Dancefloor 2021

I made a Spotify-playlist consisting of some of my currently favorite edm, disco and house-music. A playful, diverse look into dance-oriented music, ranging from contemporary releases, back to the early 2k and a gem from 1988. With lyrics ranging from english to portugese and french. Have a listen!

A Play on the Idea of Ambient

Roel Funcken - Isotope Cobalt (Part 4)

A mix released by the ever so lovely leftfield independent resource on electronic, experimental and instrumental music, Headphone Commute.

The Chopin Project

Alice Sara Ott and Olafur Arnalds has created an original interpretation of the polish romantic Composer Frédéric François Chopin, who seem to have a pull on every sucessive generation since his own.

There was even a rather succesful video game released a few years ago centered around Chopins music; Eternal Sonata.


I am writing a review of The Chopin Project in swedish for Tidningen Kulturen, but any who stumble across this blog would be advised to look it up, either on ITunes, Amazon or Spotify.

The music is vibrant and a lovely homage to Chopins world, and is not a strict performance of the compositions, but rather a dialouge between Arnalds, Ott and Chopin.

Midvintersol

"Solen besegras ej
...
hon firas i sin vila"
- Dikten Sol, (2014)

"Ty solen är också kärlek."
- Guido Zeccola 

I recorded a holiday mix yesterday to celebrate the winter sun, with artists such as James Blackshaw, Nils Frahm, Lubomyr Melnyk, Blamstrain and others. I hope you may enjoy it.

Midvintersol by Suecae Sounds on Mixcloud

A Photo from the Theatre Stage

A photo I recently shot, that I am particulary pleased with, despicting that of the artist Johanna Lillvik, reaching for the audience with her voice and keyboard, at the Putte i parken festival - theatre stage.

I used Pentax K5D with DA 70 Ltd lens at f/3,2, ISO 1600 - and retouched the colors using Adobe Lightroom.

Broken Hearted Jubilee

I have longed for so long to see this album go public. Now it's here, and I know I will have to listen to and come back to this, many times in the future to come. Originally this was to be titled Catholicon, but due to several reasons, this is now live as Broken Hearted Jubilee.

Diazo writes:
"I share this album as a journal of my life; honest as I can recall and most definitely skewed into my own perspective. I have tried my best to retell melodically the fall of a relationship, the emotions, blame, and sorrow that follow. Perhaps even the glimmer of hope that rest beneath it all."

I know of no artist that is able to do what Diazo does, in what appears as effortless blending of disparate styles. Playful yet sad and emotional. Like a broken clockwork, skewed in precisely the right way.

Nils Frahm's Gift

This live performance by pianist and composer Nils Frahm left me speachless. So it felt fitting to pass this on to you, this special christmas day.

This was performed in St John-at-Hackney Church in July this year.

I will say nothing more then leave you with these fifteen and a half minutes work of art.

It's Just a Reflector (of Disco)

The innate characteristics of Disco seems to seep into popular culture once more. The newest Daft Punk album was flirting with disco in an abrasive way, much to the homage of Giorgio Moroder. It couldn't be more obvious where their inspiration came from, they collaborated on Giorgio by Moroder, which even features an interview on the track, with the man in question.

If we go back some time, but instead of landing in the 1970's with Moroder, Donna Summer and other disco classics, DFA Records comes to mind, with their brand of punk disco aesthetics, a label formed in the early 2000's. They are perhaps most known for James Murhpy and LCD Soundsystem. (Murphy incidentally wrote a track called Daft punk is playing at my house, everything goes full circle.)

Fast forward to 2013 and following the success of Daft Punk, we see the DFA sound resurfacing in the form of the production of Arcade Fire's forthcoming album. At least judging by the one song chosen to promote it, Reflector. And this track may just be the sharpest take on pop-music I've heard all this year. It is merging new and old into something highly relevant and infective.

So here we are with Canada's own Arcade fire, and their track Reflector taken from their forthcoming album, featuring David Bowie, produced by New York's own James Murphy.

Here it comes:



Read more via Pitchfork and Stereogum.

The album is out October 29 via Merge records. 

Wooning in the Night Air

One of my favorite albums during 2012 were Jamie Woon's Mirrorwriting. Perhaps best described as gentle electronica with soulful vocals and meaningful lyrics. The above track Night air made it to be a single, this and city street are my personal favorites of the album.

