Liszt, Messiaen - Fredrik Ullén - 2012 - Piano Works

 

BIS – BIS-CD-1803

A recital program can behave like a shelf, one composer placed beside another because their names fit the available space. Fredrik Ullén’s Liszt and Messiaen program behaves more like a stained-glass window assembled across a century. Light enters through Catholic faith, birdsong, virtuosity, terror, consolation and the piano’s ability to suggest things it cannot literally contain. Liszt’s saints speak to birds and cross violent water. Messiaen’s birds interrupt human time with their own rapid, irregular proclamations. Between them stand six quiet consolations, a vision of disaster and a rhythmic construction whose language seems to have arrived from several civilizations at once. Ullén does not argue that Liszt and Messiaen sound alike. He demonstrates that they kept asking the same instrument to carry messages from beyond its ordinary human scale.
The connection becomes visible before the disc begins. Its cover reproduces the familiar Assisi image of Saint Francis addressing a congregation of birds beneath a tree. Francis extends his hand toward creatures that cannot answer in spoken language, yet the scene assumes communication is taking place. That is also the premise of the recording. Music crosses distances that ordinary explanation cannot. Liszt translates a saint’s sermon and the birds’ response into nineteenth-century piano writing. Messiaen listens to actual birds, transcribes their calls and treats them as musicians whose praise existed before human composition. Ullén then places the two acts of translation beside one another, allowing a medieval miracle, Romantic imagination, twentieth-century ornithology and a modern recording studio to occupy the same listening space.
The program opens with Liszt’s “Sancta Dorothea,” a small devotional piece composed late in his life. It does not begin with the public brilliance most commonly attached to his name. There are no crashing octaves announcing the arrival of the greatest travelling piano celebrity of the nineteenth century. Instead, Ullén gives us a few minutes of poised, luminous writing, closer to a prayer card than a monument. The piece establishes that Liszt’s religion was not merely an ornamental subject added to virtuoso music. In his later years, faith increasingly altered the scale, harmony and social purpose of what he wrote. The piano could still produce grandeur, but it could also kneel.
“Sancta Dorothea” is especially effective as an entrance because it makes attention small before the larger miracles arrive. Ullén plays it without exaggerating its innocence. The melody is clear, the harmonies are allowed to glow and fade, and the silences retain enough weight to prevent the piece from becoming decorative sweetness. Liszt’s devotional miniatures can sound fragile beside his large works, but here fragility is their purpose. A prayer does not become more sincere by being shouted.
The first of the two Franciscan legends, “Saint Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds,” begins with the piano discovering how to become an aviary. High-register figures flicker and repeat, not as a generalized pastoral atmosphere but as distinct small presences, each moving according to its own nervous intelligence. Liszt was not attempting scientific transcription in Messiaen’s later sense. His birds belong partly to nature and partly to religious narrative, but the piano writing already recognizes something important: birds do not organize sound according to human song form. Their phrases begin suddenly, repeat unevenly, scatter and reappear from another point in the air.
When Saint Francis enters, the register and rhetorical weight change. The piano acquires a human speaking voice beneath the activity of the birds, and the piece becomes a conversation between unlike orders of creation. Liszt’s virtuosity serves a narrative rather than a circus. Rapid figuration is not displayed merely because the pianist can execute it; it creates the living field through which the saint’s message must travel. Ullén keeps the bird figures crisp without making them mechanical, while the heavier chordal writing arrives with warmth instead of institutional authority. Francis does not command the birds into silence. He joins their praise.
This is where the album’s central idea becomes more than an ingenious programming trick. For both Liszt and Messiaen, birds represented a form of music that could be heard as spiritually meaningful without needing human words. Liszt’s saint recognizes them as fellow beings capable of receiving and returning praise. Messiaen would later regard birds as master musicians, sources of color, rhythm, joy and divine evidence. The composers differ enormously in method, yet both refuse the assumption that human language possesses exclusive access to meaning.
Messiaen’s first robin follows Liszt’s sermon almost as though one of the birds has stepped forward to provide its own account. The sudden transition is astonishing. Liszt’s feathered ornaments give way to a far more angular and concentrated creature. Messiaen’s bird is not a charming melody perched politely above accompaniment. It occupies the keyboard through sharp attacks, brilliant chordal colors and compressed gestures that seem to alter direction before the ear has finished registering them. The piano is no longer imitating a bird from a human distance. It is being reorganized around the bird’s perception of time.
Ullén then begins interweaving Messiaen’s six “Petites esquisses d’oiseaux” with Liszt’s six “Consolations.” This decision dismantles the sealed integrity of two established cycles in order to reveal a third structure hidden between them. A robin calls, then Liszt answers with a short inward song. A blackbird enters, followed by another consolation. Later movements arrive in pairs, but the general alternation remains: wild utterance and human reflection, feathered urgency and lyrical rest, a world that does not need us followed by music created to soothe us.
The “Consolations” are among Liszt’s most accessible piano works, but accessibility can disguise their strangeness. These pieces do not solve suffering. They create temporary rooms inside it. Their melodies often seem simple enough to have existed before the composer found them, yet their harmonies produce slight changes of emotional gravity beneath the surface. Ullén resists turning them into sentimental postcards. He keeps the lines moving, allowing tenderness without drowning the music in perfume.
The first two consolations are brief enough to feel like responses spoken by someone who understands that too much language can damage comfort. After Messiaen’s abrupt birds, Liszt’s phrases seem almost impossibly patient. Time returns to the scale of breath. Yet the juxtaposition also changes Liszt. What might ordinarily sound like conventional Romantic repose begins to resemble the human nervous system recovering after contact with another mode of existence.
Messiaen’s blackbird is darker, more abrupt and more theatrical than the robin. Chords act as flashes of color rather than merely harmony, and the bird’s call appears to carve openings into them. Messiaen often heard harmony visually, associating combinations of pitch with highly specific colors, but even without sharing his synesthetic experience, a listener can sense that the piano is being treated as a source of illuminated surfaces. Ullén’s precision matters because a blurred attack would change not only the rhythm but the apparent color of the event. Each note must arrive with the force and exact placement of a mark in a mosaic.
The second consolation then returns with slightly more motion, as though the human reply has acquired confidence from listening. This is one of the recital’s quiet achievements. The alternation does not merely reveal similarities between composers. It changes how each is heard. Messiaen makes Liszt sound more modern, exposing the unusual harmonic implications beneath his singing lines. Liszt makes Messiaen sound less forbiddingly modern, revealing that his compressed birdsong still participates in older traditions of depiction, devotion and ecstatic pianism.
The third robin and the song thrush are heard consecutively, creating a miniature habitat before Liszt’s third and fourth consolations arrive together. The robin returns throughout Messiaen’s set, but repetition does not produce a stable character. Each appearance changes according to surrounding chords, register and density. The bird becomes a recurring witness, present at different points in the landscape rather than a theme undergoing conventional development.
The song thrush offers another kind of pattern. Its repeated fragments can sound obsessive to human ears, yet the repetition is alive with tiny changes of placement and intensity. Messiaen understood that natural sound is not the opposite of structure. Nature is full of structures that do not care whether they resemble human composition. His achievement was not simply to copy bird calls, but to allow their rhythmic behavior to challenge inherited ideas about what musical continuity should feel like.
Liszt’s third consolation, the famous D-flat-major Lento placido, supplies the broadest lyrical release in the interwoven sequence. It is often compared to a Chopin nocturne, and the resemblance is audible in its floating melody and gently articulated accompaniment, but Ullén prevents it from becoming an imitation of someone else’s intimacy. Coming after Messiaen, its flowing line sounds almost miraculous. Human melody reappears not as a default language but as one possible form among many.
The fourth consolation is shorter and more restrained, functioning almost as an afterimage of the third. Together they suggest that consolation can arrive in different proportions. Sometimes it unfolds as a full song, giving emotion enough time to breathe. Sometimes it is a small gesture that does not remove distress but places a hand beside it.
Messiaen’s final robin and skylark then reopen the sky. The skylark is especially important because its song is inseparable from vertical movement. The bird rises while singing, and Messiaen’s music seems to circle an invisible high point, repeatedly punctuated by heavier notes that alter the scale beneath it. The piano cannot fly, but it can make altitude audible. Ullén’s control allows the bright upper-register activity to remain articulate even as the writing becomes intensely concentrated.
Liszt’s fifth and sixth consolations complete the central exchange. By now the word “consolation” has changed meaning. At the beginning, it might have suggested private comfort after grief. After the birds, it begins to sound like a human attempt to remain in relationship with a creation that exceeds human understanding. The final consolation’s gentle singing quality does not conquer the wild rhythmic world Messiaen has revealed. It accepts a place within it.
The program could have ended there as an elegant meditation on birds, prayer and repose. Instead, Ullén opens the ground beneath it with “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.” This late Liszt piece appears to come from a different century than the “Consolations,” although it emerged from the same composer’s final years. The title accumulates words for calamity, an ill star, something sinister, disaster, and the music refuses the expected comforts of Romantic harmony. Tritones, whole-tone movement, blunt repeated figures and unstable tonal relationships create a landscape in which the piano no longer sings reassuringly about suffering. It has entered the machinery of dread.
Late Liszt can feel prophetic because he abandoned many of the devices that had made his earlier music publicly persuasive. Harmony becomes bare, motion becomes awkward, endings cease to provide secure arrival. “Unstern!” does not sound as though Liszt has discovered twentieth-century music ahead of schedule through clever prediction. It sounds as though age, grief and spiritual uncertainty forced him to remove anything he could no longer believe.
Ullén plays the piece without smoothing its ugliness into atmospheric modernism. The attacks retain their severity, and the repeated material feels stubborn rather than grand. This matters because “Unstern!” is not simply a dramatic contrast inserted before Messiaen. It reveals the fracture inside Liszt himself. The same musician who composed consolations and miracles also imagined a world whose harmonic stars no longer provided navigation.
Messiaen’s “Cantéyodjayâ” follows, and the recital’s carefully cultivated garden erupts into rhythmic architecture. The title is assembled from terms associated with Indian musical theory, and the piece draws on Messiaen’s long study of Hindu rhythmic patterns. Yet it should not be heard merely as an exercise in imported rhythmic material. Messiaen takes sequences, durations, accents, recurring blocks and violently contrasting textures, then organizes them according to a logic that refuses ordinary narrative development. Material returns because it has ritual identity, not because it has been smoothly transformed.
The piece contains passages of almost cartoonish force beside crystalline flashes and dense chordal monuments. It can sound ceremonial, mechanical, ecstatic and physically awkward within seconds. Ullén’s experience in technically extreme modern repertoire is essential here. The challenge is not only playing the notes. It is preserving the independent identity of several kinds of musical time while preventing the whole structure from collapsing into generalized complexity.
“Cantéyodjayâ” also exposes a fascinating difference between Messiaen and Liszt. Liszt often makes virtuosity sound like transformation: an idea begins in one state, gathers force and arrives somewhere enlarged. Messiaen can make virtuosity sound like simultaneity: several complete realities exist beside or on top of one another, and the pianist must reveal their collision without pretending they form a single smooth journey. Ullén is convincing in both systems. He can shape Liszt’s long rhetorical rise, then switch to Messiaen’s block-like constructions without forcing one composer’s grammar upon the other.
The pairing of “Unstern!” and “Cantéyodjayâ” becomes the album’s dark central furnace. Both pieces reject comfortable continuity, but they do so for different reasons. Liszt’s discontinuity feels like a world losing its former order. Messiaen’s feels like the arrival of an order too complex to be measured by familiar means. One looks into disaster; the other assembles time from materials that seem ancient, modern and outside history at once.
The final work returns to Liszt and Saint Francis, but not to the gentle congregation of birds. “Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves” depicts a miracle of passage. According to the legend, the saint was refused transport across the Strait of Messina, so he spread his cloak upon the water, used his staff as a sail and crossed without the boatman’s help. Liszt converts the story into an enormous increase of resistance and faith. The water is not a decorative backdrop. It surges through repeated figures and escalating waves of sound, while the saint’s theme persists against it.
This is virtuosity restored to its most public scale, but the narrative changes its meaning. The pianist’s labor becomes the sea’s resistance. Repeated notes, octaves and accumulating sonority are not trophies placed before an audience. They are the material through which steadfast movement must occur. Ullén maintains enough rhythmic clarity that the waves remain active rather than becoming a continuous roar. The miracle is convincing because the obstacle is allowed to feel powerful.
Ending with this legend completes the recital’s spiritual geography. It began with a small saintly image, moved into communication between species, entered human consolation, confronted disaster, passed through a massive rhythmic construction and finally stepped onto unstable water. Faith is not represented as passive certainty. It is attention, endurance and movement across conditions that do not promise support.
The two Saint Francis pieces also frame different relationships between holiness and nature. In the first, Francis listens and speaks to birds, joining a living chorus. In the second, he confronts an element that could destroy him. Nature is neither sentimentalized nor treated as an enemy. It contains praise and danger. The spiritual person is not removed from creation but placed more deeply inside its demands.
Ullén’s own position adds another quiet dimension. He is not only a pianist associated with exceptionally demanding repertoire but also a neuroscientist who has studied musical training and the brain. It would be too easy to turn that biography into a slogan, claiming that science explains his playing or that performance proves his science. More interesting is the fact that this recital repeatedly asks how different systems of perception can coexist. Human song, birdsong, prayer, color, rhythmic mathematics, bodily technique and recorded sound all meet through the nervous system of one performer.
The recording was made at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm during sessions in April and June 2009, although BIS did not release it until 2012. The recorded piano has clarity without clinical coldness. Individual attacks remain sharply legible in Messiaen, while Liszt’s sustained harmonies are given enough surrounding air to bloom. This balance is crucial to the concept. Too much reverberation would blur the birds and rhythmic structures; too little would deprive the consolations and legends of spiritual space.
The three-year distance between recording and release also gives the album the feeling of a carefully considered object rather than a quickly documented recital. Its seventy-two minutes have been sequenced as one large composition made from separate works. The listener is not merely invited to compare two composers. The listener passes through a designed alternation of scale and consciousness.
What the program finally reveals is not simple influence. Messiaen did not need to resemble Liszt in order to continue a possibility Liszt had opened. Both composers treated the piano as more than a mechanism for producing notes. It could become an orchestra, chapel, landscape, aviary, storm, color field and machine for testing the limits of time. Both joined extreme technical knowledge to religious imagination. Neither believed that spiritual music had to be quiet, polite or reassuring.
Their faith also did not protect them from darkness. Liszt’s late catastrophe remains catastrophe. Messiaen’s radiant Catholic certainty coexists with violence, dissonance and rhythmic structures capable of making ordinary human time feel unstable. Belief here is not an escape from complexity. It is the reason complexity must be faced.
The cover’s birds therefore do more than advertise the most charming portion of the program. They represent creatures receiving a message that human beings cannot verify in ordinary terms. Did they understand Saint Francis? Does the piano resemble their songs? Can a composer translate divine joy into rhythm and color? The album does not prove any of this. It makes a space where the questions become audible.
Ullén’s greatest contribution is his refusal to explain the pairing through performance gimmicks. Liszt remains Liszt, with his rhetoric, lyricism, theatrical scale and late harmonic corrosion. Messiaen remains Messiaen, with his birds, colors, discontinuities and ritualized rhythm. The bridge is created through placement, touch and listening. One piece changes the atmosphere into which the next is born.
By the final waves, the recital has made consolation itself feel less like safety and more like the courage to continue hearing. The birds sing whether we understand them or not. Disaster interrupts the map. Rhythm exceeds the body. Water refuses to become a road. Yet Saint Francis steps forward, and the pianist follows him across.

