The third and final Deuterium piece I made for this project is Deuterium: Virkesvägen. Nyckelharpa player Lisa Gerholm introduced me to the members of the Coyote Collective, a group of artists who do exhibitions in–and about–spaces that will soon be shut down, torn down or otherwise transformed. A building at Virkesvägen 3 in the Hammarby sjöstad neighborhood of Stockholm was given to the Coyote Collective for an unusually long period of several weeks, so they were able to invite collaborators to program entire evenings. For this third Deuterium concert, which is the one I will take up here, the ensemble grew smaller due to last-minute complications; Bruno Anderssen and I played as a duo.
Virkesvägen 3 was originally a factory, first making stockings, and then making mirrors.x It was then converted into a food court starting in the 1990s, before sitting in disuse for some years. When we were there in 2019, it was about to be transformed into an Ikano bostad luxury condominium complex. The Coyote Collective had a number of artists make work specific to the process happening there, in an exhibition they titled Pioneer Town. In imitation of the construction site outside, complete with a model apartment sitting in a modular trailer in the middle of the rubble, they built a modular room at the center of the space, which served as a bar and lounge, with the exhibition in the rougher rooms outside, made to mimic a construction site.
I programmed an evening there with several performers who have also been engaged with artistic research: James Barrett playing the didgeridoo, Jacek Smolicki performing with radio transmitters and feedback and Henrik Frisk playing a duet of improvised music on soprano saxophone with me. I made a small sound installation, Ghost Installation: Sparvkvarteren, and this new work for Deuterium. Thus this concert and event represented a meeting point between different processes in the project. Different methods of improvisation, transposition, radiophonic work and spatial transformation through acoustic artefacts crossed in the works of this gathering of artists in a disappearing place, one phantasmagorical place upon another, all vanishing, like the improvised music, radio waves and acoustic artefacts that transform, then evaporate.
Deuterium: Virkesvägen builds on the previous pieces for the larger Deuterium ensembles, in that I took field recordings of the construction machinery outside, and found recordings from modern-day stocking and mirror factories online, for us to use as material for transposing onto our instruments. The entire score is built from transpositions of this material, drawing on similar processes from the earlier Deuterium: Dome of Visions piece. We sat with each recording, pulling out different aspects of it, trying to imitate it at some points, trying to draw upon it in more departing ways in others, copying down real pitch materials from it, and vacillating between delving into that pitched material present in the actual sounds, and turning more to extended techniques with less pitch information, for the emulation and transposition of other aspects of each recording. We also included transpositions of sparrows, since Virkesvägen 3 lies in Sparvkvarteren (The Sparrow Quarters). The factory machines of a century were re-animated in transposition, not in tentative or indicative sketches, but with the dense noisiness factory machines spin with. The sparrows the quarter is named for are everyday birds, neither colorful nor prized for their songs. But they were brought in transposed flocks to the very center of the soon-to-be condominium complex as its primary inhabitants, with the transposed work machines tearing up the quarter underlying it all. In all, the meeting in the space between the visual and sound-art works installed by the Coyote Collective, the group of musicians I brought to play on the evening and my own work with Deuterium created a whole evening of different site-specific artistic responses to and reflections on this rapidly changing corner of Hammarby.
