Tarantella is the main course of part 1 of The Fools Trilogy; Ship of Fools. It’s the longest track at number 6; 11 minutes plus.
The instruments are flute, 2 trombones, piano harmonica, zither, roofing tiles, sikus and electroacoustics. Again we need a few explanations, and they are provided! Thank you Folke for being so painstakingly meticulous! Alas, the roofing tiles are explained as pieces of roofing tiles that are played with metal hammers. The siku used in this piece is an instrument constructed from Andean panpipes made from reeds or replicas made of PVC tubes.
The initial rumble rattles your speakers like a legion of taiko drums, behind which flutes are exclaiming flute thoughts in hard-to-hear exchanges. The rhythm that gradually rises through the heavy rubber wall of synthesizer taikos is a pulsating, hasty, feverish Jean Schwarz (Studio Celia, France) audio, pounding and mangling like the best French gurus of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) wizardry of the 1970s; those sought-after vinyls that I managed to get in the nick of time in the late 1980s…
The wall of sound in Tarantella trembles viciously, as trombone cuts in quick, upward glissandi have it bleed from its rubber-meat subcutaneous reality, a giant anaconda type rubber-meat audio.
As the fierce sound recedes somewhat and moves away slightly, the melody of honey bliss and silk veils from track 4 – Uncle’s First Dream – returns in a sonic dream body, like a sad thought, a melancholy recollection, moving through the spoils of war; a lonely spirit wandering back through the shooting range of merciless Sarajevo streets… until the mighty, thudding, pulsating rhythm returns, in a cleaner guise and shape, clutching sheep and lions to its breast; moving fast as the little girl carrying the wounded crow in Mikael Wiehe’s Flickan & Kråkan (the Girl & the Crow) – and somehow the emotional content feels the same here:

Simultaneously, the brilliance of the sound is refined even more, into beautiful beads of glittering stones, pearls, gems. Cows are panning again, like in the very beginning, in Eccentric Prolog, and I have become familiar with Rabe’s and his comrades’ panning cows now, like I’m familiar with Marc Chagall’s violinists in trees with goats… and aah… it’s a madly rattling experience in which panning cows are just seasoned pastimes… as events collide into a sound brew of pigsty ecstasy and summertime chirps from inside leafy crowns… and I can hear where some of the avant-garde of Firework Edition and Fylkingen of late in Stockholm and Shitville have gotten some of their farting Rabelaisian swine inspiration!
The very end of Tarantella dances away gallantly and tenderly, into a mist och uncertain properties, reminding me pretty much of some of the finest and most enchanted parts of Ralph Lundsten’s electronic work Erik XIV from 1969.

Dawn is the last part of The Ship of Fools section of The Fools Trilogy, at track 7. The instruments are revealed as sikus, kantele and electroacoustics. Sikus in this case is explained as in track 6; an instrument constructed from Andean panpipes made from reeds or replicas made of PVC tubes.
Dawn begins like Tarantella ends, in that uncertain mist of passing time, the sikus providing soaring calls of longing, symbolizing, in my imagination, the eternally lonely and desolate predicament of the human sense of I, which, according to the Tibetan Buddhists and Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf is false, rising out of contaminated Samsara thought-forms.

Gunnar Ekelöf (Tag och skriv from Färjesång [1941]), followed by the reviewer’s translation:

The peaceful trickling of water, however, transports my inner view to Lapland and the valleys and mountains, and I enter Stuor Reaiddávággi Valley from Vistas, hiking under the needle-sharp summit of Nallo and the towering glaciers, heading towards Sälka and well-deserved nourishment at the end of the day. Folke Rabe and his colleagues in The New Culture Quartet take these sounds and visions