Marott “Keflavik” (12”-vinyl, Seilscheibenpfeiler)
Kasper Marott har med sin seneste EP, “Keflavik”, for alvor markeret sig som en af nyere tids mest lovende aktører inden for dansk elektronisk musiks mere kluborienterede side. Den tre numre lange udgivelse byder på fængende house med en upoleret pop-sensibilitet. Selvom udgivelsen er blødere og lettere i sit udtryk end den mere techno-orienterede danske musik, der i særdeleshed har fået opmærksomhed i senere år, så er der også noget insisterende over “Keflavik”, i særdeleshed titelnummeret, men også udgivelsen i sin helhed. Man kan ikke andet end give sig hen til numrenes pulserende energi og de umiskendeligt gode melodier. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Solid Blake “Warp Room” (12”-vinyl, Seilscheibenpfeiler)
While several techno affiliated artists have begun to adopt a certain trance aesthetic to their sound (as documented on the newly released Kulør-compilation), the Copenhagen-based Glaswegian producer Emma Blake instead incorporates a sonic and rippling electro-sensibility onto her otherwise rather abstract techno compositions. The ambivalence between lightness and a certain weight in Blake’s sound makes the compositions more thrilling than most average techno-affiliated music. It is an impressive work of craftswomanship, where no element feels unnecessary, and it leaves the listener completely engulfed in its sonic figures and simplistic melodies. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Sandra Boss “Luft” (CS, Falt)
Driven by a careful fascination with classical instruments and out-dated MIDI-gear, Sandra Boss has created an unsettling mosaic of vibrant and vibrating pieces. The release is the result of a probing curiosity that explores the space between classical techniques of playing and composing on the one hand, as well as improvisation with an open invitation for chance. Human, instrument and machine are equal contributors to “Luft”, organised by a composer who has a deep and clear understanding of every single one of these elements. (Wieland Rambke)

Raquin “Ariclone” (CS, Janushoved)
Euforien er normalt en gennemgående sindstilstand for flere af selskabet Janushoveds udgivelser, men ikke på den samme maniske og ukontrollerbare facon som på “Ariclone”. Når rytmesektionen stiger i tempo og intensitet, får rusen også en anden karakter end normalt. Oftest figurerer den som latent, underspillet og lokkende på Janushoved-udgivelserne, hvorimod den i disse øjeblikke på “Ariclone” snarere ekkoer af en syntetisk dopamin-injektion uden af den grund at fremstå mere endimensionel. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

Niklas Adam & Anders Vestergaard “Integrationer” (8×7” flexidisc, BIN)
Selskabet BIN drives af Jonas Olesen (Hector Rottweiler, Dansk Lydarkæologi m.m.) og har udgivet musik på en række sælsomme formater igennem årene, hvor floppy-disketterne og de sammenlimede vinyler står som de mere utilgængelige. Niklas Adam og Anders Vestergaards ca. 45 minutters “Integrationer” dokumenterer nogle udpræget reduktive live-elektronik-eksperimenter fra duoens koncerter forskellige steder i verden. Den er udgivet på hele otte flexidiscs, som er flot farvet i orange nuancer og pakket ind i to plexiglas-hylstre. De er desværre skåret i dårlig kvalitet, hvilket Jonas Olesen lakonisk dokumenterer via mailudvekslingerne med vinylfirmaet på de medfølgende overhead-lignende liner notes i plastik. “Integrationer” er med stor sandsynlighed årets smukkeste danske oddsize, men nu fik jeg ikke rigtigt plads til at skrive om musikken, som både rummer klanglige eksperimenter, realoptagelser og lyd, som peger tilbage på kildematerialet selv. (Michael Mørkholt/Simon Christensen)

Amalie Smith & Sonja LaBianca “51 e.DSO.” (lydværk, Arken)
I Amalie Smiths fremtidsfortælling “51 e.DSO.” er kunstmuseet Arken ved at blive indrettet til en kunstbank. I værket lytter vi til optagelser fra år 51 efter Den Sidste Olie. Det står klart, at menneskeheden ikke vil overleve de naturkatastrofer, som truer. Optagelserne rummer kompositioner af Sonja Labianca, som også spiller en række solosaxofonstykker, samt feltoptagelser, lyddesign og fortælling af Amalie Smith, og historien er indtalt af tre skuespillere. “51 e.DSO.” er optaget binauralt og blev “udstillet” som lydsiden til en naturvandring i området omkring kunstmuseet i sommers. Nu er den også gratis tilgængelig online; høretelefoner anbefales. (Simon Christensen)

Free The Land “Arctic Freedom” (digital installation, selvudgivet), “Bedside Ecology” (usb patch, selvudgivet), “Global Ecophony” (cassette, Ascetic House)
Det her er en blanding af ”udgivelser” eller transmissioner publiceret på forskellige tidspunkter og formater. Primært er Free The Land interessante ud fra deres kollektive tematikker om økologier, urbanisme og infrastrukturer, som behandles ud fra en optik som i højere grad har rødder i D.I.Y. end akademia. Samtidig er det et spændende output i konteksten af de involveredes øvrige praksisser; primært bestående af Jesse Sanes (Liebestod) med en roterende gruppe af samarbejdspartnere såsom Nial Morgan (Race to the Bottom), Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary), Henrik Söderström (Händer Som Vårdar) og Kali Malone. (Mikkel Rørbo)

Compilations

“Embrace” (Petrola 80)
Der er ikke et unødvendigt led på “Embrace”, hvor alle kunstnere bidrager med et nyt perspektiv på en fri og fremadskuende elektronisk musik. Titlen tro formår udgivelsen at omfavne forskelligheden som den nødvendige forudsætning for, at et musikalsk kulturliv ikke forfalder til ensporede stiløvelser; og variationen til trods lykkes det stadig udgivelsen at indkapsle en rød tråd på tværs af de forskellige numre. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

“Danske Båndamatører 1959-1976” (LP, Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi)
“Danske Båndamatører – Danish Tape Amateurs 1959-1976” tager prisen for mest imponerende arkivudgivelse på dansk jord i år. Værkerne stammer fra danske båndamatørkonkurrencer mellem 1959-1976, men ingen af dem har tidligere været udgivet. Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi dokumenterer et overset stykke dansk lyd- og musikhistorie, hvor båndamatører eksperimenterede med alt fra obskur elektronisk musik til lydcollager i deres fritid. Antologien giver derfor også et unikt indblik i en tidlig demokratisering af lydteknologien, hvor amatørmusikere med båndoptageren som instrument, kunne skabe og komponere i hjemmet og dokumentere det, uden nødvendigvis at få adgang til etablerede kanaler eller fornemme studiemuligheder som den lille håndfuld elektronkomponister, der har fundet vej til historiebøgerne; Else Marie Pade, Fuzzy, Per Nørgård, Gunner Møller Pedersen. (Mikkel A. Kongstad)

“Still Water” (3xCS, Infinite Waves)
Infinite Waves har i flere år udgivet noget af den stærkeste ambient-musik, der er udkommet i Danmark i seneste år. Den knap to timer lange kompilation “Still Water” er endnu et vidnesbyrd om selskabets musikalske standard, hvor både de velkendte navne Birch, Grøn, Antii Tolvi og CR Hougaard (Soft Armour, m.fl.) samt de nye projekter Kai Oke og Miro medvirker med æteriske og/eller meditative kompositioner. Ideel musik til kontemplation såvel som selvforglemmelse. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

“Korpsånd” (2CS, Fallow Field/2CD, Tour de Garde)
In February the American tape label Fallow Field sent out a double cassette with a collection of new Danish black metal under the name “Korpsånd – an introduction to new wave of raw DKBM”. Later it was re-released on CD by Tour de Garde, and in 2019 is it finally getting a proper 2LP release on the new label Nattetale. Despite the connotations to a brotherhood, Korpsånd (en: corpse+spirit) is neither the end nor the only means of this group of people who have also seen a number of international releases and individual paths through other genres than black metal. Rather it should be viewed as a banner for a series of bands who share a recording studio, a set of aesthetics and a shared connection to the noise/experimental scene of the venue Mayhem. (Simon Christensen)

“Islands In The Stream” (CS, Øen Rec.)
Håndværksmæssigt er “Various Islands in the Stream” en eminent opsamling, hvilket ikke mindst skyldes dens lokkende og forførende karakter. Det er en musik, der pirrer mig fra første lyt, en musik til sommerens spænding og sorgløshed, som man kan vende tilbage til adskillige gange. Musikken er hverken selvhøjtidelig eller udfordrende; letheden og varmen i numrene, det primære fokus på den gode melodi og den åbenlyse appel tjener som en kærkommen påmindelse om, at god musik – og god kunst helt overordnet – ikke nødvendigvis behøver være svært tilgængelig for at være berigende. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

“Tiden Går Sgu” (12”, Regelbau)
Også i år blev et stærkt år i den aarhusianske house-musiks tegn, takket være Regelbau og de utallige andre selskaber, som flere af bagmændene også har etableret og udgivet musik på. Det er en drømmende musik til dansegulvet, der foruden C.K. og NL110, byder på remixes og nye produktioner af Natal Zaks (her som Timeman og Sentral), hvoraf nummeret “Extra Soft” er ét af hans mest ørehængende og vanedannende til dags dato. Endnu en 12’er uden fillers, der tydeligt illustrerer kvaliteten af flere af de aarhusianske musikeres virke, sammen med flere af de respektive udgivelser fra Central, DJ Sports, C.K., Manmade Deejay, El Trick, m.fl., der udkom i 2018. (Alexander Julin Mortensen)

“I Could Go Anywhere But Again I Go With You” (digital, Posh Isolation)
Vi slutter året med begyndelsen. I januar åbnede Posh Isolations endnu et hyperaktivt år med den digitale udgivelse “I Could Go Anywhere But Again I Go With You”, hvilket er en kompilation med hele 24 artister med en relation til ny elektronisk musik i København. I sig selv kunne man hylde det ambitiøse diy-label for dets betydning for musikscenen både herhjemme og dets muligheder i udlandet gennem snart 10 år, men det helt afgørende for “I Could Go Anywhere But Again I Go With You” er dets åbenlyse kærlighed til ny kompositionsmusik i en bred forstand. Det, der i starten var et båndlabel for ekstremmusik og noise, som med tiden har udgivet forskellige afarter af techno og punk, kunne med denne milepæl siges at gå ind i en ny æra af åbenhed mod omverdenen og elektronisk kammermusik, hvilket bidrag fra Ydegirl, Astrid Sonne, KYO, Why Be og Minais B, samt senere udgivelser med CTM, Boli Group og Vanessa Amara bekræfter. (Simon Christensen)

Redaktionens note – Denne årsliste over udvalgte danske oddsize-udgivelser og compilations fra 2018 bringes i vilkårlig rækkefølge. Årslisten er ikke baseret på en kollektiv afstemning eller konsensus-afgørelse på redaktionen, men er et udvalg af de mest værdsatte eller mest interessante udgivelser hos de enkelte skribenter. Der er pt. omkring 15 skribenter og/eller redaktører tilknyttet Foreningen Passive/Aggressive. Da vi i sagens natur ikke har hørt alle oddsize-udgivelser fra 2018, så er det ikke et repræsentativt udsnit, men i stedet kan listen læses som en række nedslag og anbefalinger.

