Monolord - 2023 - It's All The Same

Relapse Records – none

 “It’s all the same” can be an accusation, a surrender, a reassurance or a statement of identity. Monolord manages to make it mean all four. After nearly a decade of building one of the most recognizable sounds in modern doom, the Gothenburg trio had reached the strange position where consistency could be mistaken for repetition. Listeners wanted the massive guitar tone, the glacial motion and the sensation of being physically leaned upon by the music, but a band cannot survive by continually rebuilding the same cathedral from the same stones. These two songs address that problem without pretending it can be solved through reinvention alone. The instruments, players and fundamental gravity remain familiar. What changes is the angle at which the weight enters the room.

The format is unusually well suited to that purpose. “Glaive (It’s All the Same)” and “The Only Road” occupy only twelve minutes and forty-two seconds, making this technically an EP, functionally a maxi-single and emotionally a two-part argument. Monolord explained that both songs had existed in unfinished states for some time before finally finding their proper shapes. That history can be heard in their compactness. Neither piece feels like a discarded album track or a riff extended merely because doom permits extension. They contain the density of songs that have survived repeated examination. Anything incapable of carrying weight has already been removed.

Monolord began in Gothenburg in 2013 with the same three musicians heard here: Thomas V. Jäger on guitar and vocals, Mika Häkki on bass and Esben Willems on drums. The continuity of that lineup is central to the group’s sound. A trio playing this slowly cannot hide weak communication behind constant activity. Every drum accent changes the dimensions of the guitar, every bass movement alters the apparent depth of the floor, and every pause becomes a jointly held decision. Over time, the band learned not merely how to sound enormous, but how to change the internal architecture of that enormity without reducing its scale.

“Glaive” begins by resisting the most obvious entrance. Rather than immediately dropping a monolithic riff onto the listener, the guitars open a wider and more melancholy space. Lead lines move with something close to classic hard rock grace, and Jäger’s Mellotron adds an aged glow behind the trio, giving the music the strange emotional coloring of sunlight entering a room containing very heavy furniture. The band is still unmistakably Monolord, but its heaviness is temporarily carried through anticipation, harmony and emotional pressure rather than blunt impact.

A glaive is a long-handled blade, built to place cutting force at a distance. The music behaves similarly. Its opening melody does not strike the listener directly; it circles, extends and finds vulnerable space from farther away. When the heavier guitar arrives, it feels less like the beginning of the song than the consequence of everything already suspended above it. Monolord’s great skill has always involved making a riff feel inevitable, but here inevitability is delayed long enough to acquire sadness.

Jäger’s voice reinforces that atmosphere. His singing has never attempted to overpower the guitar. It floats above the low frequencies in a thinner, almost disembodied register, making the human presence sound exposed rather than dominant. That contrast is especially effective on “Glaive.” The lyric addresses stagnation, self-deception, spectatorship and the belief that a new attempt will somehow escape an old pattern. The repeated title does not sound indifferent. It sounds exhausted by recognition. Someone has tried changing the surface while preserving the behavior underneath, then discovered the same destination waiting again.

That idea extends beyond the person addressed in the lyric. It can also be heard as a band examining its own position. After years of records, tours and expectations, what does musical progress mean for a group whose identity depends partly upon repetition? Doom itself is constructed from recurrence. The listener wants the riff to return because its return changes the body’s relationship to time. Monolord therefore does not escape sameness by abandoning its established sound. The band searches inside repetition for differences large enough to matter.

The bass and drums make that search physical. Häkki’s low end does not simply double the guitar. It enlarges the space beneath it, giving every chord an underground extension. Willems plays with the restraint necessary for very heavy music to breathe. His drums do not constantly announce power because the power is already present. Instead, each kick and cymbal placement determines when the accumulated pressure should advance. This gives “Glaive” a steady internal motion even when its surface appears suspended.

