“Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long” is not merely an imposing title placed over quiet music. It is a surviving line from John Dowland’s 1597 song “If My Complaints Could Passions Move,” whose lament supplies Magnus Granberg with the hidden bones of this fifty-seven-minute composition. Rhythmic and harmonic fragments from Dowland are taken apart so thoroughly that the original song can no longer be recognized, yet some of its emotional gravity remains embedded in the new structure. The result is not an arrangement, variation or historical tribute. It is closer to an old building whose stones have been scattered through a forest and gradually incorporated into the roots, soil and undergrowth. The architecture has vanished, but its material continues living in another form.
Skogen means “the forest” in Swedish, and the name suits an ensemble whose music is built less around individual statements than around coexistence. Sounds appear at different distances and heights, sometimes touching and sometimes remaining unaware of one another. Magnus Granberg’s piano and clarinet, Angharad Davies and Anna Lindal’s violins, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello, Ko Ishikawa’s shō, John Eriksson’s vibraphone and marimba, Erik Carlsson’s percussion, Henrik Olsson’s bowls and glasses, Petter Wästberg’s contact microphones and objects, and Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixing board form an unusual acoustic-electronic ecology. No instrument becomes the narrator. The players seem to enter the music as inhabitants rather than performers standing in front of it.
Granberg’s method offers the musicians composed materials while allowing them considerable freedom in deciding when, how and whether to use them. This solves a problem that has troubled many musicians moving between composition and improvisation: how to preserve harmonic identity without dictating every event, and how to permit genuine unpredictability without allowing the music to lose its center. Here the score behaves less like a railway timetable than a collection of possible paths through shared terrain. The ensemble can wander, hesitate, retrace a route or remain motionless, yet the buried Dowland material quietly keeps everyone within the same climate.
The opening minutes establish this balance almost invisibly. Single piano tones, bowed strings, struck metal and faint electronic currents are separated by enough air that each sound seems to possess its own temperature. Silence is not treated as an empty interval waiting to be filled. It becomes the material through which every vibration must travel. A vibraphone tone can glow for several seconds after the mallet has disappeared; a violin line can narrow into a thread; the no-input mixing board can produce an electrical presence that feels strangely organic. Listening closely reveals constant activity, but nothing behaves as though it needs to prove that activity is occurring.
Ko Ishikawa’s shō is especially important to the album’s atmosphere. The Japanese mouth organ traditionally produces sustained clusters that can seem to suspend time, and its breath-fed harmonies provide a quiet bridge between the strings, percussion and electronics. The instrument does not arrive carrying an obvious quotation from gagaku or turn the piece into an East-West cultural demonstration. Its sound is absorbed into the ensemble’s shared air. Bowls, glasses, crotales and vibraphone similarly blur the distinction between pitch and resonance, while contact microphones enlarge tiny physical actions until rubbing, touching and vibration become compositional events.
Although the title promises despair, the music does not act out despair as collapse, violence or theatrical darkness. Granberg has described melancholy as sadness transformed into lightness, reaching a state of equilibrium through gravity and moderation. That distinction is central here. The composition does not deny sorrow, but it removes sorrow from the machinery of crisis. It allows despair to become observable, spacious and almost weightless, no longer governing every movement. The title’s past tense matters: despair had governed too long. The music occupies the fragile condition that follows, when nothing has been repaired completely but perception has begun opening again.
Small melodic shapes occasionally emerge from the long field, carrying a distant memory of song without resolving into anything singable. These fragments may be only a handful of notes, but because the surrounding music is so patient they acquire tremendous emotional force. A piano interval can sound like a question remembered from childhood. A violin’s restrained rise can briefly suggest human speech. Electronics form thin clouds around acoustic tones, then withdraw before their presence becomes comfortable. The musicians continually create the possibility of recognition without delivering the reassurance of a familiar theme.
Recorded at Atlantis in Stockholm in November 2012, the performance has the concentration of musicians listening not only to one another but also to the room receiving them. Atlantis had existed in earlier forms as Metronome Studio, a historically important recording space, yet nothing here attempts to exploit studio grandeur. The recording instead makes scale ambiguous. A tiny metallic click may feel inches from the ear while a sustained string tone opens a much larger interior distance. Domestic playback becomes part of the work: heating systems, passing traffic, footsteps and sounds from outside can slip into its wide spaces without necessarily feeling like interruptions. The piece does not surrender to its environment, but it leaves its doors unlocked.
This openness also explains why repeated listening can produce radically different experiences. Attention may follow the prepared or isolated piano tones during one encounter, then migrate toward the low strings, shō, resonant percussion or nearly subliminal electronic activity during another. There is no central melody forcing the ear down a prescribed route. The album changes according to where the listener stands inside it. At low volume it becomes a subtle alteration of the room; played more attentively, it reveals a dense network of choices, responses and withheld gestures.
The work’s great accomplishment is that its freedom never sounds casual. Every contribution carries the possibility of changing the balance of the entire ensemble, so restraint becomes a form of responsibility. The musicians do not merely leave space because spaciousness is aesthetically fashionable. They appear to understand that each sound must justify its effect upon everything already sounding and everything that might follow. This creates an unusual moral character within the performance: patience without passivity, individuality without domination, and order without command.
“Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long” ultimately behaves like an act of transformation performed in real time. A four-hundred-year-old lament is dismantled, distributed among ten musicians and allowed to become something Dowland could never have imagined, while the emotional truth of his song remains strangely intact. Sorrow survives, but it is no longer trapped inside a single voice pleading for release. It has been opened into a communal field where acoustic instruments, household objects, electricity, breath and silence can carry portions of its weight. The despair has not vanished. It has simply stopped governing alone.
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