ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC - REVIEWS


Dr. Jayne Insane and the Gutbucket Philharmonicks
(Fylkingen Records 2003, FYCD 1022)

Liljekvist convinces and disturbs

For a composer to try his hands at different genres and ways of expression is something that can render both good and bad results, but for the same composer to be successful in all his attempts is something you don’t see every day.

Jan Liljekvist really does it marvellously well on his record Dr. Jayne Insane, that consists of eleven short and one longer piece composed between the years 2000 and 2003.

Most of the pieces are electro-acoustic, but they have to give room to multiple genre mixes for strings, percussion and guitar. For each new piece you are stricken by with what craftsmanship Liljekvist wields his material. Be it a piece for strings! Be it mean and chunky dancefloor electro! Be it white-noisy industrial rhythms! The result is always surprisingly vigorous and exciting.

Like for example the heavily hypnotic suite Five Easy Pieces, where a droning rhythm is accompanied by aeroplane motor, harmonica and factory-sounding industrial sounds. The most impressive among these Five Easy Pieces is the final Merrimaker, that truly is not far behind Alec Empire with its steelworks-sounding chaos of electric noise with its gradual transition to a fleshy house beat.

Another strange and hypnotic piece with a dream-like quality, is Duck Dreams, where Liljekvist samples and hacks up the old Donald Duck signature melody from the 1940s. Above all this is a heavy background of dull and rumbling sounds, which gives this short piece an almost psychotic feeling.

That same feeling is present in the piece Global Bliss, that uses clips from speeches by the President of the United States and mixes it with the sound of flies, metallic rattling and children’s screaming.

Unfortunately, this, as well as in the initial piece Flesh Converters – Is Meat Murder?, is where it gets a bit too obvious as far as the political message goes. At the same time, it is easy to be indulgent towards this, since the compositions are so interesting and entertaining. There is certainly nothing lacking in stringency.
Anders Nilsson Karlin
STOCKHOLMS FRIA TIDNING Saturday 14 February 2004

jan liljekvist - dr. jayne insane & the gutbucket philharmonicks

An extraordinary compilation of the work of musician and musical director Jan Liljekvist - this comes close to defying description.

The opening track 'Flesh Converters' is a recording of pigs being slaughtered in an abattoir. We then move on to 'Five Easy Pieces' of electro-acoustic noodling, the best of which is the voice manipulation exercise conducted as 'Framlingen (The Stranger)', a piece almost impossible to listen to without howling along like a dog. 'Global Bliss' is a woman reciting the words of President Bush against a background of harsh noise. 'Serenade for Strings' is a serenade for strings. 'Duckdreams' is a tribute to Donald Duck. 'Being Jan Liljovic'is described as a "tone experiment".

File under difficult, alongside the next track 'God in Disguise', an elecro-acoustic suite in nine parts, lyrics in Swedish, heavily manipulated, doing battle with whiny electronics and violent percussion. Finally we have "Flesh Converters 2", the sound of pigs in an abattoir fighting back.

Difficult to spot the crossover potential, but if you like your music perverse the this one's for you.
Stewart Gott 4 May 2004
http://www.fluxeuropa.com/review.htm?item=147

This is the latest project by composer and musician Jan Liljekvist (b.1962)

He is a true musician, comfortable with a number of instruments and at home in several widely disparate idioms, like folk music and electroacoustics. It is a true joy for this reviewer to meet a composer and musician who does not fear different traditions, and who easily mixes periods and genres. It is very refreshing.

It is clear that Jan Liljekvist has a formidable musical/cultural background, which of course raises the expectations on this solo CD of his considerably. All pieces herein are recent additions to his collection of compositions.

Below are Sonoloco’s impression:

Track 1 is Flesh Converters – Is Meat Murder? (2000)
With a bang and a subsequent pigsty environment, this sonic meat metal contribution commences. Maybe I shouldn’t draw conclusions that easily, but the recurring metallic bangs make me think of a hardy butcher hitting the poor fellows over the head in a bang, bang Maxwell Silver Hammer way, reducing them to the mound of meat that most ethically unconscious meat eaters of our culture view them as – though there is absolutely nothing that makes them pigs less worth than us war mongers and poison diffusers, night wahr?

Liljekvist’s short piece is a brutal way of pounding some sense into the heads of meat eaters, no doubt. And yes, I have the answer to the question inherent in the title: Yes, it is murder, it is… but what else can you expect of a race that murders their own unborn children out of sheer convenience, huh?

