Bestial Burst – BeBu-071 257.81MB FLAC
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Sewer Election - 2024 - Psychic Panorama II
Discreet Music – DMCD05 340.08MB FLAC
The first Psychic Panorama opened an enormous electrical landscape inside the home stereo, using four numbered synthesizer pieces and one pause to make walls, speakers and nervous systems feel like parts of the same instrument. Psychic Panorama II enters a smaller and more inhabited space. Its five compositions have names, the total duration has nearly been cut in half, and the turntable joins the synthesizer as a machine capable of carrying memories as well as frequencies. This is not simply another view of the original panorama. Dan Johansson has moved closer to the structures inside it, discovering private rooms, dissolving bodies, damaged recollections and the uneasy authority of diagnosis.
“Enskilda Rum 1-3” means individual, separate or private rooms. The title immediately replaces the first album’s open horizon with architecture. Three rooms imply walls, thresholds and the possibility that each enclosure contains a different state of mind, yet the track unfolds continuously rather than providing three cleanly marked compartments. Sounds seep beneath doors. One synthesizer pattern establishes a severe little chamber, another frequency changes its proportions, and turntable residue introduces the suggestion that something from outside has entered without permission. Privacy becomes acoustically unstable. No room is entirely separate once vibration begins passing through the structure.
Johansson’s use of the turntable changes the meaning of his minimalism. A synthesizer can appear to generate sound in the present, creating tones without an obvious history beyond the circuit producing them. A turntable begins with something already recorded. Even when the source cannot be recognized, the device implies an earlier performance, object, voice or cultural moment being brought back into motion. The needle does not simply make sound; it retrieves. Psychic Panorama II is therefore haunted in a different way from its predecessor. Its ghosts do not arise only through sustained tone and psychological association. Some have been mechanically recalled from surfaces where another time remains stored.
The rooms are individual, but they do not promise individuality in any comforting modern sense. An individual room may be a bedroom, studio, hospital chamber, interrogation space or cell. It may allow solitude or enforce it. Johansson’s slow repetitions make those possibilities coexist. A tone can feel protective when it surrounds the listener, then claustrophobic once its return becomes inescapable. The music does not change dramatically enough to tell us which interpretation is correct. It demonstrates how quickly safety and confinement can exchange functions without altering the walls.
“Liquidized” removes those walls by changing matter itself. To liquefy something is not merely to destroy it. The material remains present but loses its stable form, becoming capable of flowing into containers that once could only surround it. Johansson’s sounds behave accordingly. Hard electronic edges begin smearing into sustained movement, while pulses that initially seem fixed become difficult to separate from the pressure accumulating around them. The track does not present fluidity as freedom. Liquid can escape through cracks, but it can also drown, corrode and assume whatever shape an external structure imposes upon it.
The word also carries a commercial chill. Assets are liquidized, holdings converted, objects reduced to exchangeable value. Psychic Panorama II repeatedly sits near that border between physical and administrative language, where a human condition becomes a process performed upon material. The synthesizer operates with impersonal consistency, while the turntable introduces damaged traces that resist being made completely abstract. Something lived appears to be circulating inside the machinery, though the album withholds enough information that the listener cannot identify whose life or memory has entered the system.
“Disintegrate” completes the movement from enclosed structure through liquid instability toward the loss of coherence. At under five minutes, it is more concentrated than the album’s opening pieces, but the shorter duration does not make it minor. The title names the point at which a whole can no longer preserve the relationships among its parts. Sound fragments, rhythm weakens and recognizable surfaces appear to break into particles. Yet disintegration also reveals construction. Once an object comes apart, we can hear what had been holding it together.
This is one of Johansson’s recurring strengths. His music can sound brutally reduced, but reduction becomes a method for uncovering hidden dependence. One tone seems independent until it disappears and the entire field loses depth. A pulse appears mechanical until its absence reveals how much bodily expectation had gathered around it. Harsh noise often overwhelms distinction by presenting too much information at once; Psychic Panorama II creates comparable disturbance by removing enough information that every remaining connection becomes precarious.
Then “Sparvöga” enters, carrying a title already inhabited by Swedish cultural memory. Marie Fredriksson’s 1989 song served as the theme to the television drama of the same name and became one of her most cherished solo recordings. Johansson does not need to reproduce it as a conventional cover for its emotional atmosphere to enter the album. Naming the piece is enough to open a passage between austere underground electronics and a song remembered through television sets, radios, childhood rooms and the national intimacy of a familiar voice.
“Sparvöga” literally evokes the eye of a sparrow, something small, alert and capable of noticing minute movement from within a much larger landscape. That perspective fits Johansson’s music perfectly. Psychic Panorama sounds enormous from a distance, but its real activity occurs in tiny changes of pressure, pitch and surface. The sparrow’s eye does not understand the whole panorama through philosophical abstraction. It survives by noticing the smallest alteration within it.
The piece is described as an ode to Fredriksson, and its placement after “Disintegrate” gives that tribute particular force. A person dies, recordings remain, and memory must decide how to approach what can no longer be restored. The turntable becomes a fitting memorial instrument because it makes absence physically rotate. A dead performer’s voice can reenter the room, but only through a stylus tracing information cut into another material. Reproduction brings presence and confirms loss simultaneously. Every return proves both that the recording survived and that the original moment cannot happen again.
Johansson’s tribute avoids the grand gestures normally associated with commemoration. The music remains within his cold, repetitive language, but coldness does not prevent grief. Grief often includes numbness, mechanical behavior, repetition and the inability to understand why ordinary objects continue functioning after a person has disappeared. An electronic pattern continuing without consolation may express mourning more honestly than a melody inflated toward catharsis. The machine does not feel, yet the human listening to its persistence may feel too much.
This encounter between Sewer Election and Marie Fredriksson also refuses the false border separating underground severity from popular beauty. Johansson’s work does not become less uncompromising because it acknowledges a beloved singer, and Fredriksson’s emotional directness does not become intellectually shallow because millions recognized themselves within it. Both practices understand repetition, recorded memory and the power of a sound entering private rooms. The difference lies in surface language, not in the seriousness with which listening can alter a life.
The closing “Diagnosis” introduces an authority prepared to give all this instability a name. Diagnosis can provide recognition, treatment and relief, but it can also convert a complicated person into one classified condition. After private rooms, liquefaction, disintegration and memorial vision, the title sounds almost absurdly certain. Someone has finally arrived with a word that claims to explain the panorama. Johansson responds with the album’s shortest composition, as though the decisive label can be stated quickly while the lived experience preceding it required more than half an hour.
The track does not reveal whether the diagnosis is correct. Instead, it makes classification itself part of the psychic environment. Once a condition has been named, every earlier event may be reorganized as evidence. The private rooms become symptoms, disintegration becomes progression, and memory becomes pathology. Yet the album’s sounds remain too unstable to submit completely. They continue generating ambiguous relationships that no single label can close. The diagnosis is another room, not an exit from the building.
This gives the sequel a more explicitly human shape than the first volume. Psychic Panorama created an impersonal electronic horizon that listeners completed through their own internal reactions. Psychic Panorama II introduces titles suggesting privacy, bodily transformation, cultural mourning and medical judgment. The sound remains abstract, but language places human consequences around it. Johansson has not explained the panorama. He has allowed signs of people to appear inside its electrical weather.
The shorter running time also changes the psychology of repetition. The first volume asked listeners to remain inside long environments until their ordinary measurements of duration weakened. Here the repetitions are more compressed and differentiated, with each track performing a distinct transformation. The album does not feel impatient, but it moves through consequences more quickly. Rooms become liquid, liquid loses coherence, disintegration opens into memory, and memory receives a diagnosis. The sequence resembles an involuntary process whose direction becomes visible only after it has already advanced.
The CD edition is another private room. Five hundred jewel cases carry identical information into separate homes, where each stereo produces a different acoustic structure from the same digital source. This copy traveled farther by becoming a FLAC archive, preserving the full sequence while releasing it from the physical disc’s numbered limitation. Yet the album continues to insist upon material carriers: synthesizers, records, stylus, compact disc, computer storage, amplifiers and speakers. Psychic experience may be invisible, but it requires an extraordinary amount of matter before it can be shared.
Calling this Psychic Panorama II might initially suggest continuation, expansion or a second installment of a successful method. Johansson instead makes the title’s numeral feel almost clinical, as though this were a second observation of a condition that has changed between examinations. The basic symptoms remain: repetition, electronic pressure, altered duration and a domestic listening space gradually becoming unfamiliar. What has changed is the appearance of history. Records rotate, names replace numbers, Marie Fredriksson enters the frame, and the listener is no longer alone with pure signal.
The first panorama asked what could become visible inside sustained electrical abstraction. The second asks what happens when recognizable human memory begins surfacing within that abstraction and immediately starts dissolving. Its answer is neither nostalgia nor despair. A voice, title or recorded fragment can survive without remaining intact. Memory does not preserve the past like an untouched object in a sealed room. It liquefies, disintegrates, reassembles and continues casting emotional light from sources that can no longer be reached.
Psychic Panorama II is therefore not colder than a conventional memorial record. It is honest about the machinery required for remembrance and the damage every act of retrieval contains. The needle touches the record, the synthesizer sustains its indifferent voltage, and a dead singer’s title opens a small eye inside the darkness. The panorama has narrowed to a private room, but the room now contains the living, the absent and the machines that permit them to occupy the same sound.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)