Adam Thorsmark

Internationale (vilkårlig rækkefølge)

Rosalía “El Mal Querer” (Sony)
Saloli “The Deep End” (Kranky)
Viagra Boys “Street Worms” (Year0001)
Amnesia Scanner “Another Life” (PAN)
Tierra Whack “Whack World” (selvudgivet)
Amen Dunes “Freedom” (Sacred Bones)
Tanukichan “Sundays” (Coqueiro Verde Records)
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)
Deafheaven “Ordinary Corrupt Human Love” (Anti-)
Dirty Projectors “Lamp Lit Prose” (Domino)
Kamasi Washington “Heaven and Earth” (Young Turks)
SOPHIE “Oil of Every Pearl”s Un-Insides” (Transgressive)
Julia Holter “Aviary” (Domino)
Oneohtrix Point Never “Age of” (Warp)
Parquet Courts “Wide Awake!” (Rough Trade)
Profligate “Somewhere Else” (Wharf Cat Records)
Olden Yolk “Olden Yolk” (Trouble in Mind)
Ought “Room Inside a View” (Merge)
Palm “Rock Island” (Carpark Records)
Ty Segall “Freedom’s Goblin” (Drag City)

15 bedste danske plader (vilkårlig rækkefølge)

LLNN “Deads” (Pelagic)
Josiah Konder “Songs For the Stunned” (selvudgivet)
Fritz Fatal, Peter Peter, Morten Chrone, Peter Kyed “After / Det Blødende Hjerte” (Mastermind Records)
Pardans “Spit & Image” (Tambourhinoceros)
Clarissa Connelly “Tech Duinn” (Brystet)
Kogekunst “Sexede” (Musikkens Beskyttelse)
Kyo w/ Jeuru “All the Same Dream” (Posh Isolation)
Hjalte Ross “Embody” (Wouldn’t Waste Records)
Værket “Young Again” (Escho)
CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Tilebreaker “In The Undergrowth” (Shordwood Records)
Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
Gooms “V1″ (Descent)” (Anyines)
Soho Rezanejad “Six Archetypes” (Silicone Records)
Iceage “Beyondless” (Escho/Matador)

Simon Christensen

Fem eksempler på dansk musikformidling i 2018:
Informations nye kulturtillæg
Danmarks Radio P6 og P8
Seismograf Lyt Dybt
Heartbeats Rockhistorier
OS zine

Favorit selvproducerede LP’er i 2018:
Xenia Xamanek “Envase” (Anyines)
CTM feat. Asger Hartvig “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Frederikke Hoffmeier for Puce Mary “The Draught” (PAN)
Clarissa Connelly “Tech Duinn” (Brystet)
Astrid Sonne for “Human Lines” (Escho)
Tanja V. Jessen “Feeling Love” (The Cat Box Corp)
Jeppe Zeeberg “Eight Seemingly Unrelated Pieces of Piano Music” (selvudgivet)
Quest Removal “What We Are” (selvudgivet)

Andre favoritter
Spost “Monkey Face” (selvudgivet)
Birds In Flight “Get Real Big” (Mastermind Rec.)
Hjalte Ross “Embody” (Wouldn’t Waste Records)

Special mention
Amalie Smith “51 e.DSO” (selvudgivet)
Julius Eastman “The Nigger Series” (arkivudgivelse)

Tre samfundsrelevante tekster
Thorbjørn Radisch på Bisse “Grand Danois” (selvudgivet)
GP&PLS “21 X-tra Kone Standard’er” (selvudgivet)
Jonas Okholm på Spost “Flere” (selvudgivet)

Ivna Franic

LP
Lucrecia Dalt “Anticlines” (RVNG Intl.)
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)
Cecilia “Adoration” (Halcyon Veil)
Low “Double Negative” (Sub Pop)
Heather Leigh “Throne” (Editions Mego)
U.S. Girls “In a Poem Unlimited” (4AD)
Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner “Care” (Editions Mego)
Marie Davidson “Working Class Woman” (Ninja Tune)
Maria w Horn “Kontrapoetik” (Portals Editions)
Niagara “Apologia” (Príncipe Discos)
Vanligt Folk “Hambo” (Kontra-Musik)
Robyn “Honey” (Konichiwa Records)
Julia Holter “Aviary” (Domino)
Lucy Railton “Paradise 94” (Modern Love)
Laurel Halo “Raw Silk Uncut Wood” (Latency)
Teresa Winter “What The Night is For” (The Death of Rave)
Yves Tumor “Safe in the Hands of Love” (Warp Records)
Josephine Foster “Faithful Fairy Harmony” (Fire Records)
Caterina Barbieri “Born Again in the Voltage” (Important Records)
Sarah Davachi “Gave in Rest” (Ba Da Bing!) / “Let Night Come on Bells End the Day” (Recital)

EP
Abyss X “Pleasures of the Bull” (Danse Noire)
Shygirl “Cruel Practice” (Nuxxe)
700 Bliss “Spa 700” (Halcyon Veil)
Object Blue “REX” (Let’s Go Swimming)
bod [包家巷] “Limpid Fear [清澈恐惧]” (Knives)
Kali Malone “Organ Dirges 2016-2017” (Ascetic House)
Georgia/Bellows “Decouple ][ Series” (OOH-sounds)

DK
Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
Soho Rezanejad “Six Archetypes” (Silicone Records)
Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver EP” (Black Opal/Petrola 80)
CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Gel “Drama Tools” (NESM)

Mikkel Arre

DK:
Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
GEL “Drama Tools” (NESM)
Rasmus Juncker “Ophold” (Kingdoms)
Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver” (Black Opal/Petrola 80)
Puce Mary “The Drought” (PAN)
Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)

shout-outs til Asger Kudahl “Sketches for Revolution” (Resonans Recordings), Exquisite Russian Brides “Overflow Variations” (The Cat Box Corp.), Iceage “Beyondless” (Escho/Matador) og SØS Gunver Ryberg “Solfald” (Noise Manifesto)

UDLAND:
Gábor Lázár “Unfold” (The Death of Rave)
Ian William Craig “Thresholder” (Fat Cat)
Jlin “Autobiography” (Planet Mu)
Kali Malone “Cast of Mind” (Hallow Ground)
Mount Eerie “Now Only” (P.W. Elverum & Sun)
Objekt “Cocoon Crush” (PAN)
Proc Fiskal “Insula” (Hyperdub)
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)

shout-outs til Bamba Pana “Poaa” (Nyege Nyege Tapes), Low “Double Negative” (Sub Pop), RP Boo “I’ll Tell You What!” (Planet Mu) og SOPHIE “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” (Transgressive)

Emil Grarup

DK:
Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver” (Petrola 80/Opal Tapes)
CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
First Flush “Spira” (Visage)
Josiah Konder “Songs for the Stunned” (selvudgivet)
Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)

UDLAND:
DJ Lilocox “Paz & Amor” (Príncipe)
Kelman Duran “13th Month” (Apocalipsis)
тпсб “Sekundenschlaf” (Blackest Ever Black)
Skee Mask “Compro” (Ilian Tape)
Hiro Kone “Pure Expenditure” (Dais Records)

Programmøren

Sarah Davachi “Gave In Rest”
Clarice Jensen “For This From That Will Be Filled”
Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma “Limpid As The Solitudes”
Glass Knot “Present Tense”
Mica Levi “Jackie”
Kasper Bjørke “The Fifty Eleven Project”
Free The Land “Global Ecophony: Audio Transmissions From The Exhibition”
Erik K Skodvin & Rauelsson “A Score For Darling”
Andrea Novel, Cæcilie Trier & Emil Elg “Windows Gateways Bridges”
Kate NV “для FOR”

Klaus Q Hedegaard” (Audiodrome/Sounds)

Udenrigssager

Kurokuma “Dope Rider” (Doom Stew Records)
Full Of Hell / Intensive Care “SPLIT” (Anthems Of The Undesirable)
Thom Yorke “Suspiria “Music For The Luca Guadagnino Film” (XL Recordings)
Tomaga ““Music For Visual Disorders” (Meakusma)
Chepang / Test SPLIT” (Cricket Cemetary)
Daughters “You Won’t Get What You Want” (Ipecac)
Imperial Triumphant “Vile Luxury” (Throatruiner)
Jonny Greenwood “Phantom Thread” (Nonesuch)
Herd Mover “Vol. 2.5: The Science Of Herd Movement” + “Vol. 3: Section 59″ (Astral Noize Records)
Baptists “Beacon Of Faith” (Southern Lord)
CZN “The Golden Path” (Lovers & Lollypops)
Ricarda Cometa “Ricarda Cometa 2″ (Nefarious Industries)
Sumac “Love In Shadow” (Thrill Jockey)
Part Chimp “Cheap Thriller” (Chart Pimp Records)
Daniel Rossen “Deerslayer” (Warp Records)
Erosion “Maximum Suffering” (Hydra Head Records)
WVRM “The Blood Of The Coven Is Thicker Than Water Of The Womb” (not on label)
Napalm Death “Coded Smears And More Uncommon Slurs” (Century Media)
Oneida “Romance” (Joyful Noise Recordings)
Immortal “Northern Chaos Gods” (Nuclear Blast)

…og et par fine DK udgivelser
Nyredolk “Demo” (Caligari Records)
Smertegrænsens Toldere VS UxDxS “SPLIT” (Mastermind / Indisciplinarian)
The Malpractice “Slur” (Crunchy Frog)
Spost “Monkey Face” (not on label)
Erna “Pan” (Wetwear)
Bisse “Tanmaurk” (Showbisse Inc)
Anders Bach, Kristian Paulsen “Temper // Per Capita” (Wetwear)
Hyrevognene “S/T” (Mastermind)
…der var mange flere. Fedt for dem.

Ekstraordinær tommelfinger opad og “tak for i år” til :
DFDS Oslo Minicruise
Kill-Town Death Fest

Jonas Åkerlunds “Lords Of Chaos” film var for mig årets bedste dårlige filmoplevelse. Den vil jeg se igen i 2019.

Sandra S. Borch

Top 10 Danske
Astrid Sonne “Human Line” (Escho)
Puce Mary “The Drought” (PAN)
The Empire Line “Rave” (Northern Electronic)
Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)
Danske Båndamatører” (Institut for Dansk Lydærkoelogi)
Sufie Elmgreen “James” (The Lake Radio)
Xenia Xanamek “Envase” (Ayines)
Glass Knot “Present Tense” (Foul-up)
Kasper Marott “Keflavik” (Seilscheibenpfeiler)
Erna “PAN” (Wetwear)

Special mention: Raquin “Ariclone” (Janushoved)

Top 10 international
Maria W Horn “Kontrapoetik” (XKatedral og Portal Editions)
Lucrecia Dalt “Anticlines” ” (RVNG lntd.)
Take me a_part, The remixes “Kelala + various” (warp)
Caterina Barbieri “Born Again in the Voltage” (Important Records)
700 Bliss “Spa 700″ (Halcyon Veil)
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino Recording Co)
Michele Mercure “By Herself” (RVNG Ltd)
Nadine Byrne “Dreaming Remembering” (iDEAL Recordings)
Sophie “Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-insides” (Transgressive)
Chaines “The King” (Slip)

Special mention:
Raime “We Can’t Be That Far From The Beginning” (RR)
Christoph De Babalon “If your’re into it, I’m out” (Digital Hardcore)
The Caretaker “Everywhere at the end of time “stage 5” (History Always Favours the Winners)
Jason Korál “Modified Perspectives” (Stroom.tv)
Amnesia Scanner “Another life” (PAN),
Hontos “Subway series vol 1” (Bank Records NYC)
48 Cameras “Chosen Songs” (Stroom.tv)
Osheyack “Sadomodernism” (Bedouin Records), тпсб “Sekundenschlaf” (Blackest Ever Black)
Objekt “Cocoon Crush” (PAN)
JPEGMAFIA “Vetaran” (Peggy/Deathbomb Arc.)

Mikkel Rørbo

I vilkårlig rækkefølge og forskellige formater.

Free The Land “Arctic Freedom” (selvudgivet), Bedside Ecology” (selvudgivet), Global Ecophony” (Ascetic House)
Det er lidt en blanding af ”udgivelser” eller transmissioner publiceret på forskellige tidspunkter og formater. Primært er FTL interessante ud fra deres kollektive tematikker om økologier, urbanisme og infrastrukturer, som behandles ud fra en optik som i højere grad har rødder i D.I.Y. end akademika og samtidig er det et spændende output i konteksten af de involveredes øvrige praksisser; primært bestående af Jesse Sanes” (Liebestod) med en roterende gruppe af samarbejdspartnere, så som Nial Morgan” (Race to the Bottom), Frederikke Hoffmeier” (Puce Mary), Henrik Söderström” (Händer Som Vårdar) og Kali Malone.

Puce Mary “The Drought” (PAN)
Med The Drought har Frederikke Hoffmeier opnået at, i højere grad end nogen af de tidligere udgivelser, vise hvor stort et potentiale Puce Mary projektet har. Albummet har emotionel tyngde samt kompositorisk og udtryksmæssigt stor diversitet inden for en stadig minimal og stringent palette, som viser hvor langt Frederikke har taget projektet igennem årene igennem hårdt arbejde.