Five Easy Pieces (2002) occupy tracks 2 – 6.
The pieces – the Five Easy Pieces -, in the order they’re played, are called The Prickly; Beauty; The Stranger; The Mournful; Merrymaker.

It is an intricate sound world to step into, right from the outset. A repetitious little figurine keeps up, guitar string-like, while a short speck of static also circles a short stretch of timeware. Another weak, wobbling sound – gray, semitransparent - constitutes a basis for the piece, but a kind of insecure basis, like the “fragility of line” that Malcolm Goldstein so well has demonstrated in one of his works. Ah, I get the sense of little electric motors spinning off through the music! You also have this glissando building up, like a jet engine picking up thrust down the runway.

I haven’t heard many works resembling this one. Liljekvist has a very personal way of distributing the limited amount of sounds he utilizes in the first Easy Piece; The Prickly. He can build something quite interesting with meager resources, and this makes me even the more happy, because I know he has chosen to do it this way, since he, of course, could’ve assembled how ever many sounds he wanted. Musicality and a true sense of composition are revealed through these little electronic etudes. You name it, we like it!

There is something hypnotic about this piece, something really captivating. If it would remind me of anything it would probably be Norwegian duo Alog and their CD Red Shift Swing, which also shows this peculiar, nitpicking, austere, restrained but rich ingenuity, in an atmosphere of glow-worm August. The way the harmonica incises some saliva dripping sequences is hilarious! It gets wild and bull roaring towards the conclusion [bullroarer: a Bronze Age soundmaker made up of a stone on a thread swung around in the air to make a sound reminiscent of the wading bird Gallinago gallinago when diving over the Scandinavian marshes in May!]

The second Easy Piece is Beauty.
This begins in an ominous rumble, apparently taken from a really close-miked double bass. It is impossible to know what to expect in these early bars, except that it sounds dark and even… evil… I get the creeps, mind you! Another analogy is the deep, resounding calls of foghorns in the mist off of the coast, like sonic beacons advertising a potentially dangerous presence, and I come to think of a section from Alvin Curran’s text-sound composition For Julian, which won him a Prix Italia prize somewhere in the 1980s. It conveyed the same dark poesis, down, even, to the fog horns… and also recited Shelley’s Ode To the Western Wind, which further amplified and enhanced this dark, forlorn might that I feel in Liljekvist’s work. (Ever since I have tried to get a fresh copy of Curran’s work, because I only have a sloppy copy, but it’s beyond even Curran’s private might to find and deliver! Anyone else in possession of it? It was aired on Swedish Radio in the 1980s).

This double-bass rumble soon reveals all kinds of timbres, dancing high above the dark and muddy lowliness, like the second melody rising out of khoomei singing in Kyzyl and Ugra! That is beauty! Now I understand the title.
However, sharp, more high-pitched incidents occur, as if from distorted electric guitars or rusty hinges on barn doors… but maybe originating in Jan Liljekvist’s Goldsteinean violin scrapings, exciting the sonic expression quite a bit.
The double bass (or would you like me to say contra-bass?) picks up density again, in a way that matches up even to some of Iancu Dumitrescu’s wilder sonic excursions on his label Edition Modern in Romania.

The way the deep voice of the double bass is contrasted to the high pitches of the rough violin gets conversational, as if there is an exchange of morphemes going on here, between the active agents of this sonic adventure.
Am I wrong, or do I hear a reference to Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969 here, way inside the sound? It may well be a hippie hallucination, you know… I’m getting old…

The Stranger is the next Easy Piece.
Right off Liljekvist throws a Latino utterance at us – a vocal constituency with clear Latin American stature – and he extends it and plays with it like was it a well-chewed chewing gum between his teeth and his fingers, gluey, longer and longer, not to get caught in the hair! Now here is where Liljekvist really gets witty and playful, letting the vocal extension run parallel – but not quite – to certain long instrumental or computer generated sounds with the same – or almost the same – properties as the vocalisms. These “almost” and “not exactly” properties are what makes this so exciting, so swinging, if you can use that term here, so tangible, with such a high tension inside the music; sort of electronic blue notes, if you dig, causing tremendous strain on the timbres! This is diligent work!

After a short while the instrumental sounds turn practically barrel-organy… Yessir, and the vocalisms get cut up and permuted, resembling mooing cows and the LSD-treated cat Efsie that I met in an apartment on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn across from the Pratt Institute in 1970… jeeezzz…
If you’re prone, this may get you nauseous! If not, tough luck!

