I was commissioned to make Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? as part of the PULS collaboration between Audiorama in Stockholm and Østre/EAU gallery in Bergen, with a concert curated by Trond Lossius. This was my first serious work using Ambisonics, which Lossius pointed me towards in light of my search for more independent, D.I.Y. practices in multichannel electronic music that still had the possibility of highly detailed and nuanced work. I had several conversations with Lossius while he was working on a composition entitled Edgelands, which addresses the suburb-scape, and made Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? inspired by those conversations.x I made Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? from voices in the wider environs of Stockholm life, in all the wonderfully varied versions of Swedish that is spoken in communities with roots in other places in the world, and built the sonic environments from the “edgelands” of Stockholm. This piece is a contemplation of outer reaches of the changing city, and what its aspects of place and psychogeography might be.
I enlisted the help of writer and journalist Håkan Lindgren for Vart ska dom ta vägen nu?, because he has Swedish as a first language, and quickly showed that he was better than me at getting strangers to open up to us. For this piece I set out to interview strangers, since almost all of the participants in Skogen är bäst på bild (The Forest looks Best in Pictures) were my cohorts from the music scene, and thus gave a that other piece a rather cultural worker-o-centric view fo the city. Håkan and I interviewed all the participants together, going out several times to different places in the city. I was also called to the FisksätraFolkets hus (Fisksätra, or roughly, “Fish cove” community center, or “fiskis” for short), one evening by my friends James Barrett and Morgan Karlsson, who ran a project there around community participation and culture, Med början i Fiskis (“Beginning with ‘Fiskis’).x The city had decided to close the local elementary school with only two weeks’ notice, and people in the neighborhood were outraged. They convened on a meeting with a city official at the Folkets hus. “Bring your recorder!” they ordered, and I recorded the whole situation. I also interviewed a gentleman there who had a degree in economics from Oxford university, but had not been able to find work in Sweden other than as a security guard. Back in the city center, Håkan and I met a woman in a Bingohall, who fled to Stockholm from Austria during World War II; two fellows reminiscing about Stockholm at the Central Station; some young vegan activists in Sergels torg. Then we went to Farsta, where we talked with two groups of women, one from Colombia and Chile, one from Afghanistan and a younger man shopping there. We also interviewed a retiree and a teenager from Sundbyberg, a nurse’s assistant from Johanneshov and a dental hygienist from Solna, shopping at the second-hand store in Solna Centrum. And there are snippets from other places: a windy attic in Solna, a concert of Swedish fiddle music from Larry’s Corner (a record and book shop near Skanstull), a summer festival at Västertorp, water from every corner of the city. Two of the participants in Skogen är bäst på bild (The Forest looks Best in Pictures) also worked outside the cultural life, one as a ticket seller and ward at Central Station and one as a news translator for Swedish Television. Going back through the material from my interviews with to see if I could find anything there, I found many parallels to the subjects brought forth by the participants in this new work with the person working as a translator, so I added material from recorded interviews with him which had not been used in Skogen är bäst på bild. This tied the two works together, with his voice as shared material between them.
I structured Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? in sections, according to topics that came up often in conversation with the people we interviewed. Allowing subjects that came up often to drive the structure and contents of the piece, I juxtaposed people in different places in the city, speaking of the same thing in chorus, with collaging and spatial work around each subject. The colorful variation of dialects in this work meant that the language yields a more realistic picture of the wider city. In Stockholm, which is very segregated–and also has rapidly disappearing older dialects that hail from different neighborhoods in the last century–the dialect each person speaks the language with is an indicator of place. Thus the variety of dialects and accents in the work weaves an outer-reaching map of the city in voices.
The subject-based sections of the piece are built through methods of collage, rather than as longer, fixed tableaus. The finished sections careen in near-constant motion between stories, conversations and glimpses of rooms or scenarios, some left in a single form, some combined. The field recording and synthesizer processing here is not made to create stationary places, but rather to create that motion, as if the people who listen are traveling through the city on some ephemeral, multi-directional bus. Because the sections around subjects are both dense and non-stationary, they are marked from one another with purely chordal and drone-like synthesizer material, to give the people who listen a rhythm of pauses in which to rest, and inwardly synthesize what they have heard.At the end, there is water, and more water, the city looking in on itself from all the many waterways that cross and divide its inlets and islands. Finally, all the people whose voices make up the piece chant wordlessly, perhaps pensively: a choir where the whole city sings, softly, almost secretly together as the day fades, and a final synthesizer drone-chord dissipates out into the Mälaren. Taken together, the sections of Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? collect many different stories and sonic images of the city, and map them in an ever-moving and re-juxtaposing sonic field of diverse lives and experiences, traversing the field of the room and co-traversing all the different Stockholms in the imaginations of those who listen.
Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? Headphone Version
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 a b-format version or appropriate stems