Holly Herndon/Jlin feat. Spawn “Godmother” (selvudgivet)
Jeg har ventet på et officiel udspil, siden Holly Herndon og Mat Dryhurst fortalte om denne udvikling af deres praksis med maskinintelligensen Spawn for snart et par år siden. Projektet er i høj grad interessant på et konceptuelt niveau og viser med skarp intention fremtidige potentialer og med kritisk stillingtagen at maskinintelligens fremfor alt på et spirende stadie, hvorfor vores arbejde med den er så meget vigtigere..

Kepla & DeForrest Brown, Jr. “The Wages of Being Black is Death” (PTP)
Ligesom deres forrige samarbejde, Absent Personae, er The Wages … også en tung og kompleks størrelse, på én gang både følelsesladet og distanceret, minimal og indholdstung. Duoens teoretiske overskud er tydeligt i måden hvorpå abstrakte observationer gøres personlige og intime.

Zuli “Terminal” (UIQ)
Ekstremt gennemtænkt og detaljeret udgivelse med en lyd som fremstår unik i min optik. Genre-ekvilibrisme i særklasse.

Autechre “NTS Sessions” (Warp)
Det er 8 timer med Autechres fulde spændevidde?

Mark Fisher “K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher” (2004-2016)” (Repeater Books)
Med sine omtrent 800 sider viser denne bog Mark Fishers enorme talent for tænkning, skarp kulturanalyse, forståelse for musik, politik, filosofi og hvad-som-helst og ekstremt store samtidige relevans. Desværre uden mulighed for mere nyt i fremtiden.

Kali Malone “Organ Dirges 2016-2017″ (Ascetic House) + Cast of Mind” (Hallow Ground)
Organ Dirges … er virkelig dyb og gennemarbejdet orgelmusik. Meget minimalistisk i sit udtryk men med utroligt mange detaljer; særklasse drone, som har en særegen tilgang til arbejdet med orgel som instrument, som viser Malones tekniske finesse og forståelse for rumlighed. Meget af det samme gør sig gældende for Cast of Mind, som på den anden side har en større lydmæssig bredde og diversitet og igen fremviser Malones evner som komponist og forståelse for tonalitet.

Christoph De Babalon “If You’re Into It I’m Out of It” (Digital Hardcore/Cross Fade Enter Tainment)
Årets genopdagelse, den er også for nyligt blevet genoptrykt til dem som vil have et objekt. Jeg har virkelig lyttet meget til denne, men blev nødt til at blive mindet om den igen for virkelig at få den tilbage i rotation. Det siger noget om denne 21 år gamle udgivelse, at den stadig i dag lyder helt utroligt samtidig eller omvendt siger det noget om samtidens musik.

Amnesia Scanner “Another Life” (PAN)
Det her album har lidt til ethvert øjeblik; interessant lyd, hits, masser af larm, masser af beats, nerve, intelligens. Der er nok en grund til, at det kommer til at dukke op på masser af årslister.

Stine Janvin “Fake Synthetic Music” (PAN)
Fake Synthetic Music er igen et meget kontrastfyldt album med et stærkt teknisk, konceptuelt udgangspunkt. Det kan både være udflydende og nærmest afslappende eller helt ekstremt udfordrende alt efter hvilken måde, man vælger at gå til det. Du kan nok være næsten 100 på, at det giver din familie noia til julemiddagen også.

Reza Negarestani “Intelligence and Spirit” (Urbanomic)
Sandsynligvis den bog jeg har set mest frem til i meget lang tid. Og kommer til at bruge meget lang tid på.

Anbefalelsesværdige udgivelser er også Felicia Atkinson “Coyotes” (Geographic North), Mark Fell “INTRA” (Boomkat Editions), Demdike Stare “Passion” (Modern Love), die Reihe “Vocoder” (Anòmia) og fremtidige udgivelser med Ex-Continent “Participant” (Anòmia/Ormolycka) og Zeno van den Broek “anti.symm/Hysteresis.

Javier Orozco

I spent the last 14 months without a stream-on-demand music service, which unsurprisingly affected how and what I listened to throughout this period. It created a sensation of being behind, records I read about that I did not get to listen in their entirety or that had to be pulled from other sources” (a YouTube ad-blocker turns out to be the greatest of allies). My year was not truly defined by music released this year and now that’s about to fade it feels as if I spent most of my mornings listening to Hiroshi Yoshimura.

I appealed to the radio, not in the traditional sense and surely in a very specific manifestation: NTS. An endless portal to musical exploration that offers a restricted sense of agency, but also of community and chance. Thanks to their InFocus series I truly paid attention to David Sylvian, and discovered a vocal version of Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence under the title Forbidden Colours. Lee Hazlewood arrived through these same means. Como La Flor focuses on bolero, cumbia and salsa, a gateway towards the music heard at my grandparent’s home. Surely there were some classic NTS tunes as Hafi Deo” (a Charlie Bones Show classic) and Shadows From Nowhere” (which I plucked form Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s monthly show). There was something thoroughly enjoyable about diminishing my control over what I listened.

Since this feature is about 2018, a year that felt like walking on a tightrope without an umbrella, here are a couple of records that captured some of fissures of these 365 days. Paraffin” (Backwoodz Studioz) is Armand Hammer’s third record. The hip-hop duo comprised of Elucid and Billy Woods” (who have respectable catalogues of their own) released another triumphant record that grasps the current grimness and unrest. Ka paired with Animoss as Hermit and the Recluse for Orpheus vs. The Sirens” (Obol for Charon). Animoss’s rich and eerie production offers a soulful and rusty canvas for the veteran rapper to paint his sooty narratives, a blend of equal parts hoodlum tales, greek mythology and street wisdom.

Nils Bloch

Danske
Vanessa Amara “Manos” (Posh Isolation)
Boli Group “N.P.D.S” (Posh Isolation)
Xenia Xamanek “Envase” (Ayines)

Udenlandske
Kareem Lotfy “QTT10″ (Quiet Times Tapes)
Blood Orange “Negro Swan” (Domino)
Cat Power “Wanderer” (Domino)
Rafel Anton Irisarri “Sirimiri” (Umor Rex)
Abul Mogard “Above All Dream” (Estatic)
Grouper “Grid Of Points” (Kranky)

Special mention
Excelsior “Time of none” (single)

Ida Faaborg

Skee Mask “Compro”
Debit “Animus”
Tirzah ”Devotion”
Blood Orange ”Negro Swan”
Amnesia Scanner ”Another Life”
Kate NV ”для FOR”
Dedekind Cut ”Tahoe”
RP Boo ”I’ll Tell You What!”
Grouper ”Grid Of Points”
Kamasi Washington ”Heaven And Earth”
Okzharp & Manthe Ribane ”Closer Apart”
Low ”Double Negative”
Autechre ”NTS Session 2”
Oliver Coates ”Shelley’s on Zenn-La”
Laurel Halo ”Raw Silk Uncut Wood”

Special mention: Ryuchi Sakamoto ”Async Remodels” (remix)

Danske:
Astrid Sonne ”Human Lines”
CTM ”Red Dragon”
First Flush ”Spira”
Josiah Konder ”Songs For The Stunned”
Soho Rezanejad ”Six Archetypes”

Oddsize:
Lyra Valenza ”Scan, Deliver”
Rune Bagge ”Pink Dreams”
SØS Gunver Ryberg ”Solfald”
Sugar ”No Sex Only Feelings”

Kim Elgaard Andersen

DK:
Astrid Sonne “Human Lines” (Escho)
EYES “EYES” (selvudgivet)
First Flush “Spira” (Visage)
Nicklas Sørensen “Solo 2” (El Paraiso)
Ond Tro “Støv” (Travesty Music)
Pardans “Spit and Image” (Tambourhinoceros)
Taphos “Come Ethereal Somberness” (Blood Harvest)
Værket “Young Again” (Escho)

Derudover skal Mythic Sunships “Another Shape of Psychedelic Music” (El Paraiso) fremhæves, til trods for at jeg kender flere af bandmedlemmerne privat. Det ændrer dog ikke ved at jeg synes det er en voldsomt fed plade.

UDLAND:

Amen Dunes “Freedom” (Sacred Bones)
Beak> “>>>” (Invada)
Black Milk “FEVER” (Mass Appeal)
Bruce Lamont “Broken Limbs Excite No Pity” (War Crime)
Eli Kezler “Stadium” (Shelter Press)
Hermit and the Recluse “Orpheus vs. the Sirens” (Obol for Charon)
Immortal “Northern Chaos Gods” (Nuclear Blast)
JPEGMAFIA “Veteran” (Peggy/Deathbomb Arc.)
Julia Holter “Aviary” (Domino)
Ken Mode “Loved” (Season of Mist)
KIDS SEE GHOSTS “KIDS SEE GHOSTS” (Good)
Kriegsmaschine “Apocalypticists” (No Solace)
Low “Double Negative” (Sub Pop)
Marisa Anderson “Cloud Corner” (Thrill Jockey)
Messa “Feast for Water” (Aural Music)
Nils Frahm “All Melody” (Erased Tapes)
Nine Inch Nails “Bad Witch” (The Null Corporation)
Noname “Room 25” (selvudgivet)
PRhyme “PRhyme 2” (selvudgivet)
Primordial “Exile Amonst the Ruins” (Metal Blade)
Profligate “Somewhere Else” (Wharf Cat)
Pusha T “Daytona” (Good)
Roy Montgomery “Suffuse” (Grapefruit)
Saba “CARE FOR ME” (selvudgivet)
Sleep “The Sciences” (Third Man)
Slugdge “Esoteric Malacology” (Willowtip)
Sunwatchers “II” (Trouble in Mind)
The Body “I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer” (Thrill Jockey)
YOB “Our Raw Heart” (Relapse)

Alexander Julin Mortensen

UDENLANDSKE
Tirzah “Devotion” (Domino)
Rezzett “s/t” (Trilogy Tapes)
Shinichi Atobe “Heat” (DDS)
Pusha T “Daytona” (GOOD Music)
Pendant “Make Me Know You Sweet” (West Mineral)

DANSKE
CTM “Red Dragon” (Posh Isolation)
Lyra Valenza “Scan, Deliver” (Petrola 80/Opal Tapes)
Boli Group “N.P.D.S.” (Posh Isolation)
Rune Bagge “Pink Dreams” (Northern Electronics)
V/A “Tiden Går Sgu” (Regelbau)

PS. Passive/Aggressive holder juleferie fra 31. december til 15. januar. Vi ses.

“K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)”, edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018 – Essay by Macon Holt.

Mark Fisher was the most important music critic of his generation. And in some ways, he continues to be so despite taking his own life over two years ago. I think one of the main reasons for this was that, for Mark, writing, and thinking about music was always the start of something; an opening up of new intensities, possibilities, and connections. Music was always already political, libidinal and affecting in excess of the niches of music culture to which it is so often relegated. Fisher had trained as a philosopher and is perhaps best known for his work as a cultural theorist but, despite spending his career in and out of the academy, he was never really at home with the practice of being the arbiter of what culture was worthy of canonization. This is not to say he wasn’t strident in his opinions, because he was and unabashedly so. Rather for Mark, as with his friend and sometime collaborator Kodwo Eshun, the role of the theorist or the critic of culture and music, was one of an “intensifier”. The task was to bring out the currents already present in the sounds that surrounded us rather than merely assessing their worth in accordance with abstracted theories of the sublime.

This is why the new collection of Mark’s previously unpublished posts from his blog, K-Punk, and other places over the last 12 years is so very valuable. It lets us see the connections between the music in our lives and the politics that shape them up close.

The name, K-Punk, was a nod to his involvement in the 1990s with the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit [CCRU], with K serving as a stand-in for the ancient Greek word, Kuber, from which cyber is derived. CCRU was a group of students, lecturers, artists and writers who operated unofficially out of the philosophy department at the University of Warwick under the quasi-leadership of Nick Land and Sadie Plant. The group read the texts of French poststructuralism (Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard) and cyberpunk science fiction (Gibson, Dick, Ballard) like they were different frequencies on the same scale and purposely tried to blur any distinction further in their own enigmatic polemical texts. These were pieces of writing that tried to pull the post-human future we’d been promised into the present. Put simply, they saw their texts, and texts in general, as having a kind of force to them that could bring the ideas they contained into being in the future. This was the first wave of accelerationism, an idea that Mark would continue to experiment with up to and including the emergence of Xenofeminism. However, by the early 2000s the cyberculture dream seemed to have been utterly co-opted by the banalities of Silicon Valley commodity production, the CCRU had disbanded and Mark was looking for other sites of political potential in culture.