Kieran Hebden, Steve Reid & Mats Gustafsson - 2011 - Live At The South Bank

Smalltown Superjazzz – STSJ211

 Three musicians can share a stage without sharing the same sense of time. Steve Reid hears time as a living physical current, something produced by hands, feet, breath, memory and the body’s negotiations with fatigue. Kieran Hebden hears it as material that can be captured, repeated, layered and made to circle back upon itself. Mats Gustafsson enters time through air pressure, forcing a column of breath through metal until rhythm becomes inseparable from resistance. Live at the South Bank brings those three clocks into one room and lets them disagree productively for nearly eighty-three minutes. The result is neither jazz decorated with electronics nor electronic music supplied with unusually forceful live instruments. It is a record about musicians discovering which parts of their individual languages can survive contact with the others.

The performance took place in London on June 20, 2009, as part of the Meltdown Festival curated that year by Ornette Coleman. That setting feels almost too appropriate. Coleman had spent a lifetime demonstrating that musicians did not need to obey inherited harmonic and structural agreements in order to play together meaningfully. Freedom did not mean the absence of form. It meant that form could be produced through listening rather than enforced beforehand. Hebden, Reid and Gustafsson bring different generations and musical economies into that possibility: independent electronic production, Black American jazz history and the Scandinavian free-improvisation underground meeting beneath the roof of a major cultural institution without becoming institutional music.

Reid and Hebden had already spent several years developing a language as a duo. Their collaboration began in 2005 and produced the two Exchange Session albums, Tongues, NYC, international touring and Hebden’s participation in Reid’s larger ensemble work. The partnership was striking partly because it did not disguise the difference in their experience. Reid had played professionally since his teens, moving through Motown sessions, soul, jazz, African music and his own independently released work. Hebden had emerged through Fridge and Four Tet, using sampling and electronics to dissolve borders between post-rock, folk fragments, club rhythm and experimental composition. Reid carried decades of accumulated bodily knowledge. Hebden arrived with machines capable of hearing, remembering and transforming the body in real time.

