Retro saturday

Today is retro day. We listen to grammophone records, and we watch photos developed on paper.

Ea, my 4 year old daughter, wonders. How did the photo get to be on paper? And how can we hear music without turning on the CD player?

Web 2.0 - a sure sign of old age?

I teach bizz strategies within creative subjects. The other day, my students and I discussed the world wide web, and what it means to those who wants to share their creative products, be it music, books, movies, visual art, or whatever else. We spent time exploring the concept of The Long Tail, and we also touched on the subject of Web 2.0.

In short, the expression "Web 2.0" is a term for the development, that the world wide web has gone from being a collection of more or less static documents, resembling a larger version of the brochure stand at the local public library, and into being a venue for social interaction. The buzz word is usergenerated content. Through sites like myspace.com, second life, various fora, blogs, and chatsites, the internet has become something in which you participate, rather than something you look at.

But as we talked about it, I realized that my students, all of them being in their early twenties, never really have been using the internet in any other way. Web 2.0 may be a development of the technology, a development which has been clearly evident for those of us who have been following it as adults throughout the past 10 years. But the young adults probably rather see the current state of the www as the natural function of the tool that the internet today is. They see the "original" internet (as it was in, say, 1995), as the technological childhood of the world wide web.

Right around this point, I started realizing, that the act of labeling this development Web 2.0 is probably mostly a necessity for those of us over 30. We need a way to manifest that this fascinating thing that we call "the internet" has developed. For those who have grown up with the world wide web as a natural part of their everyday life, there is no reason to begin labeling the internet just because it's functionality has expanded. Web 2.0 is a term, that people of my age and older use, to understand how the world develops.

Just about here, I suddenly felt very old.

folktronic: Ouverture

Another entry dealing with one of the tracks on folktronic, this time moving to the beginning of the album; the opening track, Ouverture.

The melody was born in one opf those magic moments that seemed to be so abundant right around 2000-2001. Such a moment, where a melody seems to appear in my brain out of nowhere, and there's nothing to do but get it down on paper before it dissolves in thin air. This moment arrived aboard a ferry, fittingly named Carisma, on my way from Denmark to Gothenburg, where I was taking piano lessons with Rickard Åström at that time. This ferry features an amazing panoramic view, and while looking out over the sea, watching the western coast of Sweden appear in the horizon, the melody and the bass line found it's way from my poor-ferrycafeteria-coffee laden brain, out through my pen and into my notepad. The rhythmic interplay between the melody and the bass line in the A part of the song was one of the things that stood out most clearly to me at that moment of conception.
Immediately after finishing the draft, it was clear to me that this song would be a perfect opener at my exam concert at the music academy, which I was preparing around that time. Thus, I named the track Ouverture, and that title has stuck with it since then.

The version of the track featured on folktronic is the final result of many attempts, which were all dumped before arriving at this. To me, the final result is a track, in which I've succeded in creating a fusion that does not just sound like classic harpsichord and strings, folky fiddle and accordeon, and electronic beats, playing each their own style in time with eachother, but rather the mentioned ingredients mixed together to form a completely new style. It gives me great satisfaction, when succeding in making different sources melt together to form a new stylistic entity.

Other songs from folktronic on this blog: Ta Prohm

Watercolor music

I've taken up a new, geeky project. Audio based on image files.

The idea behind the project is to take advantage of the fact, that audio saved to a harddisk is stored as a sequence of 1's and 0's - just like any other digital data. When playing back the audio, the computer converts these bytes into sounds. Thus follows, that all data can be transformed into sound, if only you can fool the machine into believing that the bytes you're feeding to it's audio interface is an actual sound file.


After a few initial experiments, I've ended up producing a series of very simple watercolor paintings, tailored to deliver interesting sounding results. These paintings have been scanned, photoshopped, and then converted into sound. This sound has then been further processed. I have now come to the stage of putting them together to form a piece of audio. The results are aiming to become sequences of sound trying to put a kind of abstract auditive story into the listeners mind, by presenting a main line of development, adding sound bytes that comment this development as well as eachother.
The sounds in themselves are primarily different variations of noise. Some of them feature clearly audible ascending and descending pitches. Some might call it noise or sound art. I think I'll just stick to calling it music.

The first result of these experiments can be heard, using my myspace presence. The track is called "roed", meaning "red", as the painting that delivered the sounds for it is painted purely in red. I will alert this space on the www when more tracks become available.

folktronic: Ta Prohm

As followers of me and my work will know, folktronic has been released online. To know more about this, read here: folktronic

In a series of blog posts, I'll go a bit more in depth with the tracks from that album. I'll begin with the end, the closing track of the album:

Ta Prohm.

My wife was born in Cambodia. It follows, that it's only natural that she and I went to visit the Khmer country back in December 1999. Among other things, we visited the world famous Angkor temple complex in the northern part of Cambodia, as the tourists we (among other things) turned out to be. Angkor is a fabulous place, where archeologists have dug out the most fantastically ornamented grandiose buildings from the grip of the jungle. The same jungle that has managed to keep the whole temple complex hidden from the outside world for 500 years.
Obviously, it's a deeply fascinating experience walking around the temples, restored to make you feel right back at the height of the Angkor civilisation. But the most fascinating temple of them all is the one called Ta Prohm. Here, the archeologists have left the trees standing, enabling you to experience how the forest has been slowly strangling and demolishing the buildings. Tree roots and trunks go straight through and around walls and reliefs in a slow wrestle through thousands of years, ending in the forests inevitable victory. In many ways an aphorism for Cambodia itself, where the inherent beauty of the country and the people are constantly scarred by the violently destructive confrontations with the forces that seem to flood over the history of the country.
We spent a whole day in and around Ta Prohm. Some of the time, we just walked around and absorbed the impressions. Some of the time, we sat down and recollected our impressions as best we could. My wife made drawings. I wrote the melody that ended up with the title Ta Prohm in my notebook. While walking around, I recorded some of the sounds in and around the temple. Birds. Streams. Unidentifiable sounds of the forest.

The melody, Ta Prohm, is a polska. Strictly speaking, a Swedish traditional form, and as such, it has little in common with prehistoric Cambodia. But two reasons made me use it anyway; one, I was very occupied with the polska format at that time; and two, I find that the labyrinthic and intertwining rhythmic possibilities of the polska reflect the location most appropriately.

The recording of Ta Prohm featured on folktronic rests on two principles:
- the rhythm track and the sound effects are mainly based on the actual sounds I recorded in Cambodia, with emphasis on the sounds from the Ta Prohm area itself. One can say that the rhythm part builds on a sort of documentary idea, with a single heavily squashed drum track added for low frequencies, and spiced with a few percussion parts.
- the melody and the other tonal content can be played on any instruments. All possibilities are available. In other words, the possibilities are so many that it's almost impossible to choose one. So, in the end I decided to make it a dogma for the recording to keep strictly to one instrument for every track, and then process the recorded sound to give me bass, chord tracks, melody counterpoints etc. All tonal parts are initially recorded playing my accordeon.

Ta Prohm - an instrumental documentation of a part of Cambodian history. Enjoy.

folktronic is out!

It's here, and it's for real. My album, folktronic, is now available through various online stores. Here are a few links; the rest is up to you.

Itunes music store (requires itunes)

emusic.com

The cover art was made by Belgian graphic artist Piet de Ridder. Unfortunately, the quality of the images supplied with the downloaded files suffer. It has been printed, sent from Denmark to the US, scanned and compressed. Why they couldn't simply use Piet's jpg image is beyond me, but the only thing I can do about it is offering a decent quality download here. Click the image above here and save it to your harddisk. That will enable you to replace the supplied image with this one in our media player.

I hope you will enjoy the album. I'm planning on elaborating with some background info on the individual tracks in the near future. Look out for it on this space.

Music on myspace

I'll start out this blog properly by going through a couple of songs, currently available on my webpage on myspace.

The song Just is an example of my collaborations with Singer-Songwriter Martin Høybye.

What we're trying to do, is fuse his songwriting, rooted in country music and other such americana, and my electronica, rooted in european art music and nordic folk, among many other influences. Hopefully the fusion brings a whole new genre to the world; at least, that's the aim.

For various reasons, the project has been lying still for some time now. But just the other day, Martin stopped by for coffee, and he brought tracks for no less than 7 new songs!

The first sketches are shaping up as we speak (ehrm ... type), so look forward to new examples of this way of working soon.

Soldag is the first result of my collaborations with guitarist Mark McGouirk. Mark is based in Atlanta, US, and shares with me a passion for nordic folk music, which had him contacting me several years ago, to propose a musical collaboration. After about a year or so of sudden outbursts of activity on either end, punctuated by long periods of each of us being busy with work, other projects, family or whatever else, "Soldag" was born as a first result. I composed, played piano and synth, and mixed. Mark plays the guitars. I hope you will enjoy it.

In the meantime, we continue to create music every once in a while, but the world turns around us, and we're not the same anymore. We did finish another track recently, but this one is a completely different ballgame, with electric guitar pads happening all over all sorts of electronic treatments. Unfortunately, the track is too long for myspace, but anyone interested (and able to figure out the Danish GUI) are most welcome to check out "The Lakeside Encounter" on monsdrum.mymusic.dk.

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Admitted, a lot of this post is copy+paste from my myspace blog, but you have to start somewhere. I hope you'll enjoy my productions. More to follow ....