The Mellotron is an especially important addition. Its tones carry an association with progressive rock, early electronic simulation and orchestral grandeur, but Monolord does not use it to decorate the music with borrowed nostalgia. It creates distance. The instrument sounds like a memory of strings rather than strings themselves, which matches a song concerned with repeated experience and compromised renewal. The past is present, but filtered through machinery and deterioration.

“The Only Road” answers the first song by removing much of its open air. The guitar descends into the dense, saturated register most immediately associated with Monolord, and the rhythm becomes more foreboding. Where “Glaive” looks across a landscape and recognizes repetition, “The Only Road” enters the path anyway. Its title offers no intersection, alternative or escape route. Motion remains possible, but choice has narrowed to one direction.

This is where the band’s familiar heaviness becomes newly expressive. The fuzz is not simply an attractive guitar texture or evidence that the correct amplifiers were used. It obscures the edges of the notes until the riff seems larger than the individual actions producing it. Guitar and bass merge into a single geological movement while the drums supply scale. The listener does not merely hear three musicians playing slowly. The listener hears a mass discovering that it can move.

The song also demonstrates why Monolord’s tone has inspired so much imitation without becoming easy to reproduce. Volume and low tuning can create size, but size alone does not create consequence. Monolord’s riffs feel consequential because they are arranged around tension, release and the withholding of information. A chord is allowed to continue long enough that its decay becomes part of the composition. Silence is not empty space between attacks. It is the pressure left behind by the previous one.

“The Only Road” does not abandon melody. Jäger’s vocal remains clear enough to give the song a human center, and small guitar movements emerge from the surrounding distortion like details visible through industrial smoke. This balance has gradually become one of the band’s defining strengths. Early Monolord often overwhelmed through sheer physical scale, but later work increasingly allows vulnerability, harmony and atmosphere to remain audible inside the machinery. The crushing section becomes more powerful because something delicate has survived within it.

Placed together, the two songs form a concise model of Monolord’s development. “Glaive” leans toward spacious psychedelic and progressive rock, using Mellotron, melodic guitar and melancholy as structural materials. “The Only Road” returns to the severe gravitational force associated with the band’s earliest records. The EP does not ask the listener to choose between evolution and continuity. It demonstrates that both can occur inside the same twelve minutes. One song widens the structure; the other confirms that its foundation remains capable of supporting impossible weight.

Esben Willems mixed and mastered the release at Studio Berserk in Gothenburg. Having the drummer handle those stages makes particular sense for this music. The recording’s power depends upon preserving the relationship between impact and duration. Too much compression could turn the low end into a constant block, while excessive clarity might separate instruments that need to behave as one organism. The final sound allows the bass and guitar to merge without losing the drum kit’s authority. The music is enormous, but its movement remains readable.

That readability is one reason the record rewards loud playback without depending entirely upon it. At high volume, the low frequencies become architecture and the listener is temporarily housed inside them. At lower volume, the arrangements reveal their internal care: the guitar harmonies, the Mellotron’s haze, the timing of the drums and the subtle distinction between bass weight and guitar grain. Monolord makes music associated with physical extremity, but the songs are not merely delivery systems for loudness. Their construction survives when the walls are not shaking.

Error! Design’s cover translates the same balance into yellow, violet and black. An indistinct organic figure appears curled or folded within a rectangular field, rendered with enough visual damage that it could be an anatomical scan, a fossil, an embryo, an insect form or a body preserved inside corrupted data. The image seems both ancient and technologically processed. Its bright colors suggest heat and life, while the grain makes the subject appear already distant, reproduced through several generations of imperfect machinery.

The band name sits above the image in a distorted typeface that looks partly melted and partly excavated. The title is placed beneath it in much smaller lettering, almost as though the phrase “it’s all the same” were a laboratory conclusion appended after the experiment. The vinyl colors extended this palette through canary yellow, violet, black and clear variants. The object is visually loud, but the figure at its center remains difficult to identify. Recognition and uncertainty coexist, just as the music is instantly recognizable as Monolord while refusing to remain completely fixed.