Their age difference did not create a simple teacher-and-student arrangement. Reid was not preserving an old jazz world for a younger electronic musician, and Hebden was not updating Reid through access to modern technology. Each offered the other an unfamiliar form of freedom. Reid gave Hebden a musical intelligence that could react instantly without being contained by the grid of a sequencer. Hebden gave Reid an environment in which a drum strike could return as atmosphere, melody, signal or distorted memory. Their partnership worked because neither person was required to become younger or older than he was.

Mats Gustafsson changes the balance immediately, even when he is not playing. “Morning Prayer” begins with Hebden and Reid alone, revisiting a piece that had occupied only six and a half minutes on the first Exchange Session album. Here it expands to more than seventeen. The title suggests invocation, but this is not a prayer aimed upward toward a distant authority. Reid establishes a field of cymbal shimmer, tom movement and pulse, while Hebden introduces flickering electronic forms that seem to drift above and between the drums. Each musician leaves enough room for the other to remain partially mysterious.

The piece grows through mutual adjustment rather than a conventional increase in volume. Reid can produce several layers of motion without treating any single one as the permanent beat. A cymbal pattern suggests one speed, the kick drum another, while the toms seem to converse in a third dialect. Hebden responds by placing loops and tonal fragments where they alter the apparent size of the percussion. A repeated electronic sound may make the drums feel enclosed for several seconds, then another frequency opens the room again. The music is constantly changing its architecture while appearing to remain in one place.

Gustafsson reportedly became so absorbed in listening that he never entered “Morning Prayer.” Whether understood as forgetfulness, instinct or respect, the absence becomes a genuine contribution. He recognizes that the duo has already created a complete organism and declines to add a third limb merely because his name is printed on the program. Improvised music depends as much upon the decision not to play as upon expressive action. His silence allows the album to establish the Hebden-Reid relationship at full length before the third musician changes its chemistry.

When Gustafsson finally arrives on “Lyman Place,” there is no gentle introduction. His saxophone enters as compressed matter, a broad, rough-edged sound that seems capable of leaning physically against Reid’s drums. The original version on NYC had been built from a concentrated low figure and a sense of metropolitan forward pressure. Gustafsson opens it vertically. Suddenly the street has towers, alarms, underground tunnels and a voice large enough to argue with traffic.

His playing is often described through force, and the force is undeniable, but volume alone does not explain him. Gustafsson is exceptionally alert to grain. A saxophone note can be divided into breath, metal, pitch, saliva, vibration and the mechanical movement of keys. He can isolate those components or drive them into a single mass. On “Lyman Place,” the apparent violence is organized by close listening. Reid responds to the internal rhythm of the saxophone rather than merely increasing intensity, while Hebden searches within the incoming sound for fragments that can be framed, opposed or allowed to contaminate the electronics.

This creates a triangular relationship very different from the earlier duo. Reid and Gustafsson both produce sound through bodily impact, but their physicality moves in contrasting directions. Reid distributes energy across the kit, maintaining several possibilities at once. Gustafsson concentrates the body into breath and sends it through one narrow opening. Hebden occupies the unstable territory between them, sometimes acting as landscape, sometimes as memory and sometimes as a fourth presence generated by the other two.

“People Be Happy” carries one of the most direct titles in the set, but the music does not issue happiness as an instruction. The original Tongues version compressed its idea into less than five minutes; here it expands beyond fifteen and becomes a study of how a small melodic fragment can remain recognizable while everything around it changes. Hebden’s electronics provide a recurring point of orientation without functioning as a fixed backing track. Reid keeps adjusting the ground, and Gustafsson treats the theme less as a tune to decorate than as material that can be stretched until its emotional assumptions become uncertain.

The title’s plain optimism gains depth through repetition. “People be happy” can sound like encouragement, a political wish, an impossible demand or something spoken by a person who has known enough suffering to understand that happiness cannot be commanded. Reid’s playing supplies that historical weight without turning the performance into autobiography. His rhythm contains celebration, work, struggle and stamina at once. The piece moves because he understands groove not as mechanical regularity but as a social agreement continuously renewed between bodies.

Hebden’s role is especially subtle here. Electronics can dominate improvisation because they can fill every frequency and reproduce sounds without physical fatigue. Hebden often refuses that advantage. He withdraws, allows space, then re-enters with material that changes the perspective rather than merely increasing density. A loop can function as a railing around which Reid and Gustafsson move, but it can also be abandoned the moment it begins behaving like a cage.

The first disc therefore contains a complete three-part awakening. “Morning Prayer” establishes the old partnership in a state of expanded calm. “Lyman Place” introduces the third voice through collision. “People Be Happy” discovers how the three can remain together without neutralizing their differences. By the end of the disc, the trio has not become a smooth ensemble. Something more valuable has happened: they have learned how much disagreement the music can hold.

“Untitled” begins the second half without inherited identity. The other pieces carry histories from previous Hebden-Reid records, but an untitled performance does not have to answer to an earlier version. The trio can construct its rules from whatever appears in the moment. The result has the focused momentum of a march whose destination was never announced. Reid’s drums give the piece direction, Gustafsson supplies resistance and Hebden introduces signals that repeatedly alter the apparent terrain.

An untitled work also refuses to tell the listener which images are appropriate. This is especially useful for improvisation, where titles are often attached after the event and can make accidental structures seem premeditated. Here the blank name preserves the performance’s origin as an encounter. The music does not represent a concept. It documents three people deciding what to do next quickly enough that the decision and action become indistinguishable.

“25th Street” returns to NYC but removes the original piece from the city map that first organized it. Reid and Hebden’s 2008 studio album treated New York as sequence and atmosphere, with track titles marking intersections, arrivals and departures. At the South Bank, “25th Street” is relocated to London and occupied by a Swedish saxophonist. The title remains geographically specific while the music becomes placeless.

This relocation reveals what was portable inside the original composition. A street is partly architecture, but it is also rhythm: footsteps, brakes, machinery, conversation, interrupted movement and repeated daily routes. Reid can carry that rhythm without reproducing literal city noise. Hebden can suggest buildings and reflections without field recordings. Gustafsson moves through their city as an unfamiliar weather event, sometimes producing long shapes that ignore the street grid and sometimes reducing his sound until it seems to emerge from a basement vent.

The piece is among the set’s most spacious passages, but the space never becomes passive ambient drift. Each player listens for changes in pressure. A low electronic tone can make a saxophone phrase appear farther away; a cymbal strike can suddenly move it forward. The trio creates depth without relying on studio overdubbing because their choices determine which sounds occupy foreground, middle distance and horizon. The stage becomes a mixing desk operated through attention.

“The Sun Never Sets” closes the performance by returning to one of the duo’s strongest melodic structures. On Tongues, it lasted less than six minutes. Here it becomes a sixteen-minute final argument. The title carries both radiance and imperial shadow. A sun that never sets promises endless illumination, but it also denies rest and recalls the language once used to describe empires extending across the globe. The performance allows both meanings to remain possible: a source of energy that continues beyond exhaustion, and a system that refuses to release anyone from its light.

Reid initially sounds as though the duration of the concert has entered his body. The slight drag is not a flaw to be removed from the document. It makes the music human. After more than an hour of continuous, intensely responsive playing, time is no longer an abstract meter. It has accumulated in muscles, breath and concentration. Yet the apparent fatigue does not become surrender. Reid begins moving across the kit with renewed force, breaking the familiar theme into increasingly unstable configurations.

This is where the album’s later historical knowledge becomes difficult to ignore. The concert was recorded roughly ten months before Reid died from throat cancer. A listener cannot unknow that fact, but the performance should not be reduced to a man approaching death. Reid is not a symbol of mortality sitting behind the drums. He is an active musical intelligence, shaping the ensemble, redirecting themes and refusing any easy division between endurance and pleasure.

Still, mortality changes how duration is heard. Each time Reid pushes the closing piece beyond an apparent ending, the action acquires emotional weight. Hebden surrounds the melody with noise, Gustafsson darkens and distends his phrases, and the music gradually begins to exhale. Reid continues playing after the others seem prepared to disappear. The moment is moving not because he could have known exactly how listeners would hear it later, but because recordings preserve actions beyond the person who made them. The body stops; the rhythm does not agree to stop with it.

That continuation is one of recorded music’s strangest forms of love. Reid gave the performance to the people in the room, to Hebden and Gustafsson, and unknowingly to listeners arriving years after his death. He could not supervise what the recording would mean, which pieces would be emphasized or how his final months would alter our hearing. The gift left his control. It continues carrying the precise evidence of his attention.