But… it doesn’t end here, because when Liljekvist shakes this poor Latino voice around really bad, it turns Arabic; Lebanese or Egyptian, but I hear it’s not Om Kalsoum; perhaps Feiruz or Sabah – but no, it’s a male singer, isn’t it. Anyhow, this Arabian texture makes me feel so much at home, since I’ve been sweet on Arabian sounds ever since I learned to know Om Kalsoum’s music way back in 1970, through the album Hajartak which a friend whom we called Saligia brought home from Palestine to play in our Shitville derelict building for years to come, plus eventually 40 more Kalsoum albums on the Sono Cairo label.

The fourth Easy Piece is called The Mournful.
A deep, thudding, heavyweight rhythm bounce the piece away on its gravitated, stooping journey, much in the vein of Dan Andersson’s En Spelmans Jordafärd; the last journey of an old fiddler in the folklore of the Dalecarlia province of Sweden.

In this piece, the dark stomping grief is countered by a playful pizzicato line of a violin, I think – you can never be sure with Liljekvist – and other, more electrified guitarisms. It’s a short piece with lots of potential, so maybe and hopefully, the composer will ponder some more on this bit and it’s opposing tendencies.

Now we’ve come to the last Easy Piece; The Merrymaker, which sports samplings by Sten Backman.
A wildly panning noise static with a certain, rugged bottom sound rocks along in the best of industrial traditions, even pneumatic drills or their sonic mimicries at work, sounding like the Too Much Too Soon Orchestra and other post-Rune-Lindblad effigies!

Even though this sound material could easily shame the composer into too easy solutions, Liljekvist doesn’t fool himself. He handles these rough, rugged tortures just as well as the precise, tinkling audio of the glittering delicacies. In fact, this turns out to be a fucking far out dance floor hit, and I can’t even sit still while writing! Yeah, listen up, Björk! This rivals the best of the Björk re-mixes on Telegram and elsewhere on the remix singles that Björk likes so much. I am impressed! I am not easily impressed! Keep on keeping on, Mr. Man!

Global Bliss (2002) enters at track 7.
A creepy, sleazy track, oh yes, concentrating some of the most openly feeble-minded quotes of the president of this world’s immature and erratic teenage nation. The sounds, however, are very catchy, highly interesting; again proving Liljekvist’s talent in constructing viable and heavy headed patterns out of simple material. Here he introduces the whining and buzzing of bees - it seems - bird song, a center piece rumble with decorative static and some tumbling, rolling pieces of heavy iron or steel on a concrete floor. Up front, very close, with these sounds as a permissive and dynamo-charged backdrop, Sara Jungberg reads these barbaric presidential quotes in eloquent self-assurance.
Again I must admit that I’ve never heard quite a sound curtain like this one. It is peculiar, alien and repetitive at the same time. Sara’s voice utters these stupefying mantras out of the White House. Perhaps I can find some kind of similarity with the style of a guy like Gregory Whitehead, but that’s about it.

You may say, rightly and justly, that a subject like this is a little bit too easy, too self-evident, opposed by hardly anyone, and I believe this is a minus for the composer, but… and this is more important… he handles the audio like a master. That brings grace and indulgence, so no worries.

The latter part of the piece demonstrates – through the flaking and disruption of the audio with inserted cries of the children of the nations – the crumpling and implosion of the teenage period of the nation of the United States of America, which has to mature or recede into oblivion and ruins.

Serenade for Strings (2003) is placed at track 8
A dense and simultaneous progression of a group of stringed beings appear, scraping and burping, strings pressed hard by the bows; nothing to loose, as longer and more lose strings of the larger stringed beings rumble and squeak deeply like fenders between sailboats and quay-edges as the swell from died down storms under the horizon give testimony.
Repetitious patterns of percussive and stringed character mangle the listening space, completely filling it with seaweed or peat or tons of dust, tons of dust – and I recall a recording that Hebriana Alainentalo made of a dredger outside the town of Båstad. It has to do with matter, with the Earth, with a mouthful of dry grass in a dead person’s mouth, and layer after layer of humus…

Towards the end Liljekvist moves into a more familiar musique concrète music of the type you may locate on the earlier releases of the Cultures Electroniques series from the contests down in Bourges, by artists like Yves Daoust (Quatuor), Tommy Zwedberg (Hanging), Georg Katzer (La Mécanique et les Agents de l’Erosion) and Horacio Vaggione (Tar), to mention but a few of these diligent aficionados of sound, who work with audio like a chef with ingredients in the French cuisine.