Aside from enjoying the video, you can visit his main website here and hear an interview he's done with BBC Radio 2.

Working with If Things Exist

Following up a string of posts on music (and art), I thought I should post something that I personally are involved in, for a change. For some time now, not mentioned on this blog, I've become more and more involved in pop-music act If things exist, see their website here. The music is highly lyrical and at times feature a certain sense of melancholy, one might say: sadness.

Now, my involvment has not been as an instrumentalist or vocalist, but as an external producer. At first I was asked to re-master their song View, and then mixing and re-mastering their older songs Logic, Skyline and Graveyard. All these songs can kindly be listened to both via Spotify, but the listener can also download high quality mp3:s and wave-files of their website. Also cool to note is that they decided to use a Creative commons license when releasing their music.

"Our accomplishments and accidents, that we gaze back at in pride, make up the mighty skyline for the people left behind. To the horizon that we head for, some others turn their backs, stare over their shoulder and sneer, as they walk their own true path."

- A quote from If things exists song Skyline

Outerdimensional Akara

I write for different venues, mostly for magazines, blogs and papers related to social work, enviromental issues and society. In english my writings can mostly be found in connection to Wusik sound magazine. An outlet dedicated to music technology aimed at new and old music producers alike.

Seeing that the last issue was just published, I'll post an interview that I did with much talented Joshua Penman here. Joshua is a composer tied to the extremely fascinating psychedelic act Akara. He's also created some of the most evocative and original music I've heard in the last few years.

Hope you enjoy the read, also: don't forget to check Akara's music out, you can listen to it near the end of the article.

Tell me a bit about your background and what drew you into music to begin with?

I went to school for a long time for music, I have a doctorate in classical composition. I wrote music for lots of different groups - orchestras, chamber ensembles, wind ensembles - and had these pieces performed a lot. I started playing piano when I was five, and performed in a bunch of different kinds of musical groups including several classical choirs, an industrial band, and a Balinese gamelan. I also studied Indian classical singing pretty in Varanasi... I come from a musical family - my mother was a cellist, so being in music (though not necessarily doing it professionally) was very much a part of my mileu growing up. 

What made you want to work with digital and form Akara?

Listening to lots of dance music and psychedelic ambient music and realizing that I couldn't get that sound unless I brought in synthesizers and production.

I can definitely hear an amalgam of many influences on the album Extradimensional Ethnography, how would you describe it in your own words?

Psychedelic ambient, West coast bass music, classical minimalism, Maurice Ravel, Indian classical music, Balinese gamelan, medieval polyphony, Claude Vivier, old-school jungle...

You have a lot of other collaborating musicians as well. Among others the very talented Femke Weidema, how did you go about recording all these musicians?

Femke and Noam, the Indian mandolin player, I recorded at my home studio. The string quartet, flute, and horn, I recorded at a wonderful LA studio called Entourage. The harp, I recorded in my friend Jason's studio. A Neumann U87 was often involved. There was a wonderful Sony stereo pair and I think AKG stereo pair in the string quartet recording, as well.

What kind of production set-up do you use?

Cubase, Omnsiphere, NI Komplete, Waves, Altiverb, a few PSP, Sonalksis, and SoundToys plugins, Stutter Edit, the DestroyFX plugins, a Moog Voyager, and an Eventide DSP7000. 75% are of my synths are Omnisphere, the rest some mixture of FM8, the Moog, and assorted sample libraries.

I know you program your own patches in Native Instruments Reaktor, how do you find working in a modular studio?

I actually use Reaktor very little. It's of course extremely powerful but I find it generally uninspiring to work with compared to Omnisphere, which I love. I don't find the sounds that it ships with terribly useful (there must be some kind of alternate IDM universe in which those kinds of patches have some musical application but that universe does not intersect mine), and it's often a lot of work to do simple things. So I tend just to use Reaktor to solve very particular production problems (I've used it to generate MIDI to send to Omnisphere, for example).

However, what modular systems like Reaktor excel at are doing things that no one has thought of before... My main use of Reaktor is the massive patch I created to run the Akara Lightship, our onstage lightshow. The patch generates OSC data based on MIDI sequences, which gets converted to DMX and sent out to the lights.

 You went from classically trained into the digital, do you think people starting in a DAW milieu would benefit from going in the opposite direction – to look into starting to play classical instruments and incorporate it into their productions?