Hebden’s public words after Reid’s death described him not only as a remarkable musician but as a great friend, emphasizing the happiness and meaning contained in their shared work. That friendship is audible throughout Live at the South Bank without requiring sentimental interpretation. Hebden listens to Reid. He trusts the drummer to change direction, to extend structures and to expose weaknesses in electronic material that might have seemed complete in isolation. The record’s tenderness is located inside that trust.

Gustafsson becomes an unusual kind of witness to the partnership. He does not simply join two established collaborators and decorate their repertoire with free-jazz extremity. His presence reveals qualities already latent in their music. Reid’s drums become more visibly melodic when confronted by the saxophone. Hebden’s electronics become more physical when forced to coexist with a huge column of air. The familiar compositions reveal openings that the duo alone had not needed to enter.

The cover by Kim Hiorthøy gives the performance an unexpectedly gentle visual body. A hexagonal field of pale pink foliage sits against deep red, while the three names and title are stacked in large white letters. Nothing on the sleeve illustrates the aggression frequently associated with Gustafsson or the rhythmic power of Reid. Instead, the image resembles flowering branches viewed through a geometrical window.

That tension suits the music. The hexagon imposes clear boundaries, but the vegetation inside it grows in every direction. Improvisation also requires a frame: a stage, a set length, available instruments, existing compositions and the limitations of the body. Freedom does not occur outside those conditions. It grows against them, filling the available shape with more complexity than the shape appears capable of holding.

The equal size of the three names is also important. Hebden’s broader recognition as Four Tet could easily have been used to market the album around one personality. The typography refuses that hierarchy. Reid, Hebden and Gustafsson are presented as three complete forces, and the music confirms it. No one is the featured soloist. No one supplies accompaniment. Leadership moves from sound to sound.

Smalltown Superjazzz issued the performance in 2011 as a double CD and double LP, catalogue number STSJ211. The large physical format respects the concert’s duration rather than compressing it into a single-disc summary. The first half and second half remain separate territories, requiring a disc or record change. That interruption resembles the interval in a performance, a brief return to ordinary physical action before entering the music again.

The recording was engineered for Red Bull Music Academy Radio by Folded Wing and mastered at The Exchange. Those institutional details matter because the album depends upon a difficult balance. Reid’s drums need physical depth without burying the electronics. Hebden’s high-frequency signals need clarity without becoming detached from the room. Gustafsson’s saxophone must retain both pitch and the abrasive material surrounding pitch. The recording preserves enough air to make the three sources feel distinct while allowing them to combine into larger, temporarily unidentifiable objects.

Live recordings are often treated as secondary evidence, documents made after the important studio versions have already established the compositions. Live at the South Bank reverses that relationship. “Morning Prayer,” “Lyman Place,” “People Be Happy,” “25th Street” and “The Sun Never Sets” arrive with earlier histories, but the concert versions do not merely reproduce them at greater length. They reveal what those pieces had been waiting to become when exposed to another musician and a public room.

The expansion is not indulgence. Duration permits consequences. A loop repeated for six minutes is a musical device; the same loop surviving fifteen minutes becomes an environment whose smallest alteration can change the listener’s sense of reality. Reid understands how to keep repetition alive through shifting emphasis. Gustafsson understands when a sustained sound should become pressure, speech or rupture. Hebden understands that electronic memory becomes meaningful only when the present is allowed to answer it.

The album also collapses an old false opposition between technology and human expression. Reid’s drums are technology: shaped materials, mechanical pedals, tuned surfaces and centuries of accumulated design. Gustafsson’s saxophone is a machine that converts bodily pressure into organized vibration. Hebden’s electronics are no less human because their mechanisms contain circuits rather than reeds or skins. The meaningful distinction is not acoustic versus electronic. It is whether a musician uses an instrument to avoid uncertainty or to enter it more deeply.

All three choose uncertainty. Reid could settle into reliable grooves, Gustafsson could overwhelm the room through sheer force, and Hebden could impose stable loops that make every entrance predictable. Instead, they repeatedly surrender control to the relationship forming among them. The music succeeds because nobody protects his strongest recognizable manner for long.

The record lasts nearly eighty-three minutes, but it feels less like an extended concert than a temporary society. The participants develop rules, test them, violate them, repair communication and eventually dissolve the structure they created. “Morning Prayer” begins before all three have assembled. “The Sun Never Sets” ends with the musicians leaving at different speeds. In between, they discover that fellowship does not require similarity.

Steve Reid’s death inevitably places a border around the collaboration. There would be no later studio session in which the lessons of this trio could be refined, no second concert where Gustafsson might enter “Morning Prayer,” no opportunity to decide whether the meeting had created a permanent group. The South Bank performance remains singular.

That singularity does not make it incomplete. A life does not need infinite duration to possess complete meaning, and music does not require repetition in order to justify its existence. For one evening, three distinct histories crossed. Reid’s lifetime of rhythm, Hebden’s electronic imagination and Gustafsson’s breath occupied the same changing structure. The concert ended, Reid later died, and the relationship could not be reconstructed. Yet the act itself was given fully.

The final drum strikes do not defeat death, explain it or make its arrival fair. They demonstrate why the loss carries such weight. A person capable of producing this much attention, motion and relationship was here, and then was not. The price is enormous because the life was enormous in its connections. Live at the South Bank allows one portion of those connections to remain audible: three people listening hard enough to create something that none could have owned alone.

Nova Express - 2021- Twenty One

Rocket Recordings – Launch244

 Some records return because nostalgia has created a market for them. Twenty One feels more uncanny. It returns because somebody appears to have left an appointment in the future.

When Nova Express issued their sole album, One, Torbjörn Abelli of Träd, Gräs och Stenar reportedly declared, “This album will mature and be perfect twenty years from now.” It is difficult to imagine a better blessing for music constructed from repetition, patience and slowly changing relationships. Most promotional claims insist that a record is important immediately. Abelli understood that Nova Express had made something whose natural environment might not yet exist. The album did not need to chase its audience. It could remain where it was until time brought the audience closer.

Twenty One fulfills that prediction without pretending the intervening years never happened. It is not a transparent repress of One. The original double album has been remastered, reduced, resequenced and given a different beginning. “Nova 7” and “Jens” have disappeared, “Fredhäll” has moved from the later portion of the record to the entrance, and the physical LP compresses the surviving journey further by leaving “Bussen” to the digital edition. The title performs the arithmetic neatly: One passes through twenty years and becomes Twenty One. Yet the change is more profound than a number. The same recordings now occupy another historical atmosphere, surrounded by listeners who have absorbed two additional decades of kosmische revival, Swedish psychedelic excavation, drone music, post-rock, minimalism and electronic repetition.

The revised sequence begins with “Fredhäll,” and the decision immediately alters the record’s emotional gravity. Organ tones appear with a devotional patience, establishing a broad horizon before guitar and Lars Ydgren’s woodwinds begin moving through it. The performance does not announce itself as an opening statement. It seems already to have been continuing somewhere before the listener arrived. This quality recurs throughout Nova Express. Their music rarely feels switched on. It feels intercepted.

“Fredhäll” grows through addition rather than development in the conventional sense. A tone enters, another sound begins living beside it, and the listener gradually realizes that the apparent stillness has acquired several independent currents. The organ supplies continuity, but continuity is not the same thing as immobility. Small changes in pressure and register alter the surrounding emotional temperature. The guitar does not seize the music and redirect it toward a climax. It glows along an existing path, while clarinet and saxophone give the drone breath, grain and a faintly human vulnerability.

This is one reason Nova Express remains distinct from the many groups placed beneath the enormous “krautrock” umbrella. The motor is present, but it does not always resemble a machine. Their repeated patterns feel grown rather than engineered. Woodwinds soften the hard edge normally associated with cyclical rock, while keyboards can sound simultaneously electrical and pastoral. The band creates forward movement without insisting that forward is the only meaningful direction. Music can circulate, widen or deepen while remaining attached to the same few notes.

“Wave to Each Other” brings a more animated form of communication. Its opening electronic calls resemble signals crossing a large empty distance, playful but slightly eerie, as if two remote settlements have noticed one another and are testing whether contact is safe. Bass and drums soon give the exchange a body. What had been floating becomes social. The rhythm moves with a loose, buoyant confidence, while saxophone, clarinet and synthesizer send messages across it.

The title is wonderfully modest. No one is asked to cross the distance, explain a philosophy or merge identities. They merely wave. That small gesture contains recognition without possession. Nova Express plays with a similar ethic. The musicians acknowledge one another through sound but rarely crowd the same location. A keyboard phrase may continue while the woodwind enters from elsewhere; the rhythm section can establish a route without forcing every instrument to march directly upon it. The ensemble communicates by preserving room for separate movement.

Brief vocal material appears inside “Wave to Each Other,” but the human voice does not become the organizing center. It enters the same environment as the other instruments, another signal among signals. This helps the record avoid the familiar hierarchy in which instrumental music waits for a singer to arrive and tell it what it means. Nova Express allows meaning to remain distributed. Bass, organ, percussion, breath and electronic noise all carry portions of the message.