Duckdreams (2001) is next.
Ha, I love this passionately. It’s outstanding, hilarious! Donald Duck returns in an electroacoustic guise, and I wonder if Disney’ll sue Liljekvist and Fylkingen Records for this! The initial old 78 rpm tune make me think of good old Lars-Göran Frisk, a Swedish collector of old popular music on 78s, who, for many years, hosted an extremely popular program on Swedish radio, called Skivor från Vetlanda (Records from Vetlanda), as Vetlanda was the little rural town where Frisk lived. Frisk means well contrary to ill, but Frisk was ill, and died much too early. There can never be one like him again. I truly miss the guy. Now the first section of Liljekvist’s Duckdreams makes me sentimental for Lars-Göran Frisk… You never know the workings of art…

Very gradually an echo embraces this old tune, slowly growing on you like a slow fainting, as a downward glissading growl, like a slowed-down cat’s growl or the growl Roy Orbison sported in Oh Pretty Woman – but here in an alien, scary notion – slowly falls ever deeper into a static rumbling as from an idling truck outside… and holy smoke, this is where Woody Woodpecker gets into the picture, deep inside the sound web, heavily echoed and sort of heard from behind the fly-specked window of time, made of sheep intestines and an unlimited resource of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries and millennia... and for us Swedes Woody Woodpecker means Christmas Eve! This may sound ridiculous to non-Swedes, but a Disney tradition has rooted itself in the soul of the Swedish people; that of watching Donald Duck et consortes – including Woody Woodpecker – every Christmas Eve at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, just before the presents are handed out, or right after, depending on local family traditions. This TV mania began sometime in the Sixties, and now everything draws to a halt in Sweden at 3 PM on Christmas Eves. Everyone watches… and here I hear this mad reference in Jan Liljekvist’s work; masterly! Our precious D. Duck also emerges, in his best spirits, it seems, by the mad quacking, mastered by the notorious Clarence "Ducky" Nash. Liljekvist slows Donald down to an almost human timbre, while Woody Woodpecker keeps speed-freaking in cartoon distance; a sure amphetamine addict if ever there was one!

At track 10 we find a piece called Being Jan Liljovic (2000)
A low, slow rumble, and then a piano of sorts, in a Pierre Henry Le-Livre-des-Morts-Egyptien setting turning Liljekvistean, for loss of measure and reason… This mixture of sounds is elusive in its violin-piano electroacoustics mingling shamelessly with purely acoustic realtime progressions.

It’s one of the longer works on the CD, and for sure one of the most peculiar. It really is lucky that Liljekvist is so familiar with electronics as well as regular traditional instruments. I don’t think he could have instructed anyone else to do these things that he does in Being Jan Liljovic, these Conlon Nancarrow player piano rushes up and down the register, like a senseless flow of black and white gushing down a canyon, or like a bobsleigh down its path at the Winter Olympics!

I sense wobbly surfaces and unstable floors in earthquake audio and disappearing figures on stilts, cylinder hats against the horizon; mystery and thick layers of acrid breaths… and deep down in the clay; brown, wriggling shapes of infrasound, felt as a tickling vibration amongst the humans.

As a tone recedes into anonymity and takes on the guise of a drone, Liljekvist plays slow staccatos on his violin, still pressing the bow heavily against the strings in the foreground, acquiring that urgency, that persuasive panic… and he messes with tonal bliss and tonal catastrophe, senselessly twining the opposites together in a nameless, star crushing machine at the edge of space and time, at the horizon of events… at the prospect of a singularity – as Planck length strings vibrate the Universe into utter existence…

Förklädd Gud (God in Disguise) (2001) is the surprising entry at track 11.
Yes, Lars-Erik Larsson’s version of God in Disguise is one of my favorites too. I lent my vinyl copy to a friend once in the 1970s, my friend Christer – and then he went and drowned himself, and I never saw that record again… but that is all over, I remember him as he was – the true intellectual with a pipe always in his mouth and a gentle way with ideas - and I have a CD of it now…

This is the only part of this CD that I don’t fully agree with. Liljekvist says he asked a friend to recite the text, to get away from the scholar’s perhaps exaggerated modulations – but this does not work. This pronunciation disturbs me, as well as the insecurity in the voice. It was a longshot, and it didn’t work out. The presidential lines in another piece earlier on worked just fine with Sara Jungberg, so why didn’t Liljekvist ask her, perhaps?