I should make clear from the start that I’m not unbiased in my assessment. Mark was my PhD supervisor at Goldsmiths, and his death fell between the submission of my thesis and its defense a couple of months later. During that strange examination, my examiners made clear to me something that I had not really acknowledged or perhaps even attempted to play down; my thesis was so much more haunted by Mark’s work than I had recognized. So, for the last year, I have been working on a book manuscript exploring one his most famous works, “Capitalist Realism” (2009), as it relates to contemporary pop music. This is to say that I do have a horse in this race. But it would have been difficult to dedicate so much time to someone’s work and ideas if I didn’t think there is something to them. The upshot of this is that I find it tricky to work out where to call him Mark and where to call him Fisher.

In his own account of things in “Ghosts of My Life” (2014), it was music that opened up philosophy for Fisher. Growing up at a time when music journalism in the UK was mutating into something closer to literary criticism, Fisher would read reviews of post-punk bands in the NME that would cite Derrida or Foucault to make a point. A far cry from what that publication is like today. But rather than take this as the voice of the great explainers coming in to categorize and reduce music to pre-developed concepts, for Fisher, it was instead the music that made these ideas work at all. This was the approach that he carried into his work years later.

One his most well known theoretical terms was hauntology, an idea reluctantly borrowed from Derrida, a thinker who’s “pathology of skepticism” Fisher had always found vexing. For Derrida, the term was based on the homophonic quality of the words ontology and hauntology in French. A pun that was used to argue that the study of what can be said to exist is always haunted by previous attempts at this project, which affect how we conduct it today. Fisher, however, wanted to take this concept further to encompass how expression in contemporary cultural production contained previous notions of possibility and potential that were now lost. In the negative, Fisher would point to a band like the Arctic Monkeys, whose early 80s indie pop reenactment haunted the present with the soundtrack of squandered potential. And in the positive, nothing fits this model better than the post-punk from the 70s on, and the underground electronic dance music of the UK from the 1990s to the 2010s. From an essay included in “Ghosts”, that was originally a K-Punk post, Fisher describes this haunting as found in Burial’s debut album:

“Burial” is an elegy for the hardcore continuum, a “Memories from the Haunted Ballroom” for the rave generation. It is like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the subways in “Jacob’s Ladder’s” New York. Audio hallucinations transform the city’s rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains.”

Fisher doesn’t try and explain Burial to the uninitiated by making it fit into some kind of established music lineage—he declares that lineage dead. Instead, he is assuming the reader as beguiled by the sounds of this album as he is. He brings out resonances between the record and the world in which it was produced. “Burial” becomes a poetic amplifier of these conditions. In so doing, Fisher transforms those who may not have heard this record from skeptics into listeners hungry to find out more, not just about the record, but also the world produced through its sound-image; the audio reflections of a London oversaturated by capitalist realism.

We can see this technique at play also in his account of the haunting of Joy Division’s Manchester in the 1970s. Fisher hears in their music the tortured position of youth in between the crumbling of the post-war consensus and the festering dead-ends of this becoming-post-industrial northern city. The world of neoliberalism was just around the corner, and for people like the members of Joy Division, whatever pleasures it may provide to some, to them, they would remain unknowable. 

But there was probably no greater example of Fisher’s take on hauntology in music than the work of The Caretaker, James Leyland Kirby (V/Vm), for whom he wrote the sleeve notes for the album, “Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia” in 2006. “Let’s not imagine that this condition afflicts only a few unfortunates”, Fisher wrote;

“Isn’t, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern condition par excellence? The present—broken, desolated is constantly erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories persist intact… Constantly commemorated… I Love 1923…”

If there was any better summation of how the music of The Caretaker captures the aesthetic fragility of our contemporary soundscape, while also perfectly describing what it is to walk around those towns left behind by neoliberalism, I have yet to read it. And I would be inclined to think Kirby would agree as he dedicated his album “Take Care, It’s A Desert Out There” to Fisher following his suicide and donated all the proceeds to the mental health charity MIND.

It should be made clear though that Fisher wasn’t just focused on the niche. He wasn’t a snob. Far from it. What he wanted was what he called “popular modernism”: Cultural productions that could galvanize the collective project of inventing the future while neither dumbing things down nor making them alienating. So perhaps, if there could be said to be snobbery in his work, then it was directed at middle-class snobs in attendence at Glastonbury festival, as described in the piece “The By Now Traditional Glasto Rant”. Those who seemed to use this dalliance away from their home comforts as an opportunity to speculate as to why the hippy dream hadn’t caught on with the masses while listening to whichever musical banality had, for the moment, captured the zeitgeist perform from The Pyramid Stage. Against this, Fisher was more interested in music that could activate something. Music that was, to use the French psychoanalytic parlance of which he was partial, libidinizing. Music that opened up a space of possibility in the listener, which had previously seem entirely closed. But also music that could be shared with others so as to facilitate the viral spread of this feeling of possibility.

One of the most interesting things to read in this collection is Fisher’s appraisal Bryan Ferry—an artist who had made the journey from the working class to being accepted by those Glastonbury snobs. In the essay, “K-Punk, or The Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum”, after an intriguing disquisition on Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality as a way to see what was wrong with the middle-class hippy counter-culture, he moves on to show what is at stake in Ferry’s erotics of narcissistic heterosexuality. Fisher argues that it is this enframing that makes the desires Ferry’s songs express possible in a masochistic sense that is both thrilling but inherently limiting. Against this, he set the posthuman desire found in the work of Grace Jones, who, for Fisher, presents the means to dissolve the subjective tension found in Ferry. But this dissolution provided by Jones won’t be all smiles and rainbows. Like with his writing on Jungle in the mid-1990s, as a part of the CCRU, there is something frightening at stake in the music Fisher considers to have a liberatory potential. There is something in these sounds could help bring an end to the world as we know it, starting with the subject itself.   

It is in this porous space between the material condition of the world, the artifacts that abound in it and the formation of who we believe ourselves to be that we find the connections between Fisher’s music writing and his more directly political projects. In “Capitalist Realism” he recounts the story of a student in his class at the 6th Form College at which he taught (roughly the equivalent of a Danish gymnasium). The student would always either have their earbuds in their ears with the music off or with it playing as they dangled from their neck, so as to never be too far away from diverting themselves from the painful boredom they were required to endure in class. Within the context of his experience as a teacher working with young people on the cusp of accruing ever-increasing amounts of student debt just to be able to keep up, Fisher diagnosed this as a culture of depressive hedonia;

“There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.”

I think this is a vital way to conceptualize the conditions in which we find ourselves today. At least, I recognize myself in it. As I sit here and attempt to write about the work of someone I respected and who has been a considerable influence on my thinking—an influence I think it’s important to share—I am constantly fighting the urge to pull my focus away from the discomfort of this work, which is entangled with the discomforts and uncertainties of life under capitalist realism. A world that makes us sick so we can then pay for the cure.

One of the key themes of Fisher’s work that often garners a great deal of attention is his focus on mental health and his determination that it needs to be considered politically.

“It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”

There are some who take this as a kind of economic determinism, but this is too simple a reading. For Fisher, we are already existentially fragile and yet we have created social conditions in which this fragility is exacerbated and individualized. In the essay “Good For Nothing”, Fisher writes of his difficulty in writing about depression due to the “sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence”. This, he writes, is an “internalized expression of actual social forces”. Forces of a world that has reduced us to economic agents and diligent consumers.

Following this line, I’m glad to see Fisher’s writing be taken up in a Danish context. Denmark is a country that, from a British point view, may appear to have escaped capitalist realism until you learn what to look for. In the writing of critics like Mikkel Krause Frantzen in his book, “En Fremtid Uden Fremtid”, we find a discussion of Fisher’s work as a way to reveal the subtle mechanism of capitalist realism working to individualize depression and keep it apolitical. But as Frantzen points out, a similar foreclosure of the future has taken place here, albeit through slightly different means.    

I want to linger a little longer, however, on this notion of fragility, as one section of this new collection that sits somewhat uncomfortably with me. Less because of its inclusion and more because of its framing in the introductory text by the editor Darren Ambrose. These are the texts that Fisher wrote in response to the affective negativity he experienced online and in activist circles. The most famous of these is an essay with which I have a complicated relationship, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. This essay argues that—in the face of the commodification of so-called identity politics as both a way to build academic careers and cause a sensation on social media—class needs to be made more central in leftist discourse to promote solidarity. And while I read merit in the argument that there is a great deal of toxicity in the mediation of the discussion of racial and gendered oppression through the mechanisms of social media, and I value the notion that we must attend to our relation to Capital to overcome capitalism, it is a mixed up piece of writing the reproduces some of what it rails against. Despite its length, at times, I read this piece as something similar to what you might want to throw back at someone who has outraged you on Facebook, rather than a more carefully constructed argument.

The same is true of other pieces in the collection like “New Comments Policy”. There is something cathartic about these pieces but catharsis was something of which Mark was always suspicious, owing to its tendency to conceal the causes of the pain. I read these pieces as expressing the infiltration of the negative affects of capitalist realism into even the attempts to escape it. The anonymous commenter or the punchy Twitter denouncement of weeks of work in 140 characters are ways in which the reductive logic of capital, which converts all expression into “content”, infests the attempts to use these platforms to move past our social conditions. Despite the valid points that Fisher may have made in these pieces, I’m reluctant to read them in a laudatory way, because that would be to ignore the damaging conditions that produced them. Also, I’m sick of those in the U.S. on the so-called “dirtbag left” who keep pointing to “Vampire Castle” so as to use Fisher as a class reductionist when he so clearly is anything but that.

Towards the end of his life, Fisher was working to reappraise the counter-culture of the 1970s that he had scorned for so many years as being always already co-opted by the forces of capitalism. The most valuable text in this new collection is the previously unpublished unfinished introduction to this work which was to be titled, “Acid Communism”. In this all too short text, we find a fascinating reading of Herbert Marcuse’s “Eros and Civilization” as pointing to the imaginative resources that were missed in the counter-culture and gems of inspirational rhetoric like the following;

“We on the left have had it wrong for a while: it is not that we are anti-capitalist, it is capitalism, with all its visored cops, its teargas, and all the theological niceties its economics, is set up to block the emergence of Red Plenty. The overcoming of capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about wealth creation, capital necessarily and always blocks the production of common wealth.”

But for me, one of the most fascinating turns in this introduction was his emphasis on music. Specifically, the psychedelic funk of The Temptations, in which he finds the very imaginative resources needed to do the task that Marcuse lays out. In the space opened up between the musical exploration, the stretching of the pop song run time, the lyrics of tracks like “Psychedelic Shack,” Fisher argues we can hear what was at that time the sound of “a new humanity, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism”. It is not that we can simply take this up today, but rather that if we want to know what was missed at this near revolutionary moment, what the dreams of the counter-culture were, then this and not The Beatles is where we need to listen. And with this, we may be able to work out what we need to dream today to be able to “invent the future”, which is very much a project for a “we”.

In his moving address at the first annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths, Kodwo Eshun, Fisher’s longtime friend and collaborator, highlighted Mark’s enthusiasm for bringing groups together around ideas. He listed off, what he called, the “scenes” that Mark helped both, directly and indirectly, to bring into being. He calls Mark a midwife, who, through the inspiration of his work, his encouragement and involvement, helped to form groups who could together develop: 

“Theories to live by. Theories that are embodied. Theories that live in us and through us. And with us. And on us.”

Some have called the new collection of Mark’s work a digital-to-analog conversion as most of its contents are available online. So the purpose of this book is less that it should be sold and more that it presents an opportunity for people to come together and talk about what its contents have done and what they still can do. How they can make us think and what they can make us do together. This was really what Mark thought books and theory should do because he already knew that’s what music could do.

Info:“K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)” is out now from Repeater Books. Macon Holt holds a  ph.d. from The Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London and is the current editor of Passive/Aggressive. He has written for Atlas, Blacklisted Copenhagen and The Ark Review.

