In the Pendulums embrace In the Pendulums embrace

“What have I done?”

Spirit of Rain was reviewed by groove.de:

Norwegian Jonas Howden Sjøvaag had already had a career spanning well over 20 years as a singer and drummer in countless projects ranging from modern jazz to Nordic folk when he decided to do a doctorate in musicology and thoroughly rethink the artistic and personal forms of expression that had previously been taken for granted. One of the first results of this is Spirit of Rain, a non-binary, digital avatar persona that performs hyperfragile and enigmatic art school pop songs with minimalist, yet complex, non-trivial synthesizer accompaniment. Packed into a retro-modern vaporwave/cyberpunk aesthetic (in addition to his instrumental talent, Sjøvaag is also a graphic designer) and involving an AI in the writing process, the resulting whole, called Spirit of Rain (Shipwreckords, October 25), leaves any categories that went into the work far behind.

I like this review becayse they interpret the album as new, without mentioning new sounds, or new musical form. In other contexts, this is very often the first mention. Look for a new form. Find a new sound.

I don’t think that’s necessary, the impact of new form and new sound is often too disruptive to the music I want to create.

Instead, new can mean known fragments inside an unusual framework.

Example:

50% midi-swing on track 1, against 55% midi-swing on track 2

Complexity by leaving out instead of packing it tightly

I started using generative tools because I wanted to disrupt my normal routines and see if I could generate ideas I wouldn’t arrive at on my own. In the beginning, there was Inferkit and its outputs veered in strange, sometimes incoherent directions—what I ended up calling “weirdness.” That unpredictable quality forced me to reconsider how I shape my own work. By weaving in lines or phrases from Inferkit, I gained new perspectives I wouldn’t have imagined through my usual methods.

Then, I moved to ChatGPT and it gave me coherent text that felt neat and grammatically correct but lacked the unexpected angles I was looking for. I can see value in its clarity, yet it couldn’t replace the sense of discovery I got from more chaotic results. In both cases, I tried to limit the input to my own texts, hoping to keep track of where these AI-generated fragments actually came from. Still, I wasn’t completely sure whether I might be inadvertently incorporating snippets of someone else’s material. That’s an ethical problem, obviously. When are words original?

The question about originality and authorship led me to think about the ethics of using AI in my practice. Even if I feed it only my own words, there’s always a risk that the model’s training data seeps in, giving me something I didn’t intend or even recognize.

I have concluded, for now, that AI can be a helpful tool, but it cannot replace the active choices I make as an artist.

In Blues for N0 and Gons Neris, my main focus was to further explore the cut-up technique, inspired particularly by William S. Burroughs, this time through speech to text and text to speech, allowing a machine to do it instead of me. In Itzama, I did this by pretending to converse with Burroughs through the lyrics, here the bot converses with itself.

The result is the same, still: breaking linearity by slicing text into pieces and rearranging them. This was not just about dismantling language, but about discovering new layers of meaning through unpredictability, in line with my initial ideas from startup.

In my work, fragments of words and phrases were deliberately separated, moved around, and recombined until something else emerged. I approached this practice somewhat methodically, cycling through stages: initially compiling texts, cutting them up, and then assembling these fragments into new constellations. Each iteration revealed hidden resonances I wouldn't have found if I'd simply written straight through.

In hindsight, I see that I do this all the time. With images, sound and text. Trying to find new inside known.

With Gons Neris, I went further into abstraction. Rather than overt textual splicing, the focus shifted towards subtle shifts in tone and internal rhythm, existing by itself, a machine playing, producing sound by hitting metal rods, controlled by human presence.

The accompanying poster presentation (Blues for n0, SAR Forum, Tilburg 2024 + ARAK 2024) and exhibit (gnoS neriS, Dutch Design Week 2024) allowed for explanation in detail. Especially meaningful was being present at DDW for a week, talking to visitors, watching the machine in action in a room.

Both works strenthened my belief that the real potential of artistic research lies in embracing unpredictability and fragmentation. Rather than forcing order prematurely, allowing disorder to guide the process opens possibilities, both risky and compelling. This balance between method and chance is central to my understanding of what defines artistic exploration.

The options are often too many, it’s difficult to process everything, all at once. The conflict of Musician vs Producer evident in the Spirit of Rain led me to trying to recreate something similar, but in a way that made it possible to perform live, to interact and shape, to play for 40 minutes, or 60 minutes, or 20 minutes. Adapting. Improvising.