“Trees, Grass and Stonehenge” makes the record’s Swedish lineage explicit through a title that bends Träd, Gräs och Stenar into an English-language archaeological joke. Trees, grass and stones become trees, grass and Stonehenge. The ordinary materials of the landscape suddenly form a prehistoric monument. That transformation describes Nova Express perfectly. The band begins with humble components, a pulse, a repeated bass figure, a modest keyboard pattern, a breath through a reed, then arranges them until they seem to possess ritual scale.

The piece is the shortest on the album, but it does not behave like an interlude. Its compact length concentrates the group’s balance of jazz mobility and psychedelic suspension. The rhythm suggests travel while the upper instruments seem less concerned with destination than with the quality of light surrounding the journey. Nothing needs to declare itself mystical. The repeated figures gradually create their own ceremony.

The reference to Träd, Gräs och Stenar also places Nova Express inside a Swedish continuum that differs subtly from the German groups to whom they are often compared. International Harvester, Träd, Gräs och Stenar and related musicians treated repetition not simply as formal innovation but as communal practice. Music could be direct, physically sustained and open enough for the group’s collective intelligence to become more important than technical polish. Nova Express inherits that freedom, but by the turn of the millennium it is mixed with Casio rhythm, post-rock spaciousness, home-recording texture and a generation’s accumulated knowledge of Can, Cluster, Terry Riley, spiritual jazz and electronic minimalism.

The title piece occupies nearly fifteen minutes and reveals the group’s method at full scale. A mechanical rhythm establishes the floor, but the music refuses to become merely motorik. It is too porous. Sounds pass through the beat, alter its apparent weight and leave without demanding resolution. Guitar, organ, clarinet, bass and percussion do not build toward a predetermined summit. They create an environment in which a summit might appear temporarily if enough listeners perceive the same pattern.

Repetition here becomes a method of enlarging small differences. When a figure first appears, it may seem almost childishly simple. After several minutes, every deviation begins to matter. A new note is not merely an embellishment; it changes the history of everything preceding it. A shift in texture can make the same rhythm feel suddenly terrestrial, aquatic or airborne. Nova Express trusts the listener to become sensitive rather than continually manufacturing events to prevent boredom.

That trust may explain why the record required time. In 2001, long cyclical pieces built from inexpensive electronics, woodwinds and loose improvisation could easily fall between available identities. It was neither a fashionable continuation of 1970s progressive rock nor an obvious participant in the more rigid electronic genres of the period. Twenty years later, its refusal to select a single category sounds less confusing and more prophetic. The borderlands it occupied have become populated.

The name Nova Express introduces another productive contradiction. A nova is an apparent new star, a sudden brightness whose physical cause began before the observer saw it. An express promises speed. Nova Express makes music that becomes visible slowly. The title track travels, but it travels by allowing duration to reshape perception rather than by rushing through scenery. The express is not necessarily a fast train. It may be a vehicle capable of crossing an enormous distance while everyone aboard appears almost still.

“Bussen,” meaning “the bus,” brings the cosmic journey back into ordinary public transportation. This is one of the album’s loveliest gestures. Psychedelic music frequently reaches for spacecraft, mystical vessels and imagined interstellar machinery. Nova Express places transcendence aboard something that stops regularly, follows a municipal route and carries strangers who may never speak to one another.

The track’s repeated guitar melody has the plain memorability of scenery seen through a window. It does not need to become more complicated because movement around it supplies the change. Keyboards drift across the route, drums keep the vehicle progressing, and Ydgren’s saxophone appears to look beyond the immediate road. The piece suggests that altered perception does not require escape from ordinary life. A bus ride can become a form of travel through consciousness if attention remains open long enough.

Its digital-only status gives “Bussen” a curious archival identity. The 2021 vinyl object presents a five-track destination; the official files contain another road. Someone hearing the LP alone receives a tighter physical sequence, while someone hearing the digital edition enters an additional ten-minute environment before “Spektra.” Neither experience is false, but they create different proportions. The download is not merely a convenient copy of the record. It contains a room absent from the physical house.

“Spektra” closes the sequence by turning repetition into radiance and eventual disintegration. Synthesizer, organ, drums and guitar establish another slowly rotating system, but the atmosphere is less pastoral than the opening. The music seems to examine its own component frequencies. Tones separate, overlap and produce new colors at their edges. The title suggests a spectrum, something singular revealed to contain a range.

This is what the entire album has been doing. A repeated note is never only one thing. Its meaning depends upon the sound beside it, the duration behind it and the expectation forming ahead. Nova Express holds simple material under sustained attention until its hidden spectrum becomes audible. Toward the ending, stability begins to fray. The record does not arrive at a triumphant conclusion. Its machinery loosens and the signal disperses, leaving the listener unsure whether the transmission has ended or merely moved beyond reception.

The sleeve gives this journey a wonderfully blunt visual emblem. Red and white rays expand from a point behind a black-and-yellow mountain range. The image combines revolutionary poster, travel advertisement, sunrise and science-fiction landscape without committing fully to any of them. The horizon appears both earthly and invented. Something is rising from behind the mountains, but the source remains hidden.

That hidden source fits music whose energy rarely comes from a visible leader. Nova Express was less a fixed rock-band lineup than a gathering of musicians whose roles changed from track to track. Henrik Kihlberg’s organ provides much of the record’s continuity, Andreas Bergman supplies guitar, and Lars Ydgren’s saxophone, clarinet and flute provide its most distinctive melodic grain. Bassists, drummers, synthesizer players and additional percussionists rotate through the pieces, giving each composition a related but slightly altered body.

The clarinet is especially important. In rock music, a saxophone often arrives carrying a familiar assignment: excitement, chaos, urban heat or free-jazz eruption. Clarinet enters with less cultural baggage. Ydgren can make it pastoral, inquisitive, melancholy or faintly comic. It bends the music away from standard psychedelic-rock expectations and toward an imaginary folk tradition that might have developed somewhere between a Swedish commune, a small electronic studio and a slow-moving train.

The players’ later and parallel connections to Audionom, Klotmystik, The Janitors and Josefin Öhrn & The Liberation help explain why Twenty One sounds historically misplaced in such a productive way. These musicians did not belong to a sealed revivalist scene devoted to reproducing 1972. They moved through punk, noise, independent rock, electronics and newer psychedelic networks. The older Swedish underground was not a costume. It was part of the soil beneath contemporary activity.

Rocket Recordings discovered the album through that living network. Someone connected to the label’s Swedish artists shared the music; further investigation revealed personal routes through Flowers Must Die and The Liberation. That method of rediscovery matters. Twenty One was not recovered by an institution systematically searching for officially recognized masterpieces. It traveled person to person, carried by enthusiasm and local knowledge until it reached a label capable of giving it another physical life.

The practical realities of 2021 then helped shape what that life could be. Pressing costs had climbed, manufacturing capacity was strained, and the combined disruptions of the pandemic and Brexit made an unknown band’s double album financially dangerous. Rocket reduced the project to a limited single LP instead. That decision could be regarded as compromise, but it also became a new compositional act. Chris Reeder and John O’Carroll selected and sequenced the material, the band agreed with their choices, and One became a more concentrated object.

This is the valuable side of the reissue process when it is performed with imagination. Preservation does not always mean freezing an artifact in its first configuration. Sometimes the passage of time reveals another possible version hidden inside it. Twenty One does not replace One. The original eight-track double album remains its own geography, including “Nova 7” and “Jens.” The later edition asks what shape the same body might take after twenty years of listening history had accumulated around it.

The red vinyl edition was limited to four hundred copies, another small object emerging from a record whose earlier scarcity had helped bury it. Yet the digital version allows the music to travel beyond that number, continuing the very process through which Rocket first encountered it. A forgotten album becomes a shared link, the link generates conversation, conversation produces a reissue, and the reissue sends listeners backward toward the original. Nothing travels in a straight line.

Torbjörn Abelli’s prediction now sounds less like criticism of the audience in 2001 than confidence in the music. He was not necessarily saying that listeners had failed. He was saying Nova Express had created something capable of surviving long enough to meet another context. The band’s restraint, repetition and unusual instrumental balance would not be exhausted by the moment of release. The record contained more future than its original circumstances could use.

There is something moving about a musician recognizing that possibility in someone else’s work. Abelli died before the twenty-year date arrived, so he could not see Rocket Recordings place his statement at the center of the album’s return. Yet his attention became part of the object. He heard something, gave it a sentence, and that sentence remained attached strongly enough to help guide the music into another life.

Twenty One therefore preserves more than six recordings. It preserves an act of belief made across time. A nearly unknown group finished an album. Another musician understood that it had not yet reached its natural age. People carried the record quietly for two decades. A new label found it, altered its shape and delivered it to listeners for whom it sounded less like an artifact than a message from an alternate present.