Af Morten Østergaard Rasmussen

Den 28. maj 1990 døde den amerikanske komponist Julius Eastman, 49 år gammel. I løbet af 70’erne og begyndelsen af 80’erne havde han fået etableret sig både som sanger, pianist, danser og ikke mindst komponist. Han var fast samarbejdspartner med Arthur Russell og var den første mandlige sanger i Merediths Monks kor, hvor han bl.a. var med til at indspille stykket “Dolmen Music”, der i dag nok mest er kendt for at været blevet samplet på DJ Shadows nummer “Midnight in a Perfect World”.

I løbet af sin karriere skrev Eastman også en lang række minimalistiske værker, der både udforskede alternative instrumenteringer samt temaer, der trak på hans egen homoseksualitet og afroamerikanske baggrund. Disse stykker var med til at sikre ham et navn som en af USA’s helt store undergrundskomponister, og piratoptagelser florerede i vidt omfang på kassettebånd mellem hans beundrere. Men trods al denne opmærksomhed og succes huskes Eastman dog i dag primært for at være blevet glemt.

Eastmans problemer med stofmisbrug førte til, at hans liv faldt fra hinanden, hvilket bl.a. medførte, at en stor del af hans partiturer blev beslaglagt og dernæst efterladt på gaden af New Yorks politi, da han i starten af 80’erne blev sat ud af sin lejlighed. Den tragiske måde, hvorpå Eastmans liv løb ud i sandet, havde altså den konsekvens, at en lang række af hans værker gik tabt. Ligeledes var hans løse kompositionsstil ofte bygget på en idé om samarbejdet mellem komponist og musiker, hvilket efter Eastmans død betød, at det som regel krævede en mundtlig overlevering fra nogle af Eastmans samarbejdspartnere, før andre musikere forstod hensigten med de ofte meget minimalistiske partiturer. Det er altså ikke helt uden grund, at eftertiden har haft svært ved at holde liv i Eastmans musik.

Det var først i 2005, at optagelser af Eastmans værker blev officielt udgivet på “Unjust Malaise”, en compilation, der var resultatet af komponisten Mary Jane Leachs mangeårige arbejde med at finde både partiturer og optagelser af Eastmans stykker. Efterfølgende er en række af hans værker blevet opført forskellige steder i verden, samtidig med at interessen for den glemte komponist har været stigende de sidste par år. Mystikken om de fragmenterede rester af Eastmans karriere har kun været med til at styrke denne interesse, der har medført, at han nu ses som et af den amerikanske minimalismes oversete genier.

På trods af interessen er det dog først med pladeselskabet Blumes udgivelse “The Nigger Series”, at nogle af Eastmans værker udgives på vinyl. Pladen samler optagelserne fra “Unjust Malaise” af de tre længere stykker med de aggressive titler “Gay Guerilla”, “Evil Nigger” og “Crazy Nigger”, alle tre oprindeligt skrevet for fire vilkårlige, men identiske instrumenter, hvilket her er fire flygler. Allerede ved at se på titlerne står det klart, at Eastmans dagsorden er radikalt politisk. Alligevel er selve kompositionerne ikke særligt komplekse. Rent formalistisk set er de så tilpas simple, at det næsten kan virke helt overflødigt at beskrive deres form.

Udgangspunktet for alle tre værker er brusende og ustoppelige tonegentagelser, der vender sig fra det polyfoniske og i stedet består af et utal af stemmer, som blandes sammen og er rettet direkte mod harmonien som udtryksform. Værkerne er således en samling af konstante skift mellem vellyd og himmelråbende dissonans, der påkalder følelsen af frustration og forvirring, og hvert stykkes voldsomme længde er med til at styrke disse følelser, der nogle gange dyrker det sentimentale og nærmest ynkelige for dernæst at slynge en intens vrede ud mellem de mange stemmer. En vrede, der nemt kan knyttes til de tematikker, som fremgår af titlerne på de tre stykker og de frustrationer, der knytter sig til livet som homoseksuel eller sort i USA.

Pladens åbningsstykke, “Gay Guerilla”, kan med sine 29 minutter og inkonsistente variationer over simple 1/8- og 1/16-ostinater nærmest bedst beskrives som en ustyrlig mutation af temaet til “Downton Abbey”, mens “Evil Nigger”, der strækker sig over 21 minutter, er et studie i forskellige droner, der kaster sig mellem spænding og forløsning for flere gange undervejs at mødes i en unison nedgang.

Selvom de to stykker er ambitiøse og i den grad værd at lytte til, så er det uden tvivl “Crazy Nigger”, der er pladens mest interessante værk. De simple rytmiske strukturer er stadig det gældende udgangspunkt, men her bliver de strakt ud over 55 minutter. Samtidig river den ellers simple struktur sig flere gange løs, mens harmonierne til tider fremstår mere som en samling af melodier end som harmoniske blokke af stemmer. Ligeledes bliver disse harmonier forstyrret af hakkende og skarpt markerede enkelttoner, der fremkalder en ekstrem dissonans, der kun styrker den følelse af frustration, forvirring og vrede, der har præget de to tidligere stykker. De mere blide og krystalklare harmonier, som sniger sig ind, får i denne kontekst en ildevarslende klang, der indvarsler større og større følelsesudbrud.

Derfor er det især på “Crazy Nigger”, at Eastmans ekstreme og insisterende stil kommer til udtryk, for her vokser den verden af følelser, man er blevet introduceret til, sig større end idéen om, hvad et klaver kan udrette.

Eastmans tre klaverværker placerer sig midt i den stolte tradition, der omkranser de amerikanske minimalistiske komponister som monolitterne Steve Reich og Philip Glass og mere spirituelle afvigere som La Monte Young, der alle tre også har prøvet kræfter med klaverets muligheder: Med stykket “Six Pianos” forvandler Steve Reich et klaverensemble til en dynamisk og pulserende masse af skarpe rytmiske strukturer ved hjælp af sin karakteristiske brug af “phasing”, mens La Monte Young tålmodigt i en seks timer lang meditation undersøger klaverets uendeligt mange klange på “The Well-Tuned Piano”. Ligeledes er Philip Glass’ forskellige klaverstykker ofte et studie i repetitionens effekt på simple melodier og harmonier.

Selvom der ikke er nogen tvivl om, at Eastman er minimalist, passer hverken “Gay Guerilla”, “Evil Nigger” eller “Crazy Nigger” ind nogle steder mellem disse andre klaverværker. Stilen er langt mere konfronterende og er et modsvar på nogle store tematikker, der ikke kun bygger på musikalske idéer, men også frustrationer over den verden, vi lever i. Hvor både Reichs, La Monte Youngs og Glass’ klaverværker primært er musik for musikkens egen skyld (hvilket ikke nødvendigvis er en dårlig ting), så vil Eastmans værker mere end det. Selvom stykkerne på “Nigger Series” er bygget på et simpelt rytmisk grundlag, så kan de alligevel fremkalde følelserne af vrede, angst og frustration, der knytter sig til at være del af en minoritet i USA. Eastmans musik kan altså lige så meget ses som en kommentar til sociale forhold i hans samtid som et intenst take på minimalismen. Det er derfor ikke helt meningsløst, at Eastman bruger ord som “gay” og “nigger” til at beskrive sine egne værker.

Blumes genudgivelse af Julius Eastmans tre ambitiøse klaverværker er vigtig ikke bare i forhold til den mytologi, der efterhånden omkranser Eastman og hans værker men også hele den minimalistiske tradition i USA. “Nigger Series” formår effektivt at fremkalde helt grundlæggende følelser gennem helt grundlæggende rytmiske strukturer, og resultatet er et sonisk rum, der fremkalder narrativer, som formår at skabe en forbindelse mellem lytterens grundlæggende følelser og værkernes behandling af homoseksualitet og race.

Info: “The Nigger Series” udkom på Blume i december 2018. Indspilninger af de tre værker er tidligere udkommet på New World Records som en del af compilationen “Unjust Malaise”, der også inkluderer andre kammerværker af Julius Eastman. P/A anbefaler desuden BBC Radio 4-podcasten “Un-Forgetting Julius Eastman” fra november 2018.

Percy Records 2 years, Mayhem and Bolsjefabrikken, February 2nd 2019 – live report by Ivna Franić

It’s almost hard to believe that Copenhagen’s Percy Records has only just turned two. In the brief couple of years it’s been around Percy has come to be more than just a record store, with occasional record release parties and afternoon DJ sets contributing to the place’s image of a social hub for local DJs, artists, electronic music fans and vinyl aficionados. It’s small wonder, then, that Percy’s second birthday celebration was all about chill atmosphere and friendly vibes.

The first part of the two-phase program took place at Mayhem featuring four live perfomances, the first one being by Panxing. Her fragmented mesh of organic piano parts, spoken lyrics, abrasive noises, and electronic sounds and beats may have come across as incoherent at times but the overall feeling she created was definitely refreshing and highly engaging. The most notable moment was probably when she sent a shockwave through the audience after suddenly introducing a really loud beat nobody seemed to have been ready for. It was like when you’re watching a horror movie at the cinema and everyone freaks out at a scary scene only to start embarrassingly laughing at themselves a moment later. In any case, Panxing provided an intriguing start to the night both musically and in helping set up a relaxed mood.

Perhaps it was due to the fact that he wasn’t a scene regular like the rest of the acts on the live bill, or perhaps he just always delivers stunning sets – either way the performance by Daniele Guerrini a.k.a Heith, co-founder of Milan’s Haunter Records, was a definitive highlight of the evening. Building up on the repetitive sounds he kicked off his set with, he slowly added beats and other elements to the half-ambient, half-clubby soundscape creating an deeply immersive listening experience. The set’s near-faultless flow was unexpectedly cut in half by a power outage but Heith seemed unbothered by the whole situation, confidently continuing where he left off even though it would still have been an amazing set had he just ended it at the abrupt break.

As it started getting late, the general feel loosened up quite a bit and as if they had recognized this, the rest of the live acts took the friendly, birthday-celebrating nature of the event as an opportunity to try out some new things and have fun while they were at it. KhalilH2OP went into a full-on Summer festival mode, reducing the role of often dominant autotuned vocals in favor of heavy beats leaning more towards dancehall and grime than hip-hop and r’n’b … A pretty bold move, but hey, the crowd seemed to dig it. Whether this might have actually been a sneak peek into their new record remains yet to see. In retrospect, it feels like KhalilH2OP’s set might have fit in better before Heith as what followed later seemed to perfectly build up on the techno foundations he had laid out.

Croatian Amor and Varg joined forces for techno set that ended up being, well, actually a lot more fun than most of their solo performances in the past couple of years. Moving from Atonal-style, Roly Porter-ish dark, pulsating techno always just on the verge of releasing its accumulated tension, through some properly cheesy techno, all the way to d’n’b and whatnot, the whole thing was just pure, unpretentious fun. By the time they finished their set at Mayhem, local legend DJHvad was already hard at work over at Bolsjefabrikken, with DJ sets by UK’s Beneath and Mother to follow.

Although on paper the idea of kicking the evening off at Mayhem and then moving just across the yard to Bolsjefabrikken seemed genius, in practice this sudden change of the setting felt a little odd as the two venues have completely different vibes, but it probably only took a little while to adjust to the new setting. All in all, it was a highly enjoyable evening featuring a couple of sets that went beyond the category of providing a friendly support to the record store that does exactly the same for the local music scene.

Percy Records 2 Years: Panxing, Khalil, Heith, Croatian Amor & Varg, HVAD @ Mayhem & Bolsjefabrikken. Photos by Cameron Pagett.

Body2Body, March 16th & 22nd @ TAPE, Aarhus – live preview by Ivna Franic

Aarhus is in for two pretty sickening events this month – headlined by Lee Gamble and DJ Lag, respectively, and organized by Body2Body, a local club night promoting genre-bending music, pairing cutting edge international acts with leading local talent, and putting a focus on the visuals.

Body2Body has so far put on events featuring acts like DJ Nigga Fox, Jana Rush, RP Boo, DJ PayPal and others, with the two forthcoming events following a similar trail. One could even get the impression that tense club music styles such as ghetto-tech, ghetto house, juke or grime are much more of a “thing” in Aarhus than they are on the techno-dominated Copenhagen scene.