It's probably too late at that point to learn to play them. Classical instruments are really hard - you need to start them when you're young. But I think that many producers could study some more music theory and find something really useful in it. And also, they could think about starting to work classical instruments into their productions... It's a deep study unto itself to write effectively and creatively for instruments, but learning how to use notation, make parts, etc., is totally doable and incredibly rewarding. That said, there's a lot of electronic music (probably the majority!) that works perfectly well without any more music theory or instruments...

What kinds of obstacles and opportunities do you see for people making a transition into either one direction?

Well, classical music is really hard, as I said, so that's a huge obstacle in the one direction. And even if you don't try to play one of the instruments, there's an incredible amount of technical stuff that has to go in to just working with them properly, and knowing how to communicate with the players, how the instruments want to sing.

In the other direction, I think that most people in the classical tradition simply aren't exposed to what is really great about digital music. Also, there is a deep transition that needs to go on from thinking about music as notes to thinking about it as sound. Classical composers write melodies to be interpreted but in the electronic realm, we can't just sit back and give a few notes to a synthesizer and expect it to sound as good. We need to get on the knobs, modulate it, cut it up, etc. Also there is a legacy of absolutely awful experimental electronic music associated with "classical composition" and that stuff needs to be conceptually pitched into the wastebasket if a composer is going to do anything musically worthwhile.

What are your thoughts on the future and where do you plan on taking Akara next?

Well, I've been working very hard on our onstage light installation, the Akara Lightship. We've got a lot of shows this summer, and I think the show is going to blow people's minds. We've also got two incredible music videos that we're shooting, and I'm plugging away on the second album. It's all happening, and I'm just looking forward to doing this more, for more people, in bigger venues, etc... Down the road I hope to have a big integrated touring show with dance, bigger sets, etc. But the Lightship is a great step in that direction and I'm just unbelievably excited to start taking it out...

As a last question, what kind of feelings would you like a listener to take with themselves experiencing your music?

I'd like the listener to be taken on a mystical journey, to hear songs that they have never heard before but sound achingly familiar, to lose themselves and let themselves be transported into a magical other world...

Quote:

"... kaleidoscopic passageways for the truth-seeking multi-dimension-traveling soul. The music hypnotizes your mind and overloads your senses with luminous dreams and psychedelic visions." headphonecommute.com

Ode to Anthony

One of my favourite singers and artists of all times might just be Antony Hegarty. Part of the group Antonty and the Johnsons. There is much to say about this man, his character and persona. Aside from stating the obvious, that his art is coloured by him being queer and sympathetic to transgendered ideas, he is quite the opposite of a simplistic character and artist.

That's probably what I like the most about him.

Perhaps he is mostly recognised by his seminal duet with 80's pop figure Boy George, but although You are my sister is a very beautiful portrayal of family love, the same album that saw that song also had songs about emotional abuse, all layered around deep anti-modernistic themes of spirituality. No wonder he attracted the attention of outsider art promoter and musician David Tibet, who released Anthonys first album through his own record label. This song below is not from that time though, but rather part of one of Hegarty's later albums, where he has matured into a artist of rare emotional impact.


The above video is very much open to interpretation. Not unlike his lyricism. To my eyes it's clearly about death. The time of tragedy and staunch opposition of the inevitable fact. The time where we see a complete absence of comfort. The words are mournful. What comes in the hereafter?

The second video I'd like to include in this very short blog-post is at least is a very strong combination of pagan and Christian imagery. It does however contain some nudity and the dance might be interpreted in a sexual way, which is enough to grant it a 18-year old recommendation by Youtube. If you ask me there is a whole lot of more destructive and violent videos out there that I'd rather not younger audiences see, which makes this danceful portrayal of nudity pale in comparison. I partially believe that the numbing pro-consumer culture is making us afraid the impact of art, the more mundane explanation though is that you can see a woman’s nipples (sort of).


To understand more about this man, one might want to read this interview in The Guardian from 2009. I like how he seems sincere and genuinely upset about what we are doing to the environment. Like we should all be. Judging by our inability to change our way of life into a more green and sustainable way of living, I believe that voices such as his are very much needed in the years to come.

The best music blogs (you've probably never heard of)

Hidden places music
Rarely updated but illustrates the saying of "quality before quantity". Tends to focus on psychedelic electronic music.