The record was cut as a twelve-inch at 45 RPM, a format with more physical space than twelve minutes strictly requires. That excess is appropriate. A short record does not need to be a small record, and these songs benefit from a format capable of giving their bass frequencies broad physical grooves. The maxi-single presentation also separates the release from the expectation of an album-length statement. Monolord does not need to build an hour-long world every time it enters the studio. Two properly shaped songs can function as a complete message.

The title becomes increasingly clever the longer the record plays. At first, “it’s all the same” sounds like despair at repetition. By the end, it also describes the integrity of the band. Change the balance of melody and distortion, introduce Mellotron, shorten the format, widen the psychedelic passages or return to the oldest crushing instincts, and the underlying relationship between these three musicians remains intact. It is all the same not because nothing changes, but because the identity survives change.

In retrospect, the release also became a hinge. It followed 2021’s Your Time to Shine and remained Monolord’s final new recording until Neverending arrived in 2026. During that interval, these two songs had to carry the unanswered question of where the group might go next. “Glaive” suggested greater openness and melodic reach; “The Only Road” insisted that the primordial riff still had work to perform. The later album could proceed because this small record had already tested whether expansion and continuity could occupy the same body.

There is something quietly defiant about a successful band releasing only two songs after listeners have learned to expect entire album cycles. The modern music economy rewards constant visibility, repeated announcements and an uninterrupted stream of content. Monolord instead waited until these pieces had found their final shape, released twelve minutes and allowed them to stand. The gesture matches the music’s temporal values. Slowness is not an absence of activity. It is a refusal to confuse speed with importance.

It’s All the Same ultimately concerns the difference between repetition and permanence. Repetition reenacts the past without necessarily understanding it. Permanence carries an identity through alteration. Monolord’s riffs return, the tempos remain heavy and Jäger’s voice still floats above a landscape of fuzz, but every familiar element has acquired new relationships. The band has not escaped itself, nor does it need to. These songs suggest that the more difficult task is to remain oneself without becoming a copy.

Blod - 2023 - Dar Ska Barnet Vara

Discreet Music – 13

 

Där Ska Barnet Vara sounds like a hymnbook that has passed through too many hands to remain doctrinally tidy. Some pages have been torn out, others carry pencilled corrections, and somewhere between church, home, school assembly and private grief, the distinction between sacred song and damaged folk music has begun dissolving. Gustaf Dicksson does not approach faith as a polished system whose questions have already been answered. He approaches it as lived material: inherited phrases, imperfect voices, childhood memories, communal rituals, fear of abandonment, flashes of peace and the knowledge that every human attachment eventually encounters death.

The title, which can be translated as “There the child shall be,” immediately contains both tenderness and authority. It might be spoken by someone placing a child safely among family, community and God. It could also be an instruction delivered by an institution that has already decided where the child belongs. The words promise shelter while quietly raising a harder question: who chose the place? Across the record, Blod keeps returning to that unstable border where care can become control, belonging can become exposure, and faith can be both a home and the beginning of a lifelong argument with the home’s architecture.

This was the second of two closely connected albums inspired by Swedish Christian parish culture, following Pilgrimssånger in 2022. That earlier record explored solitude, anxiety, fellowship and hope within a life structured by belief. Där Ska Barnet Vara continues the inquiry but sounds less settled inside it. The recording is rougher, the arrangements looser and the emotions closer to the exposed wire. If Pilgrimssånger entered the church through its public doors, this album wanders into the rooms behind the sanctuary: the storage cupboard, fellowship kitchen, children’s classroom, empty hall after everyone has left and graveyard visible through a rain-streaked window.