When asked about the audience preferences and their response to the previous events, the organizers remarked that the “audience responses have been overwhelming. Seeing even very young individuals interested in the most “out-there” music is special. It does seem like there has always been a taste for ghetto tech or tense club music styles in this city and why this is, is probably too complicated for anyone to guess. Perhaps it has to do with the city sharing a comparatively large footprint with dirty, heavy industry, that makes for a thirst for hard music. It certainly seems to have that effect on us.”

Can their forward-thinking bookings be seen as a way to promote diversity, underrepresented music genres, and new trends in underground club music? No and yes, the organizers replied.

“Our mission in the ecology of the Aarhus night-life scene is simply to bring the flowers of the world on display in the darkest, deepest bowels of this city. There was a longing to experience nights in our hometown, consisting of really intentionally thought out lineups, with a focus on contemporary developments within dance music. In the process, diversity and openness should come naturally and is never ever something that is laid out intentionally, as a working dogma. It is however central to the colourfulness of Body2body listings, and if somehow we failed to uphold this standard, we’d shut the whole thing down immediately. Bury it. Hopefully, the fauna that we’re experiencing will shed some of their seeds and help diversify the ecosystem of Aarhus, to secure a (very intentional) higher meaning of the work,” the organizers said about Body2Body’s mission in the context of music and club scene in Aarhus.

The international guest at the first of the upcoming events – scheduled for this Saturday, March 16th – is London-based composer, producer and DJ Lee Gamble. He is having a busy year, putting out the follow-up to 2017’s exquisite “Mnestic Pressure” in the form of three separate EPs exploring “the aggressive onslaught of visual & sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces”, employing his usual arsenal of abstract jungle, ambient and experimental techno. Hyperdub released “In a Paraventral Scale”EP , the first part to make up the “Flush Real Pharynx” LP, just last month. Gamble also runs UIQ, a record label counting among its releases Nkisi’s stunning debut LP from earlier this year, and Zuli’s much lauded 2018 album.

Hailing from Durban, South Africa is DJ Lag, the international act leading the bill of the March 22nd event. Although he may only have two EPs under his belt so far, released via Goon Club Allstars, the “king of gqom” has been around for a while and has played one of the key roles in propelling gqom onto the international dance music scene. Over the past few years, Lag has brought the infectious sound of gqom to clubs around the world – and some of us were lucky enough to catch his stunning set at last year’s Intonal Festival in Malmo.

Joining DJ Lag on March 22nd is the Danish legend HVAD, while KhalilH20P will be playing alongside Lee Gamble on March 16th.

Info: Lee Gamble and KhalilH20P perform at TAPE on March 16 (RSVP), and DJLag + HVAD play at the same venue the following Friday, March 22 (RSVP).

Interview by Mathias Ruthner

Though having existed for more than 15 years, the forthcoming album, “Low Distance”, is only Deaf Center’s third full-length release. Since the Norwegian duo released their first EP, “Neon City”, their output has been somewhat sparse due to the geographical distance between its two members and their wide range of other collaborative and solo outputs. Since the start of their collaboration Erik Skodvin has recorded music in his own name and as Svarte Greiner and also produced and released music on the Miasmah label, while Otto Totland has collaborated with Huw Roberts under the Nest moniker and also released two solo piano records on acclaimed Berlin label Sonic Pieces.

The duo’s sound has definitely evolved throughout their existence, from the more organic and murky sounding “Pale Ravine” to the abrasive strings and heavier sound of 2011’s “Owl Splinters”, they have been operating within the realm of the dark ambient, post-classical and drone-heavy sound, which they have played a considerable part in developing and demarcating. However, “Low Distance”certainly marks a new direction in their collaborative effort.

While the tracks are still centered around Totland’s piano and Skodvin’s strings, “Low Distance”  introduces a varied use of analogue electronics which helps create a warmer and more approachable sound. The unmistakable melancholic feel of Deaf Center is no less present than before but it has found a lighter, more spacious and less eerie form of expression. This development seems only natural in the light of their most recent solo recordings and the fact that recording sessions took place in Nils Frahm’s Funkhaus studio.

We have asked Erik Skodvin to tell us about the forthcoming album. This was what he had to say about the work process and the dynamics of his and Totland’s collaboration:

The amount of time between our records seems to be expanding. We don’t plan to have such long breaks. It seems to happen naturally. We both live in different places and have different lives, so we don’t just meet up and make music together. These days it needs to be something special to put us together in a situation where new music will come out. Usually this happens the few times we play live – as we mostly improvise. This time, we got a chance to use Nils’ new Funkhaus studio for some days while he was away, back in the summer of 2017. The basis for the album came out of these days. “Owl Splinters”was made together with Nils as a co-producer back in 2011. This time we just used his studio together with engineer Antonio Pulli for a three-day session, which was a both fruitful and frustrating experience.

The change of sound or direction is also a rather natural progress I’d say. It still feels very Deaf Center to us, but the record came out more restrained this time than with “Owl Splinters”. I have no real explanation behind it. But not everything has to be loud or in your face to have some sort of personal frustration. I feel our music was often about escape, both on personal terms and with the world itself.

“Low Distance” feels more tonal/atonal, spacious and electronic to us than our previous albums. This also comes out of the custom made “Miasmachine” built by Derek Holzer, which became a bigger part of my live setup. A residency I had at EMS studios in Stockholm was also a big influence. The record was partly mixed and recorded there, including some Buchla sounds. These factors made their touch on the album, as well as Otto’s increasing development as a piano player and improviser.

Actually, several of the tracks on the record are fully improvised pieces with few additional elements added to them. On the other hand, some other pieces are collaged together in extreme detail. Deaf Center is often about contrasts fighting towards a meeting point.

“Neon City“ was for sure a turning point or more of a focal point in our sound. We’d both been making music for years seperately in basements with computers and samples. That EP somehow made our sound come to a culmination, something that had a unique voice that we could follow.

This was shaped even more with “Pale Ravine“. Back then it was a lot of sample-use and looping / layering with lo-fi techniques. I tend to collage, pitch-shift and layer sound in a distance. I’m still doing this, though in a different way. For me our meetings as Deaf Center make me think somehow less abstract than with Svarte Greiner or in another collaboration. Deaf Center has become my more available project. For Otto I feel it’s a bit the other way around. His solo piano albums are timeless pieces that can be enjoyed by practically anyone. So for him, Deaf Center could be seen as a more abstract way of incorporating piano into an album. It becomes a more loose way of improvising and exploring sounds rather than thinking melody and composition, although this mixes sometimes.

I feel the Deaf Center sound is following me more in the recent times when I’ve been making music for film and I don’t need to think project-based. But personally I enjoy exploring sound too much to only stick to one thing.

Info: ”Low Distance” will be released by Sonic Pieces on March 22. Deaf Center will play live at Mayhem in Copenhagen in May 2019.

Interview by Klaus Q Hedegaard

This Saturday Extremely Rotten Productions hosts a death metal summit at the Mayhem venue in Copenhagen, with a lineup of some of the most vile and forceful danish bands ruling the death metal underground right now. A second infestation will take place at Pumpehuset in May! Full info below the interview.

Founder of Extremely Rotten Productions, David “Torturdød” Mikkelsen, is also a founding member of the bands Undergang and Phrenelith (and others) with several releases on some of the most respected contemporary death metal record labels out there. So why would he even bother to start up his own label and open a physical store on the outskirts of Copenhagen? We asked him about the current state of rotten death metal in Denmark.

P/A: The underground death metal scene seems stronger than ever in these years – also thriving in Copenhagen with a flock of new local bands doing well, and an abundance of international bands and tours coming by all year round, which is topped off by the internationally recognized Kill-Town Death Fest of course. Extremely Rotten Productions and your bands seem to be involved and/or mentioned in almost everything related to underground death metal here. Feeling guilty? And how did this happen? 

E.R.P.: “I don’t know much about that, I just try to focus on doing cool things that I like and love with and for my friends, both locally and internationally. I’ve always felt that a good way to make sure a friendship takes a step further than “just” going out drinking together could be to play in a band together or at least me helping the bands of people I like. Death metal is a big part of my life so I just enjoy doing what I love and create something fun along the way with people I like and/or respect for their creative outputs, I’m happy if people out there take notice and like it too. In the end, I’m a simple man with simple needs and pleasures, really.”

P/A: Undergang releases have been coming out on some very distinguished death metal underground labels in recent years (Me Saco Un Ojo, Dark Descent, Xtreem Music) and have been received with positive evil praise all over the world. From an outer perspective Undergang seem to be well represented business wise. So what was the motivation and idea of starting up Extremely Rotten Productions?

E.R.P.: “It’s really cool that Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Dark Descent Records has gotten to be big underground death metal labels now and I’m happy to be a part of their band family, it’s also funny since our debut album with Undergang “Indhentet af døden” was released on LP by MSUO back in 2010 as the labels only second release.

Jesus of MSUO suggested that we released a flexi 7” supporting our first US West Coast tour in 2011 through MSUO and DDR to help get the word out in the US too and during our show in Denver on that tour Matt of DDR drove out to see us, and I met him there the first time, where he said he was interested in releasing our music in the future when our deal with Xteem Music had ended. So we stayed in touch and when our 2-albums deal with Xtreem Music ended after our second album “Til døden os skiller” in 2012, we started working on our third album which would then be the first of the continued relationship with MSUO and for the first time DDR. So, the way I see it, MSUO and DDR and Undergang have grown together into what all parties are today and I’m very excited about the whole thing.

But back to the question about Extremely Rotten Prod., I actually started up the label in 2011 to release a cassette tape called “T.D.O.S.” as a promo/teaser for the second Undergang album, just in time for the mentioned West Coast tour above. I had run a distro since 2006 before that I had a bit of a network already, besides what I had build up with Undergang up till then too, so I managed to sell (trade, give away… whatever?!) more than what I recall as 800 copies of that “T.D.O.S”. promo and thought it’d be fun to continue doing tapes of my own music and expand to other releases I liked (like re-issuing Corpse Vomit “Drowning in Puke” as our only second release) and friend’s bands as I wanted to support. It it was a bit on and off for the first handful of years, but then I started it up a bit more aggressively in more recent years.”

P/A: Despite physical record stores closing down everywhere, you opened a record store on the brink of Copenhagen (Grækenlandsvej, Amager)? 

E.R.P.: “Yeah and we’re getting close to having been open for a year soon, we had our first official opening day on June 9^th 2018. Sadly I’ll be out of the country as an extended trip away, when Undergang plays our first Canadian show in Calgary at the same time, so I guess we’ll make a bit of a delayed first year anniversary when we’re back. The growing stock of the distro and merch for my bands had started to overflow my living room, so it was taking over our lives at home for my girlfriend Jenny (whom I also run the E.R.P. store with) and I – so something needed to change. I’m pretty sure she would have strangled me and buried my body in hundreds of shirts if we would have stayed there anyway, haha.

So we started looking for a new and bigger place to live and came by the joined apartment and store on Amager where we’ve now moved to. Financially, if I was trying to run a store as my only income and specializing in death metal I’d likely been out on the street already, but since I still work part time in some loser-job as the loser I am and we live in the back, I can afford running the store and paying for my share of the bills of everything too. This also explains why we’re only steadily open on weekends, except when we’re out playing with Undergang, Phrenelith or away on vacation and such. We do the occasional opening hours based on appointments too, if people can’t reach us in the weekends. So if you’re reading things and thinking that Fridays and Saturdays are not good for you but you’d like to visit our death metal store, drop us an email and we’ll work it out.”

P/A: Extremely Rotten Productions are hosting shows at the venues Mayhem and Pumpehuset. How did this come about? Can we expect this to be a regular event?

E.R.P.: “I don’t really enjoy doings shows, or festivals for that matter, but I decided that it’d be fun to host shows which (in my own selfish way) is a gathering of my friends playing in bands that I like, so we can play together and make a fun evening out of it together with anyone else that cares. Dealing with people in bands that I don’t know, I feel like I’ve done enough and it always makes me a feel a bit uncomfortable, so this time around I just want it to be fun and try to mainly deal with people I already have a relationship with.

