The Ephemeral City: Songs for the Ghost Quarters

Katt Hernandez

Abstract The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the city. The aim is to offer those materials, wrought into music and sound works, for urban dwellers to deepen, remember, evoke and envision their own ephemeral cities. The themes in the project are drawn from urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city, aiming to empower a sense of place beyond commercial forces, through the fleeting, subtle and imaginary. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening. There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever- transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties. They are comprised of a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound. I have created them utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs; string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa or violin, and; sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to evoke the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–one possible version of The Ephemeral City–to argue that the evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers. The mechanism of that empowerment is the force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life. Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Kyrkspirorna och tornen på Stockholms horisont blandar sig med radiosändningar som flyger ut över staden bredvid privatiserade våglängder, driver ner genom atmosfären och sjunker ner i det övergivna underjordiska telefonsystemet. Stockholm har byggnader som funnits där i århundraden, men är också full av den mest moderna och samtida arkitektur. Allt konkurrerar om sin plats i det kollektiva minnet. Det här konstnärliga doktorandprojektet i musik tar upp och omvandlar stadsbildens grundmaterial, skapar bilder av staden, mer subtila än de starka krafter som är i rörelse; där staden förändras så snabbt och på ett sätt som ofta skapar maktlöshet. Syftet är att erbjuda material, bearbetat till musik och ljudverk, för stadsbor att fördjupa, minnas, frammana och föreställa sig sina egna efemära städer. Ämnena i projektet är tagna från urbana minnen och omvandlingar, psykogeografi och andarna i den efemära staden. Syftet är att möjliggöra en upplevelse av tillhörighet och hemmahörande som sträcker sig bortom kommersiella krafter och istället framhåller det flyktiga, subtila och imaginära. Projektet tar sig an tre frågeställningar: Hur kan musik och ljudkonst möjliggöra ett återtagande av tillhörighet och platskänsla genom kraften i individens fantasi? Hur kan alternativa inre bilder av staden förstärka en upplevelse av tillhörighet och platskänsla? När blir berättelser, minnen och alternativa framtidsvisioner kollektiva, när kan de delas med andra och när är de helt individuella? Det finns ett improvisatoriskt samspel mellan det levande och det materiella i staden vilket möjliggör subtila sätt för de boende att återfå inflytande över sin omgivning. De konstnärliga verken i det här projektet är gjorda för att belysa dessa subtiliteter, centrerade runt ett antal kompositioner, improvisationer, konstnärliga samarbeten och ljudinstallationer. Med användande av modulära synthesisers, fältinspelningar, piporgel, multikanaluppsättningar; PureData- och SuperColliderprogram, stråkensembler med vevlira, nyckelharpa eller violin och ljudinstallationer. Valet av instrument och material är en efemär metafor för Stockholms arkitektur. Slutresultatet är en samling musik och ljudverk, gjorda för att belysa den imaginära staden. Tagna som en helhet, skapar verken i projektet en imaginär stad – en möjlig version av Den Efemära Staden – för att kunna argumentera att detta frammanande av ett efemärt rum är ett sätt att stärka de boende genom fantasins makt, immuna mot de starka krafter som förändrar livet i Stockholm, med hjälp av det drömlika, omformande och flyktiga. Lika övertygande för det inre ögat som tegelsten och murbruk är i den yttre världen.

Mosebacke

Standing on the terrace at Mosebacke, as August Strindberg did, the city tumbles out over the islands in churches, roller coasters, stately buildings from the 1800s, and the copper rooftops of walk-ups from centuries before; in modernist department stores and office buildings from the twentieth century, and in the clusters of cranes over new building projects, dwarfing them all. Invisible radio waves, carrying music, cell phone conversations and nautical data, cross over the steeples and station towers, gold mortar and stone apartment houses, glass curtain-wall and concrete block office buildings. Katarinahissen (the Katarina elevator), iconic and endangered, stands over the massive project removing the old Slussen traffic circles, bridges, squares and bus terminals, hotly contested over the last decades. This birds- eye view of Stockholm is amongst the most picturesque–and famous–in the visually stunning center of the city. You can't see the last bit of the Debaser rock club being removed, and won't see the lounges, record stores and haunts that once looped under the old roundabout. The cityscape from here is punctuated by steeples, belying the fact that the majority of people in Sweden don't attend church services. The mountain you stand on here is hollow; there is a parking garage and car repair shop inside, and they are building a massive new underground bus station as well. Behind you are the entertainment venues Mosebacke Etablissement (The Mosebacke Establishment) and Södra teatern (The South Theater). Who are you in relation to those theaters? Did you hear Cornelis Vreeswijk there in 1979, dance to the electronica at Arts Birthday in 2017, discover Balkan dance music there in the 1990s, hear Dexter Gordon there in the 1960s –or is it just an ornate old theater with some mysterious goings-on inside you've never happened upon? Is the view of the city from here new to you, do you come up here often, or did you read about Stockholm from this “bird’s eye view” in school, in the first pages of Röda Rummet (The Red Room)?