Dicksson has said that his central intention with Blod is simply to make beautiful music, and that playing functions as relief from stress and anxiety. Beauty in this project is rarely smoothness. It is the moment something vulnerable survives its circumstances. A wavering voice remains beautiful because it wavers. A melody played with limited technical certainty can become more moving because every note sounds discovered rather than guaranteed. Där Ska Barnet Vara takes the modest musical abilities, worn instruments and emotionally direct performances that commercial recording usually tries to correct, then treats those supposedly inadequate materials as evidence that a real person was present.

“Intro/Kom Helige Ande Från Höjden” begins with an existing Swedish hymn, number 286 in the modern Swedish hymnal, whose title means “Come, Holy Spirit, from above.” Opening with an invocation places the entire album inside a request rather than a declaration. The music does not announce that the spirit has arrived. It calls upward and waits. The distinction matters. Prayer is most revealing before any answer comes, while the person speaking still has to decide whether faith means certainty or the willingness to address silence.

Blod’s treatment refuses the architectural grandeur usually associated with sacred music. The hymn is not elevated by a cathedral acoustic, trained choir or victorious organ. It enters through unstable recording, human-scale instrumentation and voices that retain the grain of ordinary life. This does not diminish the sacred material. It brings it closer. The Holy Spirit is not summoned into an acoustically perfect sanctuary but into a room containing hesitation, poor wiring, physical exhaustion and the accumulated history of everyone who has ever sung because they needed the words to be true.

The title song follows as a more intimate form of placement. A child is not an abstract symbol in religious life. The child is the person brought into the community before possessing the language to understand what the community believes. Songs, prayers, images, fears and promises enter early, becoming part of the child’s internal landscape before they can be examined. “Där Ska Barnet Vara” carries the warmth of belonging but also its permanence. Once somebody has shown you where heaven, death, sin, rescue and eternity are located, it can take a lifetime to redraw the map.

Dicksson’s melodies are particularly suited to this subject because they often feel remembered rather than newly written. They resemble fragments that might have been heard at a school ceremony, on an old private-press Christian LP, through a church loudspeaker or from an adult humming while completing some household task. Yet the melodies never settle fully into nostalgia. The recording disturbs them. Instruments sag, tempos loosen, and familiar emotional signals arrive with slightly altered faces. Childhood is not reconstructed as a lost paradise. It is revisited as the period when meaning first entered without asking permission.

“När Din Väg Känns Lång,” “When Your Road Feels Long,” adopts the language of encouragement common to hymns and devotional songs. The road is one of Christianity’s most durable images: pilgrimage, moral path, suffering, endurance, return. Blod makes the road feel less symbolic than bodily. Length is experienced through fatigue. Faith does not shorten the journey; it supplies a song someone may be able to carry while walking it. Astrid Øster Mortensen’s presence on voice and flute adds another human current, introducing breath into music concerned with how a person continues when certainty has become difficult to maintain.

The song’s importance lies partly in its refusal to separate spiritual endurance from ordinary loneliness. A person may believe completely and still find the road long. That is not necessarily failure. It may be what belief looks like once the initial promise has worn down into daily practice. The album repeatedly values faith not as a shield against despair, but as one of the languages people use while despair is happening. Hope is not presented as the cancellation of darkness. It is a small object carried through it.

“Skolavslutning Askim 03” shifts the setting to a school end-of-term ceremony in Askim in 2003. Swedish school graduations and summer closings often retain songs, hymns and communal rituals whose religious origins remain audible even when the event itself is understood as secular. The title transforms a specific local memory into an archaeological site. “03” makes it sound like a home recording, a mislabeled MiniDisc or a digital file recovered from an old computer. Suddenly the album is not only composing parish-inspired music but examining how sacred melodies persist inside civic childhood, detached from explicit theology yet still carrying its emotional grammar.

The piece also complicates the idea of innocence. A school ceremony celebrates completion and movement toward the future, but every adult listener knows that the gathered children will eventually be dispersed into lives containing illness, betrayal, love, work, fear and death. The beauty of children singing together comes partly from that knowledge. Their voices occupy a moment before the future has revealed its price. Blod does not need to turn this into tragedy. The tenderness already contains it.