So these first two Extremely Rotten Death Metal shows takes the form, that number 1 on Saturday on March 23^rd is with our ‘local’ scene in Copenhagen right now (Taphos, Deiquisitor, Chaotian, Hyperdontia and Phrenelith) at the venue Mayhem on outer Østerbro/Nørrebro, and number 2 (uh huh huh… “Number two”…” ) show will be on Friday May 10th in Pumpehuset in central Copenhagen, where they’ve been friendly and helpful enough to help a slightly stronger economy of the show, so we can bring down Finnish death metal bands Convulse and Cadaveric Incubator. And then our local bands Chaotian and Undergang.

Based on an idea from Pumpehuset’s side we’ll divide the show sort of in two and have Chaotian and Undergang play ‘early’ outside on the Byhaven stage and then later in the evening the show moves indoors where Convulse and Cadaveric Incubator will rip it up on the small stage. I hope that the weather will be with us so it can be a cool day in the sun with drinks in Byhaven before moving inside in the evening. And yeah, we’re already slowly working on the 3^rd volume to take place, likely in October or November. So keep an eye gouged for our extremely rotten activities still to come!”

P/A: A quick glance of fellow fans at shows in Copenhagen, shows a well-balanced mix between ‘elderly’ fans from the first wave of Danish death metal heydays in the 90s, and new kids with a more urban and modern approach to the genre. What’s your view of the contemporary death metal scene in Denmark right now – and its future?

E.R.P.: “Having only been a part of things for little over the past 15 years myself, I can’t speak too much about what it was like when death metal was still a new and revolutionary thing, but during my time being involved in going to shows, etc. I feel like things haven’t been this active and happening for the past 10 years than it is now. I’m not too sure about Denmark as a whole, as I sadly don’t hear too much or get too much interest from outside out little nest in Copenhagen, but things here in the capital are good, I believe. We have a decent amount of shows to go to (though lately it has been a bit sparse, haha) and the new local scene with Taphos and Deiquisitor and newer Chaotian and Dead Void, besides my own bands doing our best to leave a mark and share the word, that death metal is a thing in Copenhagen.

There seems to be a decent interest in what we do here in Denmark from what seems like mainly outside the country, but I hope we can raise a bit more interest and support here at home too. With the Kill-Town Death Fest being a thing in the past and then with their resurrecting again last year and this year, I think our country looks like a very happening death metal place to the rest of the world, though it’s only really just the usual 15 people doing things that stand out and gets noticed… At least in my circles. Whatever, what do I know, I like what is going on and I’m lucky enough to get to travel with my bands and see more cool shit and hear that people actually notice what is going on in Denmark right now, more than what we did when, say, Undergang first started being about to go out and tour, etc.

Things are what they are and if you’re not happy with it, do something about it yourself… That’s what I did and I’ll continue to do so for as long as I can imagine right now… To anyones liking or not.

Thanks for doing this interview and for the interest in my doings! And to you out there for reading and possibly caring. Death Metal – Death Metal – Death Metal!”

Info: Extremely Rotten Volume 1 features Chaotian, Deiquisitor, Hyperdontia, Phrenelith, Taphos on March 23 at Mayhem (rsvp). Volume 2 takes place at Pumpehuset on May 10 with Convulse (FI), Undergang, Cadaveric Incubator (FI), Chaotian. (rsvp)

Interview by Peter Jørgensen

Following the output and inherent growth of composer Sean McCann has been a joyous ride for me for the past couple of years. His personal and fresh approach to composing and combining sound worlds has made for some of the past years’ most interesting releases. With the added bonus of being refreshingly ignorant of “the latest trend”.

Besides his output as a composer, McCann (born 1988) has since 2012 curated an increasingly essential output on his own label, Recital. A wondrous and ever surprising combination of out-of-print half forgotten masterpieces such as Daniel Schmidt’s “In My Arms, Many Flowers” and Loren Connors’ “Airs”, intertwined with new offerings by the likes of omnipresent Sarah Davachi and McCann himself.

He has previously described his ambition with Recital to release “more focused, lasting music” and celebrate “what is significant and exciting in contemporary music”.

In the liner notes for the work “Pistons” he described himself as having “a hard time enjoying anything unless I am multitasking”. A statement which makes absolute sense to anyone who has listened to McCann’s liberating mixture of chamber orchestration, percussive elements, voices singing and reciting and more digitally processed, otherworldly sounds. While distinctly visceral and personal his works offer much space for the listener. To find one’s own place or perspective within the textures. For the listener, McCann’s microcosms of sound brings a sense of walking through a landscape. Being attentive to all sounds, attributing meaning, focus or importance by desire.

The music is at the same time easily accessible and quite complex. The pieces are loaded with hints and references, but feels freshly unacademic and full of life.

I’m always deeply fascinated when watching a real craftsman at work, performing his métier. I got interested in knowing more about what had shaped this output. What kind of musical upbringing did McCann have?

I got in touch with McCann to discover how he arrived where he is, and specifically, how he works.

PJ: I would like to start out by asking you to share a memory. Can you recall your first memory of sound? What and where it was?

SM: “I was young, perhaps three years old. My mother singing to me while I lay in bed, curled in blankets. An orange hall-light on leaking into the bedroom. In the dark and calm room, she was singing »…mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.«”

PJ: When was the first time you felt you created some music? Not just learned to play something on an instrument, but had the experience of making something of your own?

SM: “I became enamored with the software Fruity Loops when I was in 7th grade, and would spend all idle hours working on covers of Misfits songs or Smashing Pumpkins songs, I remember drawing out the entirety of “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” on the piano-roll interface. This then morphed quickly into my own variations and emulations of those sorts of songs. Fruity Loops turned into an early DAW called Cakewalk, when I picked up real instruments and started making CDs for myself. I would make one copy of the album, print out artwork and paint covers, print out an insert. I recorded probably 12 albums of bedroom/strange/primal music, none of which will ever be heard by another person (for my sake and yours).

PJ: It seems to me creating the music and presenting the music has been two sides of the same coin from the start. Not only making a song, but recording it and presenting it in a given format.
Is that accurate and could you maybe elaborate on the interaction between composing and curating?

SM: “I am a plotter. I rarely work on anything without first preparing a home for it to live in. Decisive moves are made early on; it makes me happy to do it that way. Presentation is considered immediately. As a collector of shadow boxes, cataloguing and showcasing figures and ideas is comforting.”

PJ: How did you get into making music in the first place?

SM: “I started as a drummer in third grade, when I was about seven years old. Music is in my family; my parents love music and my sister is a pianist (I will be publishing a 7″ record by her this year on Recital). I played drums in reggae bands, punk bands, prog bands etc. It was in Jr. High School when I began branching out to other instruments, landing sweetly on my mother’s childhood viola.”

PJ: Have you formally studied composition?

SM: “No, I have not, but I have taught myself to notate and write scores (both formally and informally). I am glad I slid down the path I did (non-academically). Although, I’ll never know what would’ve happened had I studied John Adams or Robert Filliou in college. I’d probably be more bold.”

PJ: I had listened to a couple of your more drone oriented records back around 2010-11 maybe and enjoyed them, but I was very surprised in the best possible way when “Music for Private Ensemble” came out. It felt like quite a leap from your former albums. Like you were communicating or expressing yourself much more clearly and honest.
Does that make sense to you? And if so, can you maybe tell a bit about that process of searching and finding?

SM: “Yes, I needed to do a lot of ruminating to get to that point. Well, to be clear, first I needed to do a lot of experimenting. Thus, why I published so many small releases (around 30) in 2007-2010. Each album was an experiment, all building and learning from the last. None of those are any good, really. Then, in 2010 I moved to Los Angeles and took a break from music for a few months. Instead spending wild nights with my new roommates, not worrying much about anything at all. It was during this hiatus when I decided to start Recital, my record label – which is probably the best decision I’ve ever made.

My interests in sound-art and chamber music had really flowered by 2011. I needed to move on from my ambient/electronic sounds. Currently, exploring new ideas, especially conceptual ideas, is exhausting and time-consuming. Though, this was before that mentality clasped ahold. At this point a new move had been bottled up for some time, and the carbonated “Private” and “Public Ensemble” exploded easily.”

PJ: Where does a new piece of music start for you? Is it the sound or feel of a certain texture that gets you going, a specific instrumentation, specific musicians, an emotion, a more philosophical approach?

SM: “It is a place; a presentation of a place. I start with a consideration of what it is for (a performance or commission) or where it is going (album format). This never used to be the case: it used to be the opposite of this, entirely thrown together layer by layer from a sound or texture I like. Now it is not that way. I sometimes fear that I’ve lost the ability to just improvise a recording, as now everything needs a purpose. I figure I am young enough to be able to try everything and lapse again and again, I hope.”

PJ: Could you maybe describe the journey of a piece – from the first idea to finished recording? Do you have established work routines? How is your workflow and what are your tools?

SM: “I will use the piece “Portraits of Friars” as an example. The piece was premiered as part of Edition Festival in Stockholm at the beginning of 2018. The piece was commissioned by John Chantler, who runs the festival. He told me I had a lot of players at my disposal, so I could dream up nearly anything. It ended up being written for 10 performers.

I love the Blackfriars pub in London. There are as you may expect portraits of friars and clergymen all over the pub walls. I have many calm and beautiful memories there, so I decided to turn it into something audible. This was the place of the piece.

The piece is courtly and tonal, with bizarre text splashed on-top. Etched metals with biblical imagery… nooks and crannies to safely sink in… a fireplace. The influx of rambunctious humans and subverted thoughts set in such sweetly fake surroundings. Beautiful.

In the piece, each player has a page of text elements to recite, and each player has ten composed phrases to cycle through at their own pace, the texts have nearly nothing to do with the pub, but more with the place I was at mentally while in London and shortly afterwards. I wrote all of the text while on a cruise ship with my sister.

The real direction I give is to start with only text recitation and to slowly over-cross into playing music for the course of 15 minutes. The words and texts shuffle randomly within one another. The final 10 minutes are purely musical.

I permit a lot of freedom to the players in my pieces, meaning they can choose their favorite phrases (textually and musically). I don’t like the idea of making a performer play something they don’t like. The players were great, very talented. We did about two hours of practice, then a few hours later the piece was performed at the festival.

It was recorded with stereo room microphones, not the best recording due to the nature of the event. I tried to EQ it and process it to sound better, but I could only do so much. It would be nice to re-record it in a studio one day, although admittedly, fidelity does not matter so much to me (in these contexts). The piece was longer than 25 minutes, entailing that it be placed on a CD, released within a book I published called Saccharine Scores, as opposed to an LP which would have been more successful, perhaps.”

PJ: I sense that your composition work is happening as much after the recording sessions as before. Is this true and if so, what does this approach bring?

SM: “On my albums “Music for Public Ensemble” and “Music for Private Ensemble” it was belabored work. Excruciating editing. I have not done that since. I have worked exclusively on compositions/commissions. I think I will go back to “frame-fucking” (as they call it in post-production) my pieces again, but not for a while.”

PJ: Do you hear the music in your head, before writing and recording?

SM: “I don’t hear it in my head, I paint with one element at a time. I choose carefully and love and hate the surprise of hearing it fused together.”

PJ: I know composers who prefer to only write music for people they know intimately, and some who love the thought of writing a piece that in theory could be played by everyone (capable).
I am interested to know if you write a piece with a specific performer in mind (his/her personality, abilities, tone etc) or rather write for a specific instrument like “a vibraphone”.
Do you think of a commissioned piece as a one off, or something to revisit by yourself or other performers?

SM: “My pieces could be performed and interpreted by anyone that is interested. There is no exclusivity. In fact, I love the idea of that variation in presentation and digestion. I always want someone to bring their character into the work, and I usually leave open windows in scores for that purpose.

I have written for specific instruments. Last year I wrote a solo vibraphone piece for American percussionist Jackson Graham, called “Violet Fat”. Along with “Folded Rose”, a solo piano piece commissioned by Michael Vincent Waller. In both pieces I have the performers use their voice, humming and singing softly. Generating a proximity or a second dimension to the fragile solos. I hope to do more of this work.”

PJ: What are you working on this spring?
SM: “I am finishing a new LP of mine called “Puck”, which I have been working on for a year. It is a single work stretched over two sides. In addition to juggling the rainbow of Recital tendrils, I hope to learn to read German.”