I made some choices, set up some rules. If it fit on the IKEA kitchen island “Bror”, it could be a part. If not, it had to go. Something would replace something else. Like written lyrics in a song (usually) replaces the immediacy of improvisation.

Many fragments were picked up, looked at, placed, and evaluated. Some stayed, some were thrown away. Pre-recorded voice on a cassette, using elevenlabs for voice synthesis, a cloning of my own. Familiar, and unfamiliar.

What was “Be like water”

Archival listening notes

Archival reading of archival listening notes, with removals

• a simplification of each instrument, narrowing down to the minimum
• a simplification of form to allow a fluid motion through a planned piece
• to keep the element of improvisation, within the boundaries set by preset elements like text, BPM, and specifics from HW used, an element of surprise was introduced (voice on cassette)
• is this really live electronics?
• turns out that in this project it was fruitful to abandon Ableton, switch to Reaper (for stability + simplification of the live electronics part), and to see the DAW as a sound processing unit rather than something that provides musical input
• new questions, other results, elaborating on the self
• accept self-gratification as a creative element
• the narrowing down causes more creativity, not less
• the narrowing down demands new creative outlets

What works?

• The setup (machine) can be re-used for another project, in another musical style, or for prewritten tracks
• The work Be like Water can be repeated without being an exact clone of the previous concert
• I find the soundscape rewarding
• The idea of keeping it portable and relatively simple worked without accepting major lackings in the resulting sound
• It's interesting to see how little I can do while still claiming to "play the instrument," and it is also interesting to see that touching a wooden box with a piezo inside is enough for me to claim to be a drummer, while singing two full lyrics still leaves me in doubt as to whether I'm a singer

Tradeoffs:

• I have played a drum kit for many years and to make this work I have put the urge to play a full kit on hold
• I have to act as a professional in fields where I know that I am really just professional-by-proxy
  • bricolage
  • improvisation
  • Wabi-Sabi

Be like water was presented both as a concert with a select audience in my studio, and at the Artistic research forum, Oslo, spring ‘24. Still very much a work in progress, less finished than Spirit of Rain, I didn’t like it very much then, and I don’t like it much now.

There’s an inherent conflict, still. Even with the rules in place, when I listen as a musician, the sound of it all is too cluttered, there is little sensibility to it, no room to think. There’s too much information, the facets are fighting for space, electronics against acoustics, vocalist against drummer.

I want music to actively inspire listening, and I think that can only be done if you allow for it from the beginning.

It means: don’t say everything, don’t play every note. Make the listener connect the dots, guide them towards a room, rather than pointing to a specific spot.

I need more confidence to allow for this to happen.

1: And then you were here // in this room

outside the window the world was // in full bloom

in this room you made your sound // and the world

the world // heard

2: in the end you'll leave this // room, and

you will not know if the world outside // will ever bloom

in this room where life has left // the world

and sounds // of birds

ref.: going out // coming home

write it down // before it's gone

tell your story // sing your tune

maybe someone // hears it soon

3: Whatever marks this life // has made, in the

end, when softly on the green fields // you are laid

staring into // the summer sky

all your marks // will fade

Abandonding bror-rules, continuing to remove, to clarify, to focus. I’m listening and “allowing myself to connect the dots”. Unknown to me when it happened, my own effort in this, both in real time and to recorded pieces, is a form of archival listening that, although always present, has not been a noticeable part of my musical practice.

Now that it is, it’s a method that I can apply to my practice. It allows me to remove known parts, trusting that the holes I dig out can be filled by the same, although unconscious, approach from a listener perspective too.

This is what has emerged from my work up until this point. A practice that informs itself, by creating, relating back, and knowing that something is there. I’m connecting the dots, and I’m knowing it. It also means I have identified my backdrop, and that I know how to place new items so that it either melts into the bacground, or stands out as highly visible creations.

It's a machine, a theoretical one, and it has been present from the beginning, but it stands out more clearly now.

It certainly isn’t pleasant, deconstructing my own practice like this.

At times it felt like time not well spent at all, like anything could become something, and yet it became nothing at all, just stuff produced and left behind.

I wasn’t even sure, and in many ways I’m still not, that I will be able to puzzle the pieces back together into something that feels rewarding, because on the other end of it all, there is the harsh reality of function, reception, reward and usage.