“Små Ögonblick Av Frid,” “Small Moments of Peace,” may be the album’s most accurate theology. It does not promise permanent peace, complete healing or a final explanation. It offers moments. The phrase accepts that peace may arrive briefly, almost accidentally, before ordinary pressure resumes. That smallness gives the song credibility. A person living with grief or anxiety may be unable to believe in a permanently repaired world, but a few minutes of relief can still be received as grace.

The first side therefore moves from invocation to placement, pilgrimage, childhood ceremony and temporary peace. Its sequence resembles a condensed education in belief. The spirit is called, the child is assigned a place, the road becomes difficult, communal ritual provides a memory, and peace appears only in intervals. Nothing is resolved, but a vocabulary has been established for entering the second side, where death and resurrection become explicit.

“Jesus Vår Son, Uppstånden Är” is a startling title. Christian speech normally identifies Jesus as the Son of God, yet “Jesus, our son, is risen” draws him into human parenthood. The incarnation is made intimate enough to hurt. Jesus is not only the distant figure whose resurrection guarantees doctrine. He is somebody’s child, loved in a body that can be injured, lost and mourned. Calling him “our son” distributes the parental relationship across the community. His death becomes not an abstract mechanism of salvation but the death of a child belonging to everyone.

The song’s length gives this thought room to unfold. Resurrection cannot erase crucifixion without emptying love of cost. If the life was precious, the loss remains terrible even when the story continues beyond the tomb. Blod’s roughness protects that contradiction. A polished triumphant arrangement might force grief to disappear beneath victory. Here, faith and mourning are allowed to occupy the same sound. The risen son remains the son who died.

This is where the album’s strong presence of death reveals its deeper purpose. Death is not included to make religious imagery darker or more provocative. It establishes the stakes of attachment. A faith without death might remain an attractive philosophy; love without mortality could remain emotionally inexpensive. Once every person is understood as irreplaceable and temporary, devotion gains its price. The loss of life is not made good merely by being given meaning, but meaning refuses to let the life become nothing.

“Förbannelsen,” “The Curse,” follows resurrection with a title that restores danger immediately. Easter has not purified the world into harmlessness. A curse remains active. It might be inherited sin, family damage, illness, institutional authority, fear of divine punishment or simply mortality itself. Blod leaves the word large enough to contain several possibilities. What matters is that belief has not eliminated it.

The arrangement’s looseness belongs to the subject. A curse does not always announce itself through spectacular evil. It can work as repetition, something passed through generations because everybody mistakes it for the natural order. The child is placed where the child is supposed to be, inherits the community’s language and eventually discovers that protection and damage may have arrived through the same door. Yet the record does not flatten religion into accusation. The curse exists within a world that also contains peace, resurrection, music and people trying sincerely to care for one another. Its power comes from refusing the simpler verdict.

“Påskhelgen,” “Easter Weekend,” places Christianity’s central drama inside the ordinary calendar. Not merely Easter as doctrine, but the weekend: travel, meals, family gatherings, church services, children, exhaustion, silence and Monday waiting nearby. The title domesticates resurrection without trivializing it. Sacred history is experienced through scheduled days, familiar rooms and annual repetition. Each year the story is told again, not because the participants have forgotten the ending, but because repetition allows a person to encounter the ending from a different point in life.

A child hears Easter as wonder. An adult may hear sacrifice. Someone grieving hears the promise of reunion. Someone disillusioned hears the machinery of an institution. Someone returning after years away discovers that the melodies survived inside the body. The ritual remains formally the same while the listener changes around it. This is one reason Blod’s mixture of hymn, folk song and deteriorated home recording is so effective. The music seems ancient and newly wounded at once.