Aurgasm
Cheeky name but a music blog that packs some great content. Very diverse in its selection and therefore carries something for everybody. One of the few "pop"-blogs I read.

Ambientblog.net
Great finds in ambient music together with knowledgeable liner notes. Continuously manages to deliver music that I haven't heard of and is a joy to read.

Dub techno blog
Highly specialized but good for keeping up to date with Creative commons releases in the realm of dub techno.

Time and Music Intertwined

Music is art. Music when recorded has also since the early 1900's also been associated with mass-production. We may be moving on from those times, at least when it comes to music as a physical medium, and at least partially. One way for record label owners, curators and musicians making sense of the diminishing amount of (records) artefacts circulated in the economy, is to make fewer records, items which people may actually care about.

This limitation is when it comes to various labels such as Time Released Sound, Ornaments and many more, self imposed and not forced upon them by terms of lack of sales. The difference is important, as is the motivation: Time Released Sound is one outlet which clearly wants to trancend the division between the record and art, and the art in this context means creating unique containers for the actual records.

Susan Matthews & Richard Moult - Fluids by Time Released Sound

As Ambientblog.net puts it when it comes to these labels:

"(...) There are the 'labour of love' labels, run by people definitely not into it "for the money", releasing extremely limited physical releases mostly packed in hand-crafted artwork so delicate and complex that it would be impossible to create more than 50 copies of a release."

Some people might scoff at the notion of releasing so few records, at the same time it illustrates the difference of motivations among artists. Of course, some will still want to live the rock n' roll lifestyle with many listeners and followers, others find different motivations. And I admit that having a record which I know has in some way been handcrafted does on a personal level simply feels better, then just buying a generic CD.

Antonymes - 281210 by Time Released Sound

(image and music courtesy of Time Released Sound label)

Related post from the archives:

Be quiet, we might be witnessing the end of an industry.

Variety of Sound Interview

I was meaning to post this earlier. Only I didn't. It's a short interview I did with one of the great figures of freeware audio effects, namely "Bootsie" of Variety of Sound. He's known for great effects for different applications in audio production, which has generated a lot of well deserved recognition.

You can read my interview here, on the Variety of Sound blog.

A Song For a Contest

I signed up with a song for rekkerd.org:s "moving" contest. With over fifty songs / works of art, and a very diverse selection, my song "Moving while Asleep" is one piece among many. It will be interesting to see how people have voted, when the winners are announced.

Moving while asleep by Suecae Sounds

Another of my favorite entrants are written by the artist Noizefield. Don't miss how the song changes after two minutes to incorporate an orchestral arrangement. The track takes on a completely different level of beauty by adding this layer.

Noizefield - go far away by Noizefield

Something very different offered came from artist nkurence. As I wrote on the artist Soundcloud, I'd liken the atmosphere of the sound to "as if someone is chewing, thereby transforming them (the sounds) into pure dissonant artefacts. Very imaginative!"

nori hvvn by nkurence

James Blake interprets Joni Mitchell

The young brittish artist James Blake has just released his first album. Something which you ought to check out. He has also performed live for BBC Radio 1, with this expressive cover. Something which fits perfectly into my current mood and therefore for this blog. So with no further ado, let "A case of you" take you on a journey.

A Mix on Vinternatt

In my own opinion my best audio-mix to this date. More ambient, drone and emotional music spanning close to 40 minutes. This time mostly focused on the Earth mantra-netlabel. I hope you enjoy it.

Vinternatt by Suecae Sounds on Mixcloud

Secret Games

Artwork: Eero Johannes

I am happy to announce that my song Klarälven is featured on the album Secret Games, which was released today by net-label Kahvi Collective. The album contains over one and half an hour of music and is available for free. There is a lot of quality songs here, from artists such as Bad Loop, Planet Boelex and Lackluster.

Download it here.

Nine minutes and forty-four seconds

If there there is a song I adore in all its simplicity it is Ame's techno classic Rej. I blogged about it before while writing something about the primitiveness of techno. Fortunatly there are two reinterpretations on the original theme, one which is even better then the original. German (super)band Sonar Kollektiv Orchester outdid themselves when they recorded this take on Rej. Available for purchase on the german label aptly titled Sonar kollektiv as well.

So enjoy the ride which stretches for 9 minutes and 44 seconds.