The music itself remains unconcerned with proving any of this. It keeps circling, breathing and changing by degrees. Organ holds the horizon. Clarinet wanders through it. A simple rhythm continues long enough to become a place. The bus travels its route. The spectrum opens. Somewhere behind the mountains, a light that began twenty years earlier finally becomes visible.

Lau Nau - 2017 - Poseidon

 

Fonal Records – FR-104

The cover of Poseidon resembles a theatrical set abandoned after a ritual whose purpose nobody wrote down. A flower-crowned figure bends toward a skull beneath an improvised wooden shelter. Her patterned clothing is partly concealed beneath a dark cloak covered in feathers, birds, scissors and other small emblems. Nearby sits an ornate object that might be a cake, crown, reliquary or ceremonial gift. A banana has been tied to a pole beneath a cracked white sphere. A black cage waits at the edge of the scene, while translucent curtains fail to provide privacy against an empty desert. Everything is carefully arranged, yet nothing belongs to the same system of meaning.
That refusal to settle into a single interpretation makes Pauliina Mäkelä’s image a perfect entrance to Lau Nau’s music. Poseidon is full of recognizable materials, piano, cello, harmonium, bowed lyre, clarinet, percussion, electronics and a quiet human voice, but their relationships remain dreamlike. Instruments do not always perform the jobs assigned to them by tradition. A piano may behave like a synthesizer, percussion may flicker like household machinery, and a melody may arrive with the emotional familiarity of a remembered folk song even though nobody has heard it before. The music is intimate, but the room containing that intimacy keeps changing dimensions.
The artwork was not originally commissioned for the album. Mäkelä created it as a flyer for a theatre work titled Tyyppi vs. tulitikku, and Lau Nau later adopted it for Poseidon. This previous life matters. The image arrives already carrying another performance, another narrative and another set of associations that the record does not fully reveal. It is not an illustration obediently translating the songs. It is an independent object meeting them halfway. The album’s cover therefore operates much like one of Lau Nau’s guest musicians: it brings its own history into the arrangement and is allowed to retain it.
The figure at the center appears burdened and adorned at once. Flowers rise from her head while her posture collapses downward. Her cloak resembles plumage, but it also carries tools and small symbolic objects, as though she has become responsible for an entire portable world. She may be mourning the skull, consulting it, caring for it or receiving instructions from it. The image does not tell us whether the dead are gone. It places death directly inside an otherwise colorful act of attention.
That combination leads naturally into Poseidon, whose songs Laura Naukkarinen described as small secular prayers carrying love, sorrow and care. A secular prayer is a beautiful contradiction. Prayer traditionally assumes an addressee, but these songs do not insist that anyone is listening. They speak because speaking carefully may itself be an act of devotion. Love is sent into weather, memory, sleep, trees, city nights and the sea without requiring confirmation of delivery.
The album began almost accidentally at Naukkarinen’s grandmother’s piano. She had intended to work on film music, but the instrument began producing songs instead. That origin places family history inside every subsequent arrangement. A piano inherited through memory is never only a collection of keys and strings. Its surface has held other hands. Its room has heard domestic conversations, seasons, silences and lives whose details may no longer be recoverable. When new music emerges from it, the past does not become a subject so much as an acoustic condition.
Naukkarinen realized that these compositions did not belong to the film she was scoring. They wanted to be performed by Lau Nau, the melancholic and dreaming character who stands onstage sharing fractured moments. Describing one’s artistic identity as a character does not make the expression less sincere. It creates a vessel capable of holding parts of the self that ordinary conversation cannot easily carry. Laura Naukkarinen can work, travel, raise a family, collaborate and live within practical time. Lau Nau can remain beneath the fog, listening for small accidents in sound and speaking from the border where dream has not entirely released the waking world.
“Caligari” opens that border immediately. The title summons the crooked architecture, painted shadows and unstable authority of early German Expressionist cinema, but the song does not imitate a horror-film score. It allows the piano to establish an environment where familiarity is subtly bent. Notes that might have formed a conventional introduction acquire another texture through electronic and acoustic interference. The music seems lit from below, not threatening enough to announce danger, but strange enough to make the room’s angles questionable.
The cinematic reference is particularly appropriate for an artist whose work moves continuously among songs, silent-film accompaniment, theatre, installation and composed soundtrack. Naukkarinen often thinks visually while composing, though not necessarily in literal landscapes or narratives. She has described imagining how sound looks, how light and darkness meet and mix. Poseidon frequently behaves in exactly that fashion. Its arrangements do not merely support melodies. They change the light falling across them.
“Elina” brings the scale closer to portraiture. A name alone can contain enormous emotional information while revealing almost nothing to outsiders. We do not need to know precisely who Elina is to feel that the song is addressed toward someone rather than simply written about an idea. Voice and piano provide a human center, while the surrounding instrumentation creates the sensation of memory accumulating at the edges. Lau Nau’s tenderness rarely arrives without distance. The person may be loved deeply and still remain unreachable.
“Unessa,” meaning “in a dream,” enters the record’s natural climate. Lau Nau’s dream state is not an escape into fantasy decoration. It is a method for hearing relationships that daylight separates. Forest spirits become webs among heather; a tiny sound can possess enormous weight; human grief can coexist with plants, insects and weather without being promoted above them. The dream allows categories to soften. A person, landscape and memory may briefly occupy the same form.
Helena Espvall’s cello is especially valuable in this environment. Her playing can give the songs a low human grain without forcing them toward conventional chamber music. A cello naturally resembles the range and pressure of a voice, but here it often functions as atmosphere, shadow or another living body standing near the singer. Espvall’s history in Espers makes the connection to experimental folk easy to identify, yet her contribution is more specific than genre. She understands how an acoustic instrument can remain ancient and uncertain without becoming rustic decoration.
“Suojaa uni meitä,” approximately “May sleep protect us,” transforms sleep from vulnerability into shelter. Sleep ordinarily removes control. The body becomes still, awareness loosens, and the mind begins producing scenes without permission. Asking sleep itself for protection means trusting the condition in which one is least capable of defending oneself. The song therefore contains both a lullaby and a risk.
Lau Nau’s voice is ideally suited to that ambiguity. She sings quietly, but quietness is not weakness. A loud voice can dominate a space; a quiet voice changes the listener’s behavior. We must move closer, reduce our own noise and become responsible for the fragile information being offered. Poseidon repeatedly creates this ethics of attention. Its music does not seize the listener. It establishes something delicate enough that careless listening might destroy it.
“X Y Z Å” makes an alphabet strange by moving beyond the familiar English ending. The additional Scandinavian letter opens another route after the sequence appears complete. The song’s minimal arpeggiation behaves similarly. A small repeating figure seems at first to define the available system, but changing harmonies, voice and instrumental color reveal that the pattern contains more exits than expected. Repetition becomes a way of examining an object under slowly moving light.
The title also raises questions about language. Poseidon is sung in Finnish, a language many international listeners will not understand, though physical editions included English translations. This does not reduce the songs to abstract sound. Meaning reaches us through several channels at once: the shape of vowels, breath, melodic direction, the emotional behavior of accompaniment and the knowledge that exact verbal meaning exists even when it remains temporarily inaccessible. The listener stands outside one door while hearing life continue clearly inside.
At the center comes “Poseidon,” where the album’s title acquires two incompatible bodies. Poseidon is the Greek god of the sea, capable of storms, earthquakes and dangerous temperament. Poseidon is also the name of a Helsinki bar. One belongs to mythology, the other to urban nightlife, yet fog allows them to overlap. The god becomes a neon sign; the bar becomes an underwater kingdom. People enter for drinks and emerge into a city whose streets have lost their edges.
This transformation from divine sea power to ordinary bar is not a joke at mythology’s expense. It reveals how mythology continues working. Gods survive because names attach themselves to places, businesses, ships, songs and private memories. A person may never offer formal worship to Poseidon yet still spend a crucial night beneath his name, fall in love there, lose someone there or walk home through fog believing for several minutes that the city has detached from land.
The title song carries music-box delicacy without becoming childish. Its melody seems to remember something while it is happening. References to owls, moths and kissing place human desire inside nocturnal animal life. The lovers do not occupy a sealed romantic scene. They are surrounded by creatures drawn toward darkness and light according to instincts older than any promise being made between people.