The album closes with “Ge Mig Upp,” “Give Me Up,” attached to “Coinleach Glas An Fhómhair,” an old Irish-language song whose title refers to the green stubble fields of autumn. The traditional song concerns love, separation and the wish that two people might marry or sail away together. Its appearance here extends the album beyond Swedish parish culture into another oral tradition where melody has carried longing across generations without requiring a known author.

“Give me up” is an extraordinary closing request after an album concerned with where a child belongs. At the beginning, the child is placed. At the end, the adult asks to be released. The phrase might be directed toward a lover, family, congregation, God or the self that can no longer continue carrying its inherited identity in the same form. Yet “give me up” also contains surrender. It can mean abandonment, but it can also mean being handed upward.

The Irish melody gives that ambiguity an autumnal body. Fields after harvest are not dead landscapes. Something has been removed from them, but the ground remains, holding evidence of what grew there and preparing invisibly for another season. The album ends in a similar condition. Faith has been harvested of easy certainty, leaving stalks, soil and memory. Nothing looks complete, yet the emptiness is not nothing.

Astrid Øster Mortensen, Anna Johannesson and Magnus Jäverling help prevent the record from becoming a sealed autobiographical chamber. Their voices, flute, saxophone, piano and organ allow other people to enter Dicksson’s spiritual landscape. This matters because parish faith is never entirely solitary. Even private belief is assembled from communal language, melodies learned from others and rituals performed in groups. The additional musicians do not create a conventional band around Blod. They appear more like witnesses, relatives or fellow congregants entering particular scenes.

The unevenness of the performances makes that community believable. Trained perfection would place the listener outside the music as an admirer. These recordings invite participation because they retain the feeling that another uncertain voice could join. This is how much private Christian music functioned before collectors reclassified it as outsider art: ordinary people made records because the message mattered enough to exceed their ability. The gap between intention and execution became the place where sincerity could be heard most clearly.

Discreet Music’s presentation continues that logic. Each copy was screenprinted and assembled using an old record sleeve, so the album’s physical body already had a previous life. Wear, marks and occasional splits were not manufacturing errors to conceal but traces permitted to remain. The plain front carries only a handful of small musical notes, while the back resembles the sleeve of a local religious private pressing: an institutional building, track list, blunt typography and four individual portraits identifying the people responsible.

The building is particularly haunting. It does not look like a grand cathedral capable of overwhelming doubt through architecture. It resembles a parish hall, school, clinic or municipal structure, somewhere faith would be practiced under fluorescent lights with coffee nearby. The musicians’ photographs are equally direct. They are not styled as mystics. They appear as people whose names and modest contributions have been documented because somebody understood that the record might outlive the gathering that produced it.

Using discarded sleeves is more than an appealing DIY gesture. The previous record remains physically underneath the new one, even if its identity is hidden. That is how inherited faith often works. A new life is built over an older structure whose outlines continue affecting the surface. Blod does not erase the underlying object. He gives it another purpose while allowing its age and damage to remain active.

Där Ska Barnet Vara is not an argument for or against Christianity. It is closer to a study of what happens when belief enters deeply enough that it cannot simply be accepted or discarded. Faith becomes memory, melody, fear, consolation, social structure and a way of understanding death. Even doubt must speak in the language it learned there.

The album’s deepest insight may be that love and mortality cannot be cleanly separated. The child is placed somewhere because someone cares where the child will be. The road feels long because there is a destination worth reaching. Peace matters because it does not last. Resurrection matters because death has taken someone irreplaceable. The plea to be released matters because belonging once carried enormous weight.

Life is not made meaningful by death, but death reveals the meaning that was already attached to life. Blod allows that revelation to remain painful, awkward and unresolved. These songs do not conquer death. They surround it with voices, old melodies, fragile instruments and people continuing to sing. Perhaps that is what the child’s place finally becomes: not a fixed location chosen by authority, but a place among others where no life is permitted to vanish without leaving music behind.

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.