It was an evening at the beginning of May. The little garden on Mosebacke had not yet opened to the public, and the flower-beds were unturned. The snowdrops had worked through last year's piles of leaves, and were at the point of ending their short career to make room for the crocuses, which had taken shelter under a barren pear tree; the lilacs waited for a southerly wind before bursting into bloom, but the tightly closed buds of the linden still offered cover for love-making to the chaffinches, busily working on building their lichen-covered nests between trunk and branch. No human foot had trod the gravel paths since last winter's snow had melted, and the free and easy life of beasts and flowers was left undisturbed [...] The sun stood over Liljeholmen, casting sheaves of light to the east; they pierced the columns of smoke from Bergsund, flashed across the Riddarfjärden, climbed to the cross of Riddarholm Church, flung themselves over onto the steep roof of the German church, played with the buntings of the boats on Skeppsbron, lit the windows of Stora Sjötullen, illuminated Lidingö forest, and died away in a rosy cloud far, far away in the distance, where the sea lies. And the wind came from there, and made the same journey back, over Vaxholm, past the fortress, past Sjötullen, along Sicklaön, it went in behind Hästholmen and glanced at the summer resorts; then out again and on it came into Danviken; there it took fright and dashed off along the southern shore, marked the smell of coal, tar and whale-oil, burst against Stadsgården, rushed up Mosebacke, swept into the garden and buffeted against a wall [...]1

Det var en afton i början av maj. Den lilla trädgården på Mosebacke hade ännu icke blivit öppnad för allmänheten, och rabatterna voro ej uppgrävda; snödropparna hade arbetat sig upp genom fjolårets lövsamlingar och höllo just på att sluta sin korta verksamhet för att lämna plats åt de ömtåligare saffransblommorna, vilka tagit skydd under ett ofruktsamt päronträd; syrenerna väntade på sydlig vind för att få gå i blom, men lindarna bjödo ännu kärleksfilter i sina obrustna knoppar åt bofinkarna, som börjat bygga sina lavklädda bon mellan stam och gren; ännu hade ingen mänskofot trampat sandgångarna sedan sista vinterns snö gått bort, och därför levdes ett obesvärat liv därinne av både djur och blommor. [...] solen stod över Liljeholmen och sköt hela kvastar av strålar mot öster; de gingo genom rökarna från Bergsund, de ilade fram över Riddarfjärden, klättrade upp till korset på Riddarholmskyrkan, kastade sig över till Tyskans branta tak, lekte med vimplarna på skeppsbrobåtarna, illuminerade i fönstren på stora Sjötullen, eklärerade Lidingöskogarna och tonade bort i ett rosenfärgat moln, långt, långt ut i fjärran, där havet ligger. Och därifrån kom vinden, och hon gjorde samma färd tillbaka genom V axholm, förbi fästningen, förbi Sjötullen, utmed Siklaön, gick in bakom Hästholmen och tittade på sommarnöjena; ut igen, fortsatte och kom in i Danviken, blev skrämd och rusade av utmed södra stranden, kände lukten av kol, tjära och trän, törnade mot Stadsgården, for uppför Mosebacke, in i trädgården och slog emot en vägg [...]2

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.–Rebecca Solnit 3

Excerpt: Skogen är bäst på bild (The Forest looks Best in Pictures). Here, a participant looks out over the city from a point a bit below and slightly to the west of Mosebacke.

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In 2015, I wandered into a second hand shop in Sundbyberg, and found this lithograph in a sale bin. I immediately dubbed it "Imaginary Slussen", took it home, and hung it on my wall. Here is another outlook from the northern edge of Södermlam, a century before.This ephemeral place walks the city with me, softly golden under the city that unfolds from Mosebacke.

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