Samuli Kosminen’s production is crucial throughout the album. His percussion, harmonium, kalimba and electronics add motion without installing a conventional rhythmic grid beneath the songs. Sounds flicker, tap, pulse and breathe at the margins. Instead of telling the music where to go, rhythm often reveals that the song was already moving invisibly. His mix allows these small events to remain distinct while connecting eleven recordings made across Kemiönsaari, Stockholm, Suomenlinna, Lisbon and Tampere.
Those locations make Poseidon a dispersed album assembled to feel intimate. It was not produced by isolating everyone inside one controlled studio. Parts were gathered across islands, cities and countries during 2016 and 2017. Each musician brought not only an instrument but the acoustic conditions surrounding that contribution. The finished album joins separate rooms without sterilizing them into one imaginary location.
Matti Bye’s involvement deepens the cinematic atmosphere. His long practice of accompanying silent film gives him unusual sensitivity to music that must suggest emotion without fixing it too rigidly. A silent-film pianist learns to enter images, follow gestures and create continuity while leaving room for the visual world to retain its mystery. Poseidon benefits from the same discipline. Piano and keyboard passages can guide a scene without explaining what the scene means.
Pekko Käppi’s jouhikko, a traditional Finnish bowed lyre, introduces another relationship with time. The instrument carries historical associations, but its rough drone and friction prevent tradition from becoming a polished museum display. Its sound can feel older than the song while remaining physically immediate. Bow hair meets string, pressure becomes vibration, and the supposed distance between archaic folk practice and experimental sound vanishes.
Antti Tolvi’s contributions belong naturally within this collective vocabulary. His work across improvisation, clarinet, keyboard and meditative repetition complements Lau Nau’s attention to sound as an event rather than merely a note. The album’s arrangements were shaped collaboratively, allowing the musicians’ individual artistry to remain audible instead of reducing them to anonymous session support. Poseidon is centered upon Naukkarinen’s voice and compositions, but its weather is communal.
“Tunti,” meaning “an hour,” makes duration itself a subject. An hour is mathematically stable and emotionally unreliable. It may pass without leaving evidence or contain an event that alters the next twenty years. Lau Nau’s music understands this elasticity. Four minutes can feel suspended outside ordinary measurement because the arrangement is not constantly announcing progress. Time accumulates through small changes in texture, the way a room slowly darkens before anyone notices evening has arrived.
“Sorbuspuun alla,” “Under the Rowan Tree,” returns the album to a specific living shelter. Rowan trees carry extensive folklore across Northern Europe, associated variously with protection, magic, domestic boundaries and the vivid red berries that persist into colder seasons. The song does not require a listener to possess that entire symbolic archive. Simply standing beneath a named tree already creates a small world. Its branches establish a ceiling, its roots imply hidden depth, and whatever occurs beneath it becomes temporarily separated from surrounding time.
The rowan connects elegantly with the cover’s flower-crowned figure. Both image and song treat plants not as scenery but as participants in human meaning. Flowers are worn, trees provide shelter, heather carries webs, and seasons help organize emotional life. Nature is not romantic purity opposed to the city. Poseidon moves comfortably between island landscapes and a Helsinki bar, understanding that fog, longing and care follow people into both.
“Pianopilvi,” “Piano Cloud,” lasts less than two minutes and gives the album one of its most accurate compound images. A piano is heavy, mechanical and difficult to move. A cloud has no stable edge and changes shape while being observed. Lau Nau repeatedly asks solid instruments to behave like weather. Notes lose their percussive origin, sustain spreads around them, and the piano’s wooden body seems to evaporate into resonance.
The phrase also describes the album’s relation to Naukkarinen’s grandmother. The physical piano remains attached to a particular family place, but the music it generated becomes portable. It travels as recordings, performances and files, entering rooms the instrument itself will never visit. Matter produces atmosphere; private inheritance becomes a cloud drifting beyond its source.
“Lydia” offers another named figure late in the album, but by this point names feel almost like lanterns placed within fog. They tell us that someone exists without providing a full map toward them. This restraint protects intimacy. A song can be deeply personal without converting another person’s life into public explanation. Poseidon continually gives the listener emotional truth while permitting biographical facts to remain sheltered.
The closing “Kun lyhdyt illalla sytytetään, ne eivät sammu koskaan,” “When the lanterns are lit in the evening, they never go out,” turns illumination into permanence. The line is impossible in practical terms. Fuel is consumed, electricity fails, morning makes lanterns unnecessary, and every human-built light eventually goes dark. The song speaks from another order of truth, where an act of care can continue beyond its visible duration.
A lantern does not abolish night. It creates a limited region in which people can recognize one another. That is close to what these songs do. They do not promise to cure sorrow, stop death or translate every mystery. They produce small circles of attention where love can be delivered before darkness resumes around them. Their modest scale is not evidence of modest meaning.
This makes the artwork’s skull especially important. The album’s lights remain beautiful because extinction is present. The flower crown will wilt. The ceremonial food will be eaten or decay. Cloth will tear, wood will split, the cage will rust, and the bowed figure will eventually join the skull she appears to address. Yet the image is not hopeless. It is crowded with acts of arrangement. Somebody tied, painted, dressed, placed, carried and decorated every object in the scene.
Care is visible because things are temporary. The scene may be absurd, but absurdity does not cancel devotion. The banana tied beneath the cracked sphere may be a joke, talisman or theatrical leftover. The ornate object may be a cake nobody will eat. The cage may contain nothing. Still, somebody decided where each item should stand. Meaning appears through the attention paid, not through our ability to decode a final message.
The cover layout extends this world through pale pink, tan and thin blue contour lines that resemble water, topographical mapping or wind moving across sand. On the back, the title stretches vertically in ornate gold lettering while the track names float lightly at either side. Bijan Berahimi and Christine Shen’s design does not compete with Mäkelä’s dense collage. It gives the image breathing room and lets the package behave like a strange book discovered in a theatre archive.
The vinyl and CD also received different mastering. Rafael Anton Irisarri mastered the Beacon Sound LP at Black Knoll, while Fonal’s CD and digital edition were mastered by Sami Sänpäkkilä. That distinction means the formats do not merely place identical information into different containers. They pass through separate final listening decisions, each balancing dynamics, tone and available physical space according to its medium. The downloaded copy here most likely follows the CD or digital lineage associated with Fonal, though the files themselves would need to be inspected before identifying their precise source.
Poseidon travelled internationally through three coordinated releases: Fonal handled Finland’s CD and digital edition, Beacon Sound issued the American vinyl, and Yacca/Inpartmaint released a Japanese CD. The same small secular prayers therefore entered several distinct physical and cultural routes. The record’s geography continued expanding after its scattered recording sessions had already joined Finland, Sweden and Portugal.
Beacon Sound’s LP was limited to six hundred copies and included a double-sided insert containing the Finnish lyrics and English translations. That insert matters because translation is part of the album’s hospitality. The songs do not abandon their native language to become globally legible, but they open a second doorway for listeners willing to enter through text. Finnish remains the sound-bearing body; English becomes a companion walking beside it.
Poseidon was nominated in the critics’ category of Finland’s Emma Awards and attracted unusually strong domestic reviews, but its real achievement is difficult to compress into award language. It makes elaborate music without behaving grandly. The album grew larger and brighter than Naukkarinen initially expected, yet it retains the scale of one person singing beside a piano because something private has become too important to leave unspoken.
The cover performs the same magic. It contains theatre, death, flowers, tools, birds, food, captivity, desert and domestic improvisation, but its emotional center remains one bowed person attending to something fragile. We are not told what she is doing. Perhaps she is mourning. Perhaps she is preparing a gift. Perhaps she is listening to the skull, waiting for an answer that cannot arrive through ordinary speech.
Poseidon never forces the answer either. Its songs remain beside the mystery, adjusting the curtains, lighting the lanterns and allowing every small sound to carry what it can. The sea god and the Helsinki bar become one foggy place. A grandmother’s piano becomes a cloud. A theatre flyer becomes an album cover. Separate rooms become one record. Sorrow becomes care because somebody has taken the time to arrange it beautifully.

