Vädersolsmodernitet was made from June, 2017 to August, 2018, in the newly built electronic music studios at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. It is structured entirely around almost cinematic tableaus, which are each, in turn, environments. The work takes up the detritus of what was then nine years worth of field recordings of the city of Stockholm, and reworks it into combinatory representations of place. The dérive is something which ultimately “disintegrates” into “representation” according to Ivan Chtcheglov, the original progenitor of psychogeography in 1950s Paris.x Thus, Vädersolsmodernitet is an altered ghost city in scenes, cycling the room in tandem with the changes that take place outside the internal, listening walk of the wanderer. In this work, the city also wanders impossibly together with, and in the imaginations of, the people who listen. The ephemeral city is a living, moving entity here, joining its inhabitants in traversal, through its changing places and passing times, future and past.
Although the work is structured in tableaus that are made from field recordings with specific locations, I have made the narrative of the work intentionally vague–a practice I have termed “open narrative” in this project. In this way, those who listen can meet the psychogeographical act of walking through Stockholm with their own imaginary traversals. Thus, the agenda here is to use seemingly agenda-setting materials, like protest marches, people calling out or orating, and heavy machinery, in order to not define an agenda. This anti-agenda is a direct repudiation of those forces in cities which seek to dominate the narrative, offering complexity in place of on-point messages. Different people who listen will focus on different parts of the tableaus, depending on their particular walk in the city. In all of the scenes, materials from juxtaposing places and scenarios and set in motion together, setting up a wide enough array of experience that people who listen might identify with one, more or listen with counter-materials.
The Gentle is the Political!
The Indistinct empowers Articulation!
The Subtle is the defining mark of Psycho-sonic Cartographies!
Taken together, the combined tableaus of Vädersolsmodernitet are a journey through an imagined Stockholm, and a varied enough one that the protagonist–be they the one I have provided, a different one someone listening imagines–can be interpreted in many ways. Vädersolsmodernitet (The Sun-Dogs of Modernity) is also about re-owning one’s sense of place as an individual city dweller, as much through darker or contentious stories as optimistic ones; as much through the force of the everyday as through the subtleties of the forceful.
Vädersolsmodernitet (The Sun-Dogs of Modernity).Headphone Version, made in part using a model of the Klangkupolen at KMH, as built by Gerhard Eckel in 2017.
IMPORTANT: This version is made for HEADPHONES, not for a pair of speakers. If you happen to have a multichannel listening set-up in your home or studio and would like to hear the work that way, feel free to contact me for appropriate stems.
I made the piece in Reaper, a DAW (or “digital audio workstation”). I have used Reaper for all the fixed media electronic works in this project. Faced with constant moving between several studios, where plug-ins shift, I set a limitation with the piece that the lion’s share of effects would be only those available inside the Reaper program. But I also hope that using Reaper in this way has provided some useful information to others faced with uncertain plug-in access. After having phasing problems with Orogenesis, I asked composer and acoustic engineer Gerhard Eckel for his advice. “One sound, One speaker!” was his reply. Thus I made 16 “passive” or static tracks, where one sound does indeed come out of one speaker at a time. Then, I made eight additional “active” tracks, which are used for mixer-automated panning, where sounds move in space. There are also a small number of sounds which have LFO’s(or “low frequency oscillators”) applied to their panning parameters, so that they fly about the room in a more randomized manner, their panning motion directed by the slow hocket between the LFO’s. Since the speaker set-up between the studios I was using was different, and I knew it might be performed in settings with consumer grade speakers or less than optimal acoustic spaces, I did not use ambisonics in this work at all. Rather than having a single panner on each track, each sound has its own panner plug-in. This made it possible to do very exact placement work, but also made the piece quite heavy for many computers; I have hand-placed every sound in it. These and other techniques used to make this piece descend in many ways not from the latest, cutting edge spatialization technologies, but from my original education in tape music in the mid-1990s, which consisted in no small part of cutting tape with razor blades.
Vädersolsmodernitet is structured scenographically. Even though this diagram looks primitive, sketches like this comprise the main working scores for the work–although, of course, the real score is the finished, original Reaper file. Working scenographically was what led me to the use of tableaus for this piece, and using them as an organizing principle yielded a more sophisticated kind of work with tableaus than I had done in previous compositions. It was in composing Vädersolsmodernitet (The Sun-Dogs of Modernity) that this method was truly realized to a more detailed, in-depth and meaningful degree. I have included a more legible table of the tableaus in the pieces here. Each of these tableaus, which start to bleed into one another and eventually transform into the chordal sections at the end, is constructed from a number of different real places.
There are three points at which the sonic environment dissolves into spatialized sweeps of cut-up environs. These are the mixer diffusion sections, which I made by hand on the SSL board at KMH. The study for this work, and the first mixer diffusion work I did, was Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda, which has a section of live mixer diffusion. I was also influenced by my collaborations with several Stockholm area live electronics performers who were using mixer diffusion employing small, MIDI-driven banks of faders, as well as by mixer diffusion performances I had seen by Baltimore electronics musician Twig Harper in 2005 at the High Zero festival, by Danish electronics musician and composer Jakob Riis in 2017 at the InterArt center in Malmö and by composer Annette Vande Gorne at the SMC conference in 2013 at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.x The diffusion sections in Vädersolsmodernitet act as moving transitions between tableaus, even though they are a kind of tableau themselves, built from the mixed cues of different places, and recognizable as such to those who recognize those cues. It is also part of the re-orchestration of the Easter hymn which concludes the first section of the piece, starting at 8:12–dispersing the church singers back out into streets and galleries full of people, joining in the hymn of imagined renewal, welcome or unwanted, across the city.