Musik Til Mor “ζωή” (Aftenrutine, 2019) – Interview af Nils Bloch-Sørensen

I dag udkommer Musik Til Mors niende album, “ζωή” [zåæh]. Et langt stream of consciousness fatamorgana, der langsomt borer sig ind i hjertet af det spirituelle. Albummet er overstrøet med litterære og bibelske referencer og uddrag, der blander sig med de sagte toner, der visse steder giver mindelser om Under Byen og postrockens stille stunder.

Rasmus Bak har, som Musik Til Mor, siden 2012 udgivet en lind strøm af sagte, men afgrundsdybe plader. Det er ikke musik, der gør det store væsen ud af sig, men musik, som arbejder i det stille. “ζωή” er for så vidt en fuldstændigt sømløs fortsættelse af Musik Til Mors forsagte univers, men føles alligevel som et radikalt nybrud. Langt mere litterært og religiøst funderet, og det er endnu et skridt væk fra den ekstreme selvudlevering, der karakteriserede særligt de tidlige plader. Nu er det ikke længere blot det biografiske, men den personlige relation til det spirituelle, der er i centrum. Den dagdrømmende kvalitet, der altid har karakteriseret Musik Til Mor, antager nu bønnens form. Messende. Syn i den religiøse trance.

Musikkens højstemt sakrale karakter reddes fra det patetiske gennem sin underspillethed. Som i en lang svævende tankeflugt føles alle detaljer slørede, ikke afgrænsede, sammenvævede. En lang strøm af billeder. Den ene melodilinje overtager den næste. Som blev man trukket over en glat flodbund. Mellem tang bumpende ind i ujævnheder, sten, ord, melodilinjer. Ubesværet glidende med strømmen.

Baks albums har altid arbejdet aktivt med anonymitet, hvilket ikke er det samme som mangel på indhold. På samme måde som en mannequindukkes blanke ansigt er designet til at være proxy for den handlendes, er Musik Til Mor ikke domineret af afsenderens personlighed, men skaber et rum, alle er tilladt at indskrive deres egen historie i. Et personløst personligt rum. En ramme om en identitetsløs intimitet.

P/A: Du skriver i pressemeddelelsen til “ζωή”, at værket “handler om spiritualitet og om at være menneske i et guddommeligt forhold.” Er der en særlig grund til, at det spirituelle har været dragende for dig lige nu? Ikke blot personligt, men også i et større perspektiv, er det et vigtigt område for musikken at afsøge i øjeblikket?

Rasmus Bak: “Jeg er personligt meget betaget af kristendommen. Jeg har igennem min ungdom søgt at besvare livets store eksistentielle spørgsmål og har kun fundet frustration over de manglende svar. Det lyder en smule pladderromantisk, men jeg har fundet en ro i at være troende. Et centralt element for mig er tilgivelsen, som agerer som modvægt til selvhadet.

Jeg havde ikke noget større perspektiv for øje da jeg skrev “ζωή”. Det faldt mig blot naturligt, at det skulle handle om tro, da jeg selv var meget optaget af det. Jeg synes, der ligger noget enormt vigtigt i det religiøse og spirituelle, men jeg tror også, at det er meget vigtigt, at man finder sin egen vej ind i det.”

P/A: I pressemeddelelsen skriver du også, at værket “skaber et åndeligt rum, hvor lytteren kan træde ind og forsvinde væk i de langsomme bevægelser og luftige lydbilleder.” Har musik i dag en særlig/underbelyst rolle at spille som rum for spirituel refleksion?

RB: “Det er fra mit synspunkt en tendens i tiden, at vi søger efter noget åndeligt, og herunder også i en musikalsk sammenhæng. Det kan ses i det stigende antal af bl.a. meditationskoncerter/-gudstjenester og sovekoncerter, som begge giver rum til en åndelig refleksion i en musikalsk relation. Musikken har altid spillet en stor rolle i religøse og spirituelle sammenhænge og har været brugt til at komme i kontakt med noget hinsides. Det tror jeg stadig er aktuelt, selvom den måske ikke bruges lige så rituelt i dag som i tidligere tider.

Meget af den musik, der bliver spillet i radioen, søger efter at fange lytterens opmærksomhed. Det sigter “ζωή” ikke efter. Fortælletempoet er langsomt, der er ikke noget omkvæd, og formen er nærmest udvisket. Du har som lytter ikke meget at holde fast i, hvilket gør, at man hurtigt svæver væk og lader musikken være en ledsager eller et lydspor i et åndeligt rum. Det har været vigtigt for mig at skabe et musikalsk rum, som ikke kalder på for meget opmærksomhed, og som kan bruges til at forsvinde væk.”

P/A: “ζωή” virker betydeligt mere referencetungt end dine tidligere udgivelser. Du nævner i pressemeddelelsen Hildegard af Bingen, Mester Eckhart og Paul Celan som havende spillet en stor rolle i udformningen af værkets tekstunivers. Hvordan taler litteratur og musik sammen i dit arbejde?

RB: “Jeg har altid brugt litteratur som inspirationskilde i mit arbejde, både konkret til at finde ord, linjer og billeder jeg kan bruge, men også til mere abstrakte formmæssige greb og fortæller-stemmer. F.eks. har Thomas Bernhards gentagende formsprog i romanen “Træfældning” inspireret mig meget og ligeledes Robert Walsers Røver-roman.

Da jeg skrev “ζωή”, var jeg stærkt optaget af den kristne mystik og Paul Celans digte, og da jeg skulle skrive teksterne, endte jeg med direkte at låne linjer og billeder fra mystikkens tænkere og Celan. Jeg var derfor ikke den eneste forfatter til teksten, men havde mere en kuraterende og samlende rolle. Dette afspejlede sig også i min tilgang til musikken. Jeg skrev over en måneds tid et utal af et- og tostemmige melodier og samlede til sidst et udvalg af melodierne i ét stort arrangement. Jeg byggede en lettere tilfældig form med mine melodier, og oplevede, at den harmonik, der opstod i mellem melodierne, ikke var skabt af mig, da den ikke var intentioneret – den var indeterministisk.”

P/A: Jeg har altid oplevet din musik som nærmest grænseoverskridende intim. Nu inddrager du flere eksterne referencer, og hele omdrejningspunktet for det nye værk er spiritualitet, der kan anskues som en art skæringspunkt mellem det personlige og det kollektive. Hvordan forhandler “ζωή” det intime og det fælles? Den personlige og den kollektive historie. Hvordan forholder de to størrelser sig til hinanden i værket?

RB: “Jeg har bestemt haft en trang til at bevæge mig væk fra det personlige, som meget rigtigt kommer til udtryk i teksterne til “ζωή”. Jeg har tidligere skrevet enormt meget om mit private liv og nærmest brugt skrivningen som en terapi. Der er noget magisk over den samtale, man kan have med sig selv, når man skriver umiddelbart, da linjerne kommer nede fra det personlige dyb, hvor bevidstheden ikke altid kan nå ned. Men det er ikke omkostningsfrit at grave dybt i sig selv, og jeg har igennem de seneste år fjernet fokusset fra mig selv og stoppet helt med at skrive mine dybeste følelser frem.

Når det er sagt, handler “ζωή” for mig om tro, som i og for sig er et ret personligt foretagende, men på samme tid er det også universelt og abstrakt. Troen er en smuk forening af det kollektive og personlige, hvor hver enkelt har sit eget personlige forhold til Gud, men samtidig hører til et større fællesskab. Men det er også specielt at tale om tro, da den er uhåndgribelig og abstrakt, og måske ikke kan beskrives. Den afsluttende linje i værket er henvendt til Gud, men siger også noget om tro, og lyder således: “Du er det, jeg ikke kan begribe”.”

P/A: Navnet Musik Til Mor har altid fået mig til at trække på smilebåndet, mens jeg samtidig synes, det er en knivskarp beskrivelse af musikken. Det peger på en tilbedelse af det feminine. Ikke en seksualisering, men en tilbedelse. “ζωή” er også den gammeltestamentelige betegnelse for Eva, og når jeg læser teksten igennem, synes jeg, den er overstrøet med henvisninger til kvindefiguren. Der er både erotisering af kvinden: “Vi står over for hinanden / Du kun klædt i en skygge”. Et fokus på det moderlige og omsorgsdragende: “På vejen hvor du plantede dine frø / Voksede blodrøde roser frem / De græd mine tabte tårer / Og du samlede dem i din hånd”. Samt en mystificerinde ophøjning, en besyngning af den matriarkalske figur. Af “Skyggernes dronning”. Kan du uddybe, hvilken rolle moder-/kvindefiguren spiller i dit musikalske univers?

RB: “Vi er alle født fra vores moders skød og er dermed blevet skænket livet (ζωή betyder frit oversat livet). Jeg synes, at moderfiguren er enormt spændende og et meget stærkt billede, men det er ikke det, jeg har sigtet efter i teksterne til “ζωή”. Store dele af teksten er som sagt enten lånt eller inspireret af den kristne mystik, så det handler alt sammen om et forhold til Gud og kan læses som en form for bøn. Herfra stammer også begrebet Skyggernes Dronning, der blot er en mystikers beskrivelse af Gud.

Jeg har mødt folk, der troede, at teksterne handlede om en ekskæreste. Der ligger også en stor hengivenhed og ømhed i teksterne, så jeg kan sagtens forstå det. Og jeg synes, at det er smukt, at teksterne kan læses med forskelligt udgangspunkt.”

P/A:?Albummet består af en indledende Prolog/Forsang og derefter over 20 minutters uafbrudt musik. Fragmenter i opløst form. Det er et nyt greb i Musik For Mor-sammenhæng. Ser du det som en spejling af værkets tekstunivers?

RB: ““ζωή” skiller sig på mange punkter ud fra mine tidligere udgivelser, men er også en naturlig forlængelse af nogle ting, jeg har arbejdet på i lang tid. På mit forrige album, “Forestille Klarhed”, arbejdede jeg med gentagelsen og de små bevægelser, der kan ligge i noget, der virker til at stå stille. På “ζωή” har jeg arbejdet videre med disse elementer og tilført nye. Ligeledes har jeg længe arbejdet med at spille i forskellige tempi, hvilket også kommer til udtryk på “ζωή”. Melodilinjerne, som værket er komponeret af, er i forskellige tempi, hvilket giver fornemmelsen af fraværet af tempo, da lyden af kaos er fravær af orden. Men vokalen og trommerne er med til at smede de fragmentariske figurer sammen og danne en lyttevenlig helhed.”

P/A:?I endnu højere grad end dine tidligere udgivelser opleves “ζωή” nærmest som et ambient album snarere end et singer/songwriter-album. Det er en ubrudt strøm af lavmælte ord og lette guitartoner. Det “oplagte” for en plade, der kredser så meget om religion og spiritualitet, ville være at blive iscenesat på en bund af new age’y synths. Hvorfor vælger du en slags ituslået rockbesætning? Det er på sin vis et ret traditionelt og referencetungt lydbillede, du tager udgangspunkt i og så omformulerer. Kan den slags rockscenografi noget særligt for dig?

RB: “Det ville klart være oplagt at have brugt en anden instrumentation, men jeg har et kært forhold til lyden af guitar, tromme og bas. Grunden til min favorisering af disse instrumenter er bl.a. at man kan høre mennesket bag. Hvis jeg havde spillet på synthesizere og trommemaskiner, ville musikken også været blevet mere kold og fraværende – i hvert fald for mig. Jeg sætter stor pris på de instrumenter, hvor der skal arbejdes for at få tonerne frem og forme dem, i modsætning til et keyboard, hvor du kan fremkalde præcis den samme lyd, hver gang du trykker en tangent ned.

Derudover er mislydene og fejlene meget vigtige for mig. Ikke på en måde hvor de skal søges eller forceres, men i en kontekst hvor de vidner om, at vi blot er mennesker og ikke er perfekte. Jeg har meget svært ved musik og bands, især i livesammenhæng, der lyder for godt og/eller spiller for godt, da det bliver en glat oplevelse og fraværende for mig, da jeg ikke kan mærke menneskene bag.

Dernæst er jeg formet af rockmusikken fra især 00’erne og har lyttet til utroligt meget musik med den klassiske rockbesætning. Og jeg synes stadig ikke, at lyden er udtømt, selvom det selvfølgelig kræver en øget opmærksomhed for ikke at falde i klichéerne eller gå ned ad allerede udtrådte stier.”

Info: “ζωή” udkommer den 26. april på pladeselskabet Aftenrutine.