bBb [Ola Rubin + Martin Küchen] - 2022 - tape 5: ''Sometimes - history needs a push''

 

scatterArchive – None

The cover does not advertise jazz in any familiar visual language. There are no instruments, musicians, smoky rooms, explosive abstractions or declarations of virtuosity. Instead, a small brown suitcase waits on a wooden bench beside a narrow footbridge. The photograph is framed formally against a field of institutional brown, with an ornate bBb monogram hovering above it and the phrase “Sometimes, history needs a push” printed below. It resembles an archival document whose subject has gone missing. Somebody travelled here, placed the case down and continued without it, or perhaps the case itself is the traveller and has paused before crossing.
The image turns out to be a remarkably precise map of the music. bBb is the duo of Ola Rubin and Martin Küchen, two Swedish improvisers whose nominal instruments are trombone and sopranino saxophone. Those instruments provide the lungs of the performance, but the luggage contains much more: multiband radios, selected reeds, mutes, small percussion and 78-rpm records. The music emerges through the interaction of breath, obsolete media, accidental transmissions and physical objects whose original purposes are continually being bent. This is jazz if jazz means attentive musicians creating form together in real time, but it is not a conventional horn duet with alternating solos. It is closer to two people unpacking an abandoned century while the radio continues announcing the present outside.
The group name offers its own unstable explanation. Rubin’s website expands bBb as “build Back better or whatever,” deliberately weakening a political slogan before it can solidify into branding. The mismatched capitalization also prevents the name from behaving normally. It can look like three notes, two mirrored figures facing a central spine, or a typographic insect. That ornamental logo on the cover appears much older than the phrase supposedly hidden inside it, joining antique calligraphy to the disposable language of recent politics. History is already folding over itself before the recording begins.
Tape 5 is one uninterrupted performance lasting slightly under thirty-two minutes. It was recorded on February 3, 2022, at Annelund Industrial Complex #4 in Malmö, directly onto a two-track reel-to-reel machine using recycled Scotch magnetic tape. There was no editing afterward. This does not mean the music arrived without decisions. It means that selection, balance, interruption and composition had to occur while the tape was moving. Every action becomes part of the final object, including moments in which one player waits, listens, changes direction or allows an apparently unintended sound to remain.
The recycled tape is not merely a charming analog detail. Magnetic recording normally promises that a surface can be erased and used again, but erasure is rarely absolute. Previous information may survive as residue, damage, hiss, reduced fidelity or irregular response. A used reel is therefore not a blank page. It is a page whose former writing has been rubbed away hard enough for another message to appear over it. Tape 5 places improvised music inside that condition. The musicians create in the present, but the material receiving their sounds has already lived another life.
The 78-rpm records intensify this relationship with the past. A shellac disc is both music and artifact: groove noise, surface damage, mechanical playback, unidentified performers, lost rooms and the cultural assumptions under which the recording was first produced. bBb does not seem interested in restoring these sounds to some imaginary original purity. The records enter as damaged evidence. A fragment can be heard, obstructed, contradicted or placed beside a radio transmission that belongs to another historical speed entirely.
The multiband radios introduce the opposite uncertainty. A record holds sound fixed in a groove; radio arrives from somewhere else at the moment of reception. The source may be distant, unstable or only partially intelligible. A voice or burst of music can enter without having been invited into the performance, after which Rubin and Küchen must decide how to live beside it. The radio is therefore both an instrument and an unpredictable third musician. It carries the outside world directly into a session otherwise built around close listening between two people.
These old and immediate media meet inside the narrow bodies of the horns. Küchen’s sopranino saxophone occupies a high, concentrated register where melody can quickly become cry, whistle, air current or tiny mechanical complaint. Rubin’s trombone possesses a much larger physical span, capable of broad low pressure, unstable glissandi, muted speech and metallic interruption. Their instruments appear naturally opposed in size and register, yet both depend upon columns of breath negotiating tubes, curves and resistance. The duet can therefore move between obvious contrast and the more mysterious moment when it becomes difficult to determine which player produced a particular scrape, exhalation or wounded animal sound.
The absence of a conventional rhythm section does not remove rhythm. Breath has duration. A radio signal repeats. The turntable rotates. A mute is inserted or removed. A 78 clicks at a mechanically enforced speed while human players stretch and contract around it. Small percussion produces impulses that may establish a temporary grid before the horns pull away. Rhythm exists here as the timing of encounters rather than as a beat everyone must obey.
This is one distinction between free jazz and the territory bBb often occupies. Free jazz may retain the emotional profile of jazz even while harmony and meter explode: propulsion, themes, collective peaks, rhythm-section energy and individual voices pushing toward intensity. European free improvisation can begin farther outside that inherited architecture. A sound does not need to function as a note, a phrase does not need to lead toward another phrase, and silence need not represent a pause before the real music resumes. The players discover what each sound is capable of becoming after its normal assignment has been removed.
That does not make Tape 5 cold or academic. The duo describes its own practice as “everyday music for distracted times,” with jazz eventually falling over everything “like a glowing blanket.” That phrase catches the peculiar warmth within the method. Radios, worn tape and old records could easily produce austere conceptual art, but Rubin and Küchen remain physical, comic and alert to pleasure. Breath sputters, objects refuse cooperation, and grand historical machinery is continually reduced to two people making decisions in a room.
Their description of “archaeologically colored sound-bearing artefacts” is equally revealing. Archaeology does not restore the past to life exactly as it was. It uncovers fragments, studies their placement and constructs provisional relationships among incomplete remains. bBb does something similar with recorded material. A 78-rpm fragment cannot explain the society that made it; a radio voice cannot provide its full surrounding context; the reused tape cannot disclose everything once recorded on it. The musicians do not solve these absences. They make the absences audible.
The title appears to supply a political instruction. The release credits “Sometimes, history needs a push” to Vladimir Lenin, though the attribution is part of the artists’ presentation rather than something the music asks us to accept as doctrine. Throughout the tape series, bBb uses quotations about fear, tyranny, lying, freedom and political manipulation. The sentences are too severe to function merely as quirky track names. They form a textual atmosphere around improvisations concerned with unstable information and the difficulty of distinguishing memory, evidence and authority.
“History needs a push” can be heard optimistically: circumstances do not change by themselves, and human action can move society across a bridge. It can also sound ominous. Nearly every political force believes history should be pushed, particularly when other people are expected to absorb the consequences. The suitcase on the cover contains that ambiguity. Is somebody helping it across, shoving it aside, or leaving it for the next traveller to inherit?
The bridge itself is modest. It does not span an ocean or connect monumental structures. It crosses reeds and marshy ground, surrounded by winter vegetation and ordinary wooden posts. History here is not a parade passing beneath statues. It is the small route between two locations, the suitcase somebody carried, the bench where they stopped and the decision to continue. The grandeur of the title is quietly contradicted by the scale of the photograph.
That modesty is connected to the recording process. Two-track tape cannot offer unlimited correction or infinitely rearrangeable perspective. There is nowhere to hide a performance beneath later production. Rubin and Küchen must accept the relative positions of their sounds as they happen, while the recycled tape adds another layer of material resistance. The machine does not neutrally preserve their choices. It presses them into a surface with its own age and temperament.
This creates a recording that is simultaneously an event and an object. The improvisation occurred once, but the tape makes that temporary relationship repeatable. Each replay returns the same accidents, pauses and radio intrusions, gradually turning spontaneous decisions into a composition listeners can memorize. Improvisation becomes history almost immediately. What had no fixed route while being played becomes a road every future listener must travel in the same order.
Yet no two hearings are exactly equivalent. At first, the radios and records may seem like foreign material interrupting two horn players. Later, the horns may begin sounding like displaced recordings themselves, while the mechanical sources appear strangely alive. Attention reorganizes the hierarchy. Background becomes signal, instrumental technique becomes environmental noise, and an apparently incidental crack may suddenly connect two larger regions of the performance.
That perceptual instability is what the design prepares us for. The cover looks orderly, almost conservative, while its central photograph poses an unresolved question. The typography promises a document; the suitcase supplies a mystery. Tape 5 behaves similarly. Its presentation is restrained, but the sound world refuses stable classification. Jazz, field recording, radio art, musique concrète and free improvisation pass through without any one category successfully claiming the entire case.
Martin Küchen brings a long history in European improvised music, including Angles, Trespass Trio and numerous collaborations in which political grief, melodic force and abrasive sound coexist. Ola Rubin’s trombone work extends through Swedish Fix, Lazy Rude Monk, Semla Empanada and several duo settings. In bBb, neither player merely imports a recognizable personal style. The project gives them a shared laboratory where the cultural history surrounding their instruments can be mixed with technologies that interrupt instrumental mastery.
That interruption may be one reason the music feels so alive. A highly experienced improviser risks becoming fluent enough to predict their own freedom. Radios, old records, awkward objects and deteriorating tape restore uncertainty. The players cannot completely control what enters or how the recording surface will receive it. Their experience is used not to eliminate the unexpected, but to recognize what the unexpected has made possible.
Tape 5 ends the initial run of five reel-to-reel installments, but it does not provide a conclusion in the ordinary sense. One long performance finishes because the tape, concentration or chosen duration reaches its border. The suitcase remains beside the bridge. The quotation remains unresolved. History may have moved slightly, though whether it was pushed by the musicians, the machines, the discarded recordings or the listener cannot be determined.
That uncertainty is the real subject. bBb does not present history as an orderly sequence preserved in correct containers. History leaks through obsolete media, survives attempted erasure, interrupts current broadcasts and changes meaning according to whatever is placed beside it. The duo listens inside that leakage. A trombone opens, a tiny saxophone answers, a record rotates, a voice arrives from nowhere and worn magnetic particles hold the entire encounter just long enough for someone else to find it.
Anyone who recognizes the photograph’s location, the 78-rpm sources or the radio material may possess another corner of the evidence. But complete identification might not solve the mystery. The suitcase matters because we cannot see everything packed inside it. For thirty-two minutes, Rubin and Küchen open it without emptying it.