However, other aspects of the work make it well worthwhile anyhow, and I’m of course thinking of Liljekvist’s numerous ways of treating the sound, of building enchanted soundscapes and shoving us through them. Here he has more than 22 minutes to do that. I hear echoes of early electronics, the way it was heard in the 1960s and 1970s from people like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Konrad Boehmer, and I hear bubbling spheres of cocking audio from the Jean Schwarz Studio Celia 1980s – and as Liljekvist has said already, he uses some downright quotes from Rolf Enström’s Final Curses (Slutförbannelser) – one of the finest electroacoustic works ever, based on a text by Elsa Grave, with Elsa Grave’s own recitation cut up and permuted. Yes, that CD – Caprice CAP 21374 – probably holds the best sample of electroacoustics issued in Scandinavia, anyway, with the two other works Directions and the Prix Italia winner Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise also included on the disc, the latter based on a yoik by and with Jonas Edward Steggo, recorded by Matts Arnberg in 1953 and with Sören Runolf on prepared electric guitar. There’s only one CD in a couple of decades like that Rolf Enström CD!

I’m not exactly sure why Liljekvist wanted to hint at this CD on Dr. Jayne Insane & The Gutbucket Philharmonicks, because it’s a little out of place, but I’m sure he has his reasons. Perhaps its an homage to his former teacher, or maybe it’s a way to acknowledge that he is trying to use some of Enström’s methods in a long poetic text by Gullberg, like Enström did in Final Curses by Grave.

The long Hjalmar Gullberg text of course calls for textsound and sound poetry, and sure enough we get some of that, the words fluttering around like intoxicated butterflies, or breaking to a down pitched halt in its own tracks. I have maybe one more word of criticism in connection with the treatment of the words at times, for example when Liljekvist slows down or speeds up words in such an obvious way that you just think all the time that that is what he does; slows down and speeds up words. Other than that - which surprises me, because it’s what newcomers in this art always do, and Liljekvist is no novice – everything is fine, exciting, fluent, captivating. Some metallic fire fly percussion is brilliant!
The long outstretched, noisy band of audio towards the end of God in Disguise could be seen as a latter day parallel to the mighty final stanza of Final Curses, which in the Enström booklet is described as “[a] darkly shimmering, intensely stormy […] final chord.

Flesh Converters II – Revenge! (2001) is the last piece at track 12.
It is a wild counterpart of track 1, and perhaps the indication of revenge means that the animals get into power over us, poor souls, and do away with us the way they really ought to do… in a furious stampede of the cities and the night clubs, the police stations and the military academies, the super markets and the parking lots… Praise be!

My conclusion is that this CD is one of the very best that has come out of Swedish studios for a long time, and it has its very own profile, its very personal attitude, as the composer and musician Jan Liljekvist arrives into this binary focus from all kinds of directions, all walks of life, all kinds of periods and lands, with a familiarity with several great traditions and with a talent sharpened by the lust for discovery and cumulative beauty. It’s a primeval lust to listen! Do!
http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco14/fylkingen/jayne.html

EIGHT TIMES FALLING
(Elektron/SEAMS, 2001)

Stockholm’s Elektron label delivers some very interesting electroacoustic music.
On Eight Times Falling there are rapturous violins deconstructed by software and
tape splicing, deep dark gongs and high pitch vibes.....

... The next five tracks are The Arkham Quartet by Jan Liljekvist who uses woodwinds and a variety of percussive instruments to make for a quirky and experimental listen.
The overall feel here is that of free improvisation, atmospheric and sweeping, shadowy and timeless. It creeps and crawls and makes you question the state of things in general. Liljekvist’s unique blend of sources probably comes from the multiple genres he plays including medieval folk music and violin session work on deathmetal recordings by Månegarm and Mortifer.
www.tjnorris.net/review081502.htm

Subsidized by Electroacoustic Music in Sweden (EMS), Eight Times Falling presents works by eight 2000 graduates of its graduate studies program. This is the new generation of Swedish electroacoustic composers. Fresh out of their academic studies, some of them have a surprisingly singular voice that resisted the sometimes rigid
teaching of such institutions......Jan Liljekvist’s “The Arkham Quartet” provides another highlight. In five short sections, he mimics and/or mocks classical music, snapping crude electroacoustic masks to cliched orchestral gestures.
François Couture, www.allmusic.com