The introductory piece is Opus 131 [1976]. Lindblad sometimes failed to give his pieces a title in addition to the opus number.
Opus 131 begins peacefully on an organ note, so to say, or perhaps on a glassy or bellish note, bending slightly around itself, treading a searching path through the ether; a tonal searchlight down life, in an unusually serene mode.
This reminds one somewhat of early works by Gottfried Michael Koenig, even though, surprisingly, Lindblad’s Opus 131 is much more gently poetic than any of the color series works (for example) by Koenig; and… almost fondling. Those who have only heard really crude Lindblad stuff will be surprised at this, which, although coming across with edge and sharpness, remains pretty withheld and introverted, in beautiful, shiny, jingling Buchla audio, painting colorful metal stillnesses on standing waves of time…

Piece number 2 is Nocturne 72-2 [1972].
A synthetic bee swarm hits it off, or maybe a generously miked, hovering swarm of mosquitoes in Lapland… This is syncopated, or at least intertwined, with a harsher bronze crudeness, in ample amplitudes and tight rhythms. I feel, after as while, like I’m stuck in an Istanbul traffic jam, all the feverish drivers leaning on their horns… It’s great! No need for more sound than this. It completely fills every cubic millimeter of hearing – and perhaps this is more like the public’s common view of Lindblad; Lindblad the Terrible; the Relentless Wrecker of Peacefullnesses, the Gatherer of Grand Annoyances, the Distributor of Auditory Reluctances!

Opus 172 [1980] also has a title; Decree. Since this is a piece that is rather late, we expect it to also sound a bit different. It is also the longest piece on the double CD; 16:02.
We find ourselves in a kind of stalagmite- stalactite environment, our head lamps shining on down the winding caves of ancient times; perhaps a French explorer team edging ever deeper into earth, inside the mountain, below the lakes, into hidden chambers…
Others may get Tarkovsky visions of atmospheres out of films like Stalker, or maybe even eerie recollections of abandoned villages around Chernobyl, the vegetation mutating under the strain of a murderous radiation… I get a feeling of afterwards…
Voices, whisperingly chanting, move like shadows along the far ends of the subterranean halls, like long lost memories… Water drops, echoes… Darkness quickly washes back and fills the space behind the explorers…
Lindblad has successfully mixed clearly electronic sounds with both unaltered and permutated voices and concrete sounds, achieving a remarkably suggestive web of sounds, which will leave nobody indifferent, the ghostly vocals taking turns with some sort of radio communications inside the rich and well distributed electronic soundscape.
Chanting voices way inside the layers of sound appear as out of history, in Friedrich Jürgenson-like tape recordings out of the hum of radio static…
Little fairy melodies in the deeper, brown register of the synthesizer, reminding me of some enchanted forest dances out of early works by Ralph Lundsten, inject a half humorous, half venomous feeling into the work.
Again I’m in fact surprised at the beauty and variation of the music. It seems I didn’t know Lindblad as well as I thought, which gives this issue an even greater importance than I had already bestowed on it!
The war drums just before the end kind of issues a warning of some kind, of evil times yet to come, perhaps.

Förort (Suburb) [1974] offers a more grainy experience, wave upon wave of dust storm audio beating at your corrugated steel hideaway in Arizona, where you resort to old Indian customs to try to sway the Great Spirit into mercy…
The high pitch sounds keep beating at your shelter like an intense venomousness, looking for any crack in your defenses to enter your body and soul with aches and pains and karmic results…
Suddenly the chirpy layers of audio are cut up into rhythms that move along like some of the complex textures of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano.
Lindblad adds some deeper sounds to the overwhelming high chirp menace, and the beat goes on; the march across alien plains of distant planets, perhaps… Magnificent! And maybe these alien environments are indeed found in an early Scandinavian June morning Stockholm suburb; those 3 AM sunrays reflecting off of tenement windows over the coniferous forests of Ingmar Bergman anxiety… like on some Blå Tåget vinyl cover!

Samtal (Conversation) [1960 – 61] is the earliest work included in this choice selection.
It is also one of the longest pieces.
The vibrating, rattling beginning makes for an intense, charged, high-voltage current of sounds, raw yet refined, in a peculiar mixture of flaky grains and head-on pneumatic drills, the smoke of asphalt and the dust of concrete rising through your nostrils in a proletarian fragrance out of a socialist system per preference. I see exemplary suburbs like Vällingby rising out of the welfare state of Tage Erlander. I get a little nostalgic…
The noise gets violent, but takes on some kind of motion feeling, like a rocking and rolling ride on a horse carriage down a Wild West bolt, the horses gone raving wild and mad, down the rocky path of a canyon road. The voices of hollering people, sort of shouting and grunting in awe, amplify this impression.
As the noise dies down somewhat (to reappear!) a female voice joins, in whines and moans that suggest sexual pleasure, so this rocking and rolling ride takes on a completely different aspect… This could in fact be lovemaking to the sound of violent shortwave static, if that can be imagined! Calling this Conversation does imply some kind of exchange, and the rampant rhythm and the overwhelming intensity could well portray the inner workings of two very aroused bodies and minds… The pneumatic drill at the beginning can serve an allegoric end as well as a train through a tunnel, in the style and manner of a 1940’s movie…
Listening to this fabulous Lindblad work has taken me through many completely different visions. This alone shows the inherent suggestive strength of Rune Lindblad’s art.

Pedagogik (Pedagogic) [1972] arrives in a more modest duration.
This piece diverges completely from anything heard so far on this set. It’s a kind of text-sound composition, or a radio theatre monologue, with a bitter criticism on the school environment and the way children are taken care of in school and society.
The whole idea and execution is an enumeration of different kinds of behavioral problems that a school kid may have. If any one kid showed all these examples of serious maladjustments, he surely would be expelled or put in an observation class.
The male voice that recounts all these disturbances sometimes is layered upon itself, uttering different kinds of maladjustment simultaneously, but most of the time the voice just recounts problems, one after the other, from a very long list. Towards the end the voice also cuts in on itself through the enumeration, shouting the words “vänskap” (friendship) and “kärlek” (love) and some pedagogical principles in a sternly military way, as if friendship and love and adherence to pedagogic ideals could be ordered in a political plan. Towards the end the layering of problems gets denser, as the political principles laid down in the educational plan are feverishly exclaimed. The construction and build-up of this piece reminds me of Åke Hodell’s methods of working with some of his text-sound pieces.

Some few of the maladjustment problems recounted are:

…and so forth…

Another text-sound work by Lindblad that I find highly interesting and downright touching (which isn’t included here), is a piece consisting of an interview – consequently cut up and interspersed into electronic music – that Lindblad did with an unwilling resident at an old-age home. The old women simply longed to go home.

The final contribution on CD 1 is Die stille Liebe, which has lent its title to the whole set, and which we dealt with in the beginning. The German voice that is distributed in sudden cuts some distance into the duration of the violent work sounds like Hitler or at least something to that general extent.

CD 2 begins with Orgel 3 – Medeltida borg (Organ 3 – Medieval Castle) [1964].
It arrives silently in a throbbing, thudding, phasing rhythm, which almost hypnotizes the listener. Inside the throbbing vibration jingling sounds grow, like hinges on old gates moving in the wind out in a lonely countryside…
The deep sounds are layered, and later you can feel the air seep through cracks in… and old organ? Anyway, the feeling of age does manifest itself in these wheezing, modal tones, and the organ identity gets clearer after a while, having me think of some of the more experimental and extended stretches of some performances of enfant terrible Karl-Erik Welin. The wheezing imperfections of an old instrument and the presence of the electric hum of early electronic devices are utilized as legitimate ingredients of sound, and later the impression even gets across of fog horns out in the Baltic; perhaps from the lighthouse Gustav Dahlén heard from the outer reaches of the archipelago, off of the island of Enskär where Tengmalm's owls are caught in Japanese veil-nets by bird-banding crews in Septembers of old.

Associationer (Associations) [1973]
A jumping, hopping, frantic set of rhythms in different tonal colors and even different tempi are dispersed unto the listener. It’s a maze of hopscotch audio, and you choose what line to follow, or if you have a go at a collected impression of the screeching, thumping and banging experience!
Suddenly a male voice comes in, quite clearly, stating, in British English: “I think Sender’s probably right”, as an uproar of more distant voices in some kind of array are heard from inside the web of sounds. Another voice counters: “What do you think I’m doing?”.
The electronic sounds and the roaring commotion of what might be a Black Panther rally in San Francisco or a meeting with Malcolm X in Harlem mix, until the music glides over into a kind of short wave static or some other radio communicative breakdown.
A scene from a military barracks opens, as someone is getting loudly ordered by some higher-ranking officer. It sounds very evil.
The electronic sounds, in different layers of pulsation, pan back and forth, and it occurs to me that perhaps Lindblad, like Öyvind Fahlström, did get some of the spoken parts from radio or TV.
Steam engine imitations pass in the electronics, eventually blending out into flapping of electronic levers or indefinable electric rhythms. Sometimes Lindblad sounds like a rougher and less orderly Jean Schwarz, and when a military counting of one-two, one-two is followed by an obvious section from a TV-show or a movie, Lindblad sounds just like a good old mix of Åke Hodell and Öyvind Fahlström. I hadn’t considered Rune Lindblad as influenced by anyone, really, but always saw him as a completely independent sound worker. Maybe he came to these artistic conclusions all by himself, without any contacts with Hodell or Fahlström, but it would be interesting – and somewhat comforting too… - to think that he did have artistic contacts, which meant something to him.

Sections of male British laughter, all in a jolly atmosphere, eases things off a bit.

Opus 133 [1976] sounds at first like a monochordic tune, like Lindblad was hitting the strings of a some African monochord, but soon it comes across like a bass guitar, perhaps, or a double-bass – and maybe that is part of the source sound too.
Picking and knocking is going on, left, right, middle – and for the first time Lindblad sounds like a performer of improvised art music, like Barry Guy or somebody, fingers walking about erratically but in jazzy gestures across the tense wires. A lot of silence is permitted, which isn’t usual in Lindblad musics. Some careful electronics are allowed too, like whining Buchla stretches, and the Buchla gets more evident later in the piece. The electronic sounds get loud and dense, but pretty pearly sound beads are dispersed too, like in some early Morton Subotnick issue.

Glaciär (Glacier) [1971] has been released once before (I think this is the only piece on this double that has been available commercially), on that interesting vinyl Predestination from 1975. This also reveals the one and only flaw I’ve found in this release, since the cover text states that all material is previously unreleased – but that doesn’t matter, and the piece is heard here for the first time on CD, and it defends its inclusion very well!

Rune Lindblad often submitted work descriptions; a sort of liner notes, with his pieces. On the cover of the LP Predestination he writes the following about Glaciär:

A soaring sound builds up, with curving, springing small sounds somewhere in the distance, like angelic chatter across a doomed weight, fallen prey to its own massive gravity. The white noise gets overwhelmingly loud, but inside the monstrous occurrence lighter electronic chirps arise, like bubbles of air through water or rivulets of melting water up on Björling’s Glacier below Kebnekaise in Swedish Lapland. I can feel the sunlight dancing across the crackling surface of the old ice giant, wrestling and trembling between the mountainsides.
Voices of mountaineers – beads of roped shapes tilted against the wind - carry across the glacier, echoing muffled down the crevasses.

Opus 161 [1978] presents a rhythmically thudding beginning, which soon is accompanied by a dancing display of chirping electronics, dispersed like Inori hand gestures with long pauses in between. A beautifully permuted female voice soars in Swedish above the rhythm as the chirping ceases. It is almost impossible to make out but a few words here and there, but the magical glare of the voice makes for a truly enchanted atmosphere, in a way reminding me of some vocal pieces by Lars-Gunnar Bodin, but here taken a bit further into a hazy meadow of elves and fairies, in chance lightings from random sun rays slanting through the branches.
I have a feeling that this text is a matter-of-fact description of something, but the way Lindblad has treated the voice renders it a sacral, mystical aura. Very beautiful!

Musikundervisning (Musical Tuition) [1972] is again a longer work.
It is violent to begin with, like Die stille Liebe, but immediately shifts into something else, over a speeded-up voice saying: “A hundred years ago today, March 21st...”, into a male voice in German talking: “Der Flügel… Die Oktave… Das Schlagzeug… Die Synkope… Der Takt… Die Triangel… Das Akkordeon… Die Blockflöte… Die Klarinette…” and so forth… and the voice appears in two or three layers, uttering musically connected words.
The electronic music; noises, rippling sounds, bead-like rhythms and extended timbres, engulf this enumeration of musical words, sometimes blocking them out altogether. At times peculiar cuts of electronic sounds are repeated minimalistically, until the enumeration of words continue.
This is indeed a very strange and appealing mix of all kinds of contemporary idioms, like text-sound composition, electronic music, radio theatre, poetry and whatnot! It’s Lindblad at his best and most varied!

Gryning (Dawn) [1973] is the final cut on the second CD.
It rumbles heavily in standing wave of multi-timbral layers at the opening, soon flipping up and down in erratic spurs of variations. It sort of cleanses the entire environment with a chaff cutter of audio… like Dror Feiler still to this day sometimes does, angrily and merrily!
Lindblad does not hold back any here, but delivers noise for the noise lovers and appalling sensations for the honey-eared! If this is to be heard as a final greeting from Rune Lindblad, it is a slap in the face, to wake the indifferent, to make everyone aware… of life, perhaps, and its nameless possibilities. Wow!

In 1991 Jan Ling, professor at the College of Music in Gothenburg, and the prefect at the same institution – Stig Magnus Thorsén – wrote the following obituary on the recently deceased Rune Lindblad:

Many years earlier, for the 1975 release of the Proprius LP Predestination, Jan Ling wrote the following introduction: