This is a record for Stockholm, recorded with a microphone of which only three examples were ever made. The title is the simultaneous two languages which now twine together in my mind: ”Lent skiner solen ner på själens skinn / The sun shines down softly on the skin of the soul.” The improvisations, done entirely on the acoustic violin and in single takes, build upon listening to the moving of huge granite mountains for the building of things on Stockholms stone terrain, and the stones and machines in all the cities waterways found with hydrophones – on the songs of the new birds here, and the trains, and the hours the sun came forth until midnight and disappeared over a hundred years of rising and setting. It is for the endlessly disappearing and re-emerging versions of the city and the people who live in those tides.
This material is both part of on-going work with improvised music, and a collection of mixed composed, structured and freely improvised violin solos recorded for a 2016 LP double release on Ehse and Fylkingen Records. Even here, the work is site-specific: I chose to use an Ehrlund tube microphone. These microphones were commissioned to be manufactured by the Swedish Radio, but only three examples ever made, one of which is at EMS. I also used two Neumann KM184 microphones, to balance the pointy, harsh sound of that tube microphone, though I aimed to make the music I played match the sound of that unique device. All the tracks were recorded in single takes.
The covers, depicting Stockholm and the sun, were made by my long time friend and collaborator Erik Ruin, a paper-cut, shadow-show and screen-print artist living in Philadelphia.
After making this LP; I have continued work and done many performances focusing on the techniques I developed for that LP since recording it for this project.
Although my approach to the violin is not based in any one genre and is often unorthodox, it is still very much informed by the kinds of master-apprentice situations I learned to play it in, as well as by hand-to-ear techniques I came to use through many years of both live and session work for various classical, jazz, klezmer, eastern European folk, Americana, Ottoman and art-rock projects, as well as more dedicated playing in various free improvisation, inter-media and experimental electronic music contexts. During the course of the last several years, and especially during my masters studies, I developed new and parallel compositional processes through the use of electronic media.
The LP has five tracks, each of which focuses on a different subject, and thus a different set of techniques. The violin has always been the tool through which I depicted immediate human stories and environments, through the use of musical symbols known only to myself and, occasionally, a small, shifting group of confidants. My violin work is focused heavily on a group of genres called “improvised music”, which are each fairly specific in terms of aesthetics and practices; there are vibrant scenes of these kinds of musics in every major city in the world. I engaged in that practice with an eye to transmuting and telling tales of the environments where I dwelt, in artspaces, activist movements, local businesses and other myriad cityscapes, in all their transformations. This changed in Stockholm, and I found myself turning to different sources in my new environment. Perhaps this is because I feel no sense of origin in this new country, even though, for many years, I was certainly no less involved in Sweden’s improvised music scenes than I was in previous cities. This change in focus is, however, almost certainly because of new ideas gained during studies in electroacoustic composition from 2012 to 2014 at KMH.
I Fågel/Bird
One of the more predominant features in the soundscape of Stockholm is that of non-melodic birdsong: the Björktrast (Fieldfare h), Skata (Magpie) and Kaja (Jackdaw). I made the first track on the record with techniques based on trying to transcribe the ”songs” of these birds. The björktrast, in particular, has a host of rattling, synthesizer-like sounds. I added some materials drawn from the sorts of idiomatic references one might find to birds in various violin music. This work is also a reprocessing of the trills and ornaments which I found appearing in my improvisational work after spending several years learning and performing various dance and folk musics from Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Romania and Serbia, as well as Klezmer and Mevlevi music. It is also a good example of the techniques of transposition and emulation discussed earlier in this document. Rather than make literal transpositions, I have imitated these birds, or sat and played with them, testing whether they stay or go, whether they come nearer or look at me with confusion.
To record and play with these birds is an act of psycho-sonic cartography. The landscape of their rattling anti-songs spans time rather than distance, over the day or the season. They mark and intermesh with memories the city holds, and as I play with them I join them in that marking.
II Sol/Sun
This is a quasi-algorithmic piece, built from solar data for the city of Stockholm between the years 1800 and 1900, which is mapped onto sections of descending intervals, punctuated by sections of still non-tonal material. The technique being explored here is one of a group of such techniques I loosely term spectral drones. The aim is to make one violin sound like many, and it is a group of techniques that I use fairly frequently throughout my playing.Since the pitches mostly do not line up with natural violin harmonics, the combination of the fingered and harmonic material creates the effect of sounding like more than one instrument, creating a "ghost" violin. Most of what I call spectral drones in my solo playing are created using rapid trills between pitches and, simultaneously, between harmonic and fingered pitches. So I wanted to break that pattern by developing ways of reaching the outer spectrum of the range of violin harmonics without trills. Here, other than slow vacillations between fingered and harmonic treatments, the hand is relatively still. This left room for subtle vibratos and many new bowing techniques that I had not previously explored. By the time I recorded the LP, these techniques had become a fixed part of my vocabulary, so that even when I followed the intervals set out in the score I had been working with for some time, there was a host of new improvisatory alterations to work from. This track is an updated, developed version of the first of two solo violin compositions/improvisation structures I made during my Masters work.
III Stone/Sten
Stockholm is built on a landscape of solid granite. I took many recordings of huge machines moving stones, stones in water and on the ground, picking them up in my hands and used as gravel in winter. Then I tried to emulate those recordings as transcriptions on the violin, and cataloged a group of them to use as material. This track is an updated, developed version of the second of the two solo violin compositions/improvisation structures I made during my Masters work. The main technique I employed to make it – transposing real-life objects and field recordings – is an important method for this entire project. Here, this method yielded a host of ways new to me to use over-pressuring of the bow and ricochet techniques in combination with various trill techniques. The score is a very basic sketch, with short examples of different techniques to choose from drawn from those transposition exercises; more a reference sheet for myself than something for another musician.
IV Yes/Ja
One late night I let myself into EMS. It was empty, for the dark and the winter, and I was worried about running into someone I did not want to meet there. I recorded a video of music for this nerve-wracked sadness, called it “No”, and posted it online. Seeking transmutation, I recorded a second, called it “Yes”, and posted it directly after. This track is based on the material from that spontaneous video recording. That piece suddenly contained many things I had not done very much of lately; a missing counterpart to all the Stockholm transposition music. In terms of new materials and techniques, there were cathartic major melodies, as well as a usage of the spectral drone techniques full of trills and rapid bow crossings into which I embedded more diatonic chord progressions, running in heedless parallel to the longer unfolding of the spectral material. In combination it all struck me as a group of ecstatically irreverent aesthetic choices which are sometimes seen as fundamentally ”wrong” or, as I often jokingly say, ”illegal” in some of the improvised music worlds I have walked in. Here I worked from that initial recording. Much of the music on this LP is geographical, and addresses the natural world of the city: birds, stones, celestial bodies. Here, then, is the one who walks through that cityscape.
V Stålträd/Wire
Bird on a wire, played with the wire wrapping near the frog of the bow. With this last, short track in mind, I added this old rhyme to the end of the liner notes, as superstition has always guided me well, and it is a part of my own psychogeographical wanderings:
One for sorrow, two for joy
three for a girl, four for a boy
five for silver, six for gold
seven for a secret, never to be told
eight for heaven, nine for hell
ten for the devil’s own sel’. . . .
Throughout my life I have been a relative purist about using only what the violin, itself, affords as a sound source, employing neither electronic enhancements nor preparations except on the rarest of occasions. But this use of the bow wire is an exception, since it is (technically) something the conventional equipment of the violin affords. It is one of the few ways to get a sound evocative of metal from the instrument, and subtleties can be drawn from it through ”normal” violin techniques around bow placement, speed changes and fingering.
These techniques and groups of sound-worlds have transformed my solo playing. In summer of 2016, I traveled to the USA, and played five concerts of improvised music there, both in ensembles with musicians, artists and dancers whose work I find inspiring, and performing solos drawn from the materials here.
