Rönnells antikvariat (Rönnell’s antiquarian book shop) is one of those rare bookstores that is, itself, like something out of a wonderful book.x Located near the center of Stockholm’s most ostentatiously extravagant neighborhood, this marvelous center of books, music and art is under more and more imminent threat of closure. In 2014, the landlord was once again making noises about evicting the storied shop. Then music artist Dan Fröberg came to town. As chronicled on the LP that came out of his live appearance at the shop:
A sorcery and exorcism to shield Birger Jarlsgatan 32 for eternity, that in all worlds Rönnells is protected unto the end of the world, to call forth all of book-kind’s indwelling angels, protective spirits, and drive out those market rate demons and elemental spirits of greed out of reality once and for all, and transform them into green frogs.x
Days later, Rönnells got a stay of execution as their lease was renewed. In the shifting smoke and mirrors between music, magic, imagination, psychogeography and the evident city, Dan Fröberg had performed a work of psycho-sonic cartographical conjuring, re-imagining this room of the city back into existence through magical re-mapping and sorceries of sound.
My own work in this particular project claims no such supernatural power. In other (and continuing) artistic lives, I have embraced more such overtly supernatural practices, most often in contexts far louder than what Fröberg wrought. But in the context of a PhD project, I felt called to embrace something wholly different. The stance of making artistic work from inside a large academic institution is one of reflection some steps removed from the greater world, not activism from within it. This demands more subtle, complex and gentle work; a counterpoint to the city and its transformations, just and unjust, which it reflects upon. In this project, I am reaching for the magic of the daily, and the ghosts of that daily life’s memories and imagined futures: the daily life of anything from a banal shopping mall to a contested city plaza to a venerated local bookshop. I also found that I could not conflate the activism I had done earlier in life, nor the more outsider-situated and magic-driven musical practices I have spent much of my life engaged in, with the artistic research that a PhD of this kind must be. Finding ways to take up and honor all these things in the places that seem proper in this project has been a constant task. Engaging with psychogeography provides some means for doing that. But learning of this event at Rönnells, and listening to its documentation, have given me ways to address these disparate strains in my practice as situated inside an institution. Fröbergs performance and LP teeter on the edge of magic, activism and musico-sonic art. This project must also do so, if in a different way: each illuminates the path for the other. From here, even in its understated flamboyance, I hear Fröberg’s performance as a shining example of the very subtlety, gentleness and complexity this project seeks out. The way he uses acoustic artifacts is different from the way I use them, but none-the-less informs the basic sonic and musical aesthetics of the music and sound works I have made here. Knowing this story has informed the overarching conceptual work of this project as well, lighting a tenuous but true third way between the protest of the street, the improvisation of the artspace and the artistic research of the academy. In ghosts, magic and ritual, at the same time Fröberg (perhaps) saved Rönnells to live another day, this is the ultimate act of Stockholm psycho-sonic cartography that I have heard. The unspoken, the implied and the cryptic are sometimes the most powerful actors in all these strains of practice alike.
I have made a work, Ghost Installation: Rönnells, which you may access here.