Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall - 2021 - Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves

 

Astral Spirits – AS167

A seven-inch record leaves almost no room for hesitation, which suits Mats Gustafsson and Joachim Nordwall perfectly. Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves contains barely eight minutes of music, yet neither side feels like a sketch reduced to fit the format. Each is a sealed pressure chamber in which breath, reed, electrical current and low-frequency vibration are forced into immediate contact. Gustafsson and Nordwall have collaborated often enough to recognize one another’s reflexes, but familiarity has not made their music polite. It allows them to interrupt, crowd and provoke each other without losing the deeper conversation taking place beneath the surface damage.

“Shadows of Tomorrow” begins in a state of nervous incompletion. Gustafsson’s saxophone does not settle into a stable line; notes scatter, repeat, snag against one another and disappear into Nordwall’s thin static fields. The electronics occupy the tiny spaces between breaths rather than constructing a wall behind them, making silence feel contaminated before any sound fully arrives. Gustafsson’s phrases sometimes resemble messages transmitted too quickly for language to form, while Nordwall keeps changing the conditions through which those messages must travel. The title suggests a future already casting darkness backward upon the present. Nothing has happened yet, but its consequences can be felt pressing against the room.

“The Brain Produces Electrical Waves” turns that anxiety into heavier physical force. Synthetic bass frequencies establish a dark gravitational center while Gustafsson’s breath and reed noise arrive as wounded howls, low growls and compressed bursts of air. The distinction between biological and electronic sound begins to collapse. A saxophone is an acoustic object, yet it converts lungs, nerves and muscular pressure into vibration; Nordwall’s equipment begins with electrical signal but produces something that feels bodily, irritated and capable of panic. The title therefore describes more than neurological fact. The brain produces waves, machines produce waves, and this record traps both inside the same narrow groove until thought itself appears to have become audible as pressure.

The two sides operate like alternate states of one nervous system. “Shadows of Tomorrow” is alert, fragmented and scanning for danger; “The Brain Produces Electrical Waves” is the moment accumulated signals become an involuntary physical response. Neither piece allows enough time for a conventional development or resolution, but brevity intensifies their effect. The record ends while its frequencies still seem active, leaving a phantom vibration behind after the stylus would have lifted. Gustafsson and Nordwall do not merely place saxophone against electronics. They expose the electrical life already hidden inside breath and the troubled animal presence concealed inside circuitry. The result is small enough to hold in one hand and large enough to temporarily rewire the room.