Morton Riis writes, “The story of DIEM (The Danish Institute
of Electronic Music) is the story of 25 years of believing that
the newest technology can move existing musical boundaries,
create new sounds, new structures, and pioneer the development
of the music of the future.” Presented in a nice clamshell
box and with very decent documentation, this release presents
a wide selection of works produced at DIEM from 1987 to 2012.
Other than Per Nørgård’s truncated Årsfrise-91
these are all presented in their original form, and most will
be unfamiliar, which is no great surprise as many of these pieces
are released here for the first time.
By chance I happened to commence composition studies at the
Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in 1987, so I can vividly recall
the electronic music facilities there at the time. Atari computers
were the cutting edge, but for us untrained and intuitive types
there was still a hands-on experimental feel to the whole thing
which I embraced wholeheartedly for about a year. Tape cuttings
on the floor and loops in procession around the entire studio,
turning the old analogue acoustic chamber which was like a big
radiator full of springs into something which sounded like an
exploding atom bomb, pushing and pulling plugs and levers -
those were the common activities which can never quite be emulated
by the relatively easy and certainly more compact range of computers
and equipment we use today. If your system has a glitch these
days there’s not much for it but to turn off, reboot and
start again. Back in 1987 you immediately recorded your glitch
and probably made a 20 minute piece out of it - the effect being
one unlikely ever to be reproducible in a subsequent session.
There are many fascinating sounds to be heard on these two CDs,
though tastes will vary and you’ll have to be willing
to allow your imagination free rein in some seriously abstract
tracts. Daniel Rothman’s Southwest Sky is one such
work, an airy and free-spirited collection of kaleidoscopic
lines which suggest stars and space, or clouds and deathly isolation,
depending on your mood and associations. This is from 1988,
and a more interesting species of work than its recent predecessor,
Jonas R. Kirkegaard’s 802, which is a disco drum
beat which speeds and slows but does little else - something
which would have been impressive in 1988, but which doesn’t
cut the mustard in 2012.
No doubt we did some pretty dreadful stuff in the 1980s and
early 90s, but as ever with this kind of music, it’s the
mind behind the art rather than the means used to produce it
which is its guardian of quality and lasting value. I know I’ll
be accused of having nostalgic preferences, but I sense a consistency
and honesty in the microtonal explorations of Carl Bergstrøm
Nielsen’s Omdrejninger II when put against the
somewhat haphazard and softly bumbling Hypermodel by
Band Ane. The BBC’s original ‘Hitch Hiker’s
Guide to The Galaxy’ radio series had more interesting
background music than this - bless the Radiophonic Workshop
and all who sailed in her.
If seemingly random bumps and squeaks are your thing then Jonas
Olesen/Morten
Riis’s Prim X is an interesting collage of
what sounds like a mixture of analogue and digital sources -
minimal in their sculpting of shapes within a deep silence.
Grander ambitions in Fuzzy’s Electric Gardens and Their
Surroundings send us into a world of richness whose cataclysmic
opening and ‘gong’ effects remind me of that literary
advice, “start with an avalanche, and go on from there.”
This piece has connections with Morton Subotnik and the like
- think of The Wild Bull - and could probably have been
a few minutes shorter, but it is still a grandiloquent and intensely
energetic piece of work. Echoes of Frank Zappa mixed with one
or other kind of acid is the order of the day in Puzzleweasel/Richard
Devine’s striking Mad Bonce, but Per Nørgård
has us more on the edge of our seats with the fascinating Årsfrise-91,
an extract from a multi-layered project originally conceived
as Kalendermusik, originally about 8 hours’ worth
of semi-autonomous electronic tone generators. They should release
it as an MP3 file.
At last, humour, with a fairground feel given to the spoken
word in Halfdan E. and the late Dan Turéll’s Intro
(Team Trash). I also like the concept of Wayne Siegel’s
Tunnel Vision, which filters a multitude of sounds into
a single, constantly changing note - as if heard through a tube-shaped
seashell.
On to CD 2, and while Bjørn Svin’s 7 circler
I 1 matrix has something of a doom-disco feel to it, the
project is an interesting one, involving the re-mixing of a
pioneering 1958 work, Syv cirkler (seven circles) by
Else Marie Pade. Michael
Nyvang’s impressive Collage IV, Corona manipulates
sounds sourced from a piano “to larger or smaller degrees
beyond recognition”; a ‘Music for Virtual Orchestra’
and a man after my own heart. An if anything more bizarre disconnect
between the familiar into strangeness is Line Tjørnhøj-Thomsen,’s
Lauria, which works on the human voice in a way which
can be disconcertingly animal, and can be both exquisitely expressive
and painful at the same time. This piece has an attractively
intuitive and literally tongue-in-cheek feel and is very much
worth persisting with. Talking of animals, there are some pretty
desperate sounding alien ones in the “overexposed panorama
of ruins” in Hans Hansen’s Passiacs Monumenter,
one of those real-time recorded works which either work well
or not, and this one does.
I love the desperate cartoon world of Jørgen Teller’s
Sparklings, which should be used as a soundtrack for
the final episode of ‘Top Gear’ when the BBC finally
cancels the series. There’s a minor typo on the sleeve
of disc 2 which has two tracks marked as number 8. Birgitte
Alsted’s poetic Zu versuchen, die Fragen on track
7 is filled with recorded sounds such as doors closing and creaking,
and with its dense sense of mystery doesn’t outstay its
sixteen minutes of duration. Chilling nuances and nicely transformed
noises also inhabit Sofus Forsberg’s Homework,
which has an admirably surprising ending. The final track is
Rasmus Lunding’s On Learning How to Kill, which
is powerfully cinematic. The words in the piece are those of
Lunding’s father, who survived as a Jew in Denmark during
WWII, smuggling German Jews and others into Sweden. The work’s
pacifist message is unmistakable, but by the end you know it
is a standpoint which knows its own terrors.
This is a fascinating compilation of work from Denmark’s
DIEM studios, and with a majority of good work, a few terrific
pieces and only a few duds, this is something which stimulates
and educates. I would say it also entertains, but there are
few moments to which I would apply this term, and this is a
world which takes itself more seriously than not. This is not
a closed and intolerant environment however, and there is an
openness and eclecticism to many of these composer’s approaches
which allows for its own confluences and juxtapositions of influence
and style; always something which gives rise to new avenues
of discovery. If you want to know what happened in Denmark after
the Yamaha DX7 was relegated to a dusty cupboard, this is a
hot place to find out.
Dominy Clements
Track list
Anker Fjeld Simonsen
Oktav III (1988) [4:34]
Jonas R. Kirkegaard
802 (2012) [2:27]
Daniel Rothman
Southwest Sky (1988) 10:58]
Band Ane
Hyper Motel (2011) [2:39]
Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen
Omdrejninger II (1989) [7:12]
Jonas Olesen/Morten
Riis
Prim X (2010) [2:59]
Fuzzy
Electric Gardens and Their Surroundings (1989) [11:46]
Puzzleweasel/Richard Devine
Mad Bonce (2008) [6:24]
Per Nørgård
Årsfrise-91 (exerpt) (1991) [5:29]
Halfdan E./Dan
Turéll
Intro (Team Trash) [1993) [1:30]
Wayne Siegel
Tunnel Vision (1995) [11:31]
Bjørn Svin
7 circler I 1 matrix (2002) [8:33]
Michael Nyvang
Collage IV, Corona (1996) [5:06]
Vectral
AC-3 (2007) [5:30]
Line Tjørnhøj-Thomsen
Lauria (1998) [13:49]
Hans Hansen
Passiacs Monumenter (1999) [8:17]
Jørgen Teller
Sparklings (2005) [3:03]
Birgitte Alsted
Zu versuchen, die Fragen (2002) [16:20]
Sofus Forsberg
Homework (2005) [1:58]
Rasmus Lunding
On Learning How to Kill (2002) [8:13]
DIEM (The Danish Institute of Electronic Music), Aarhus, Denmark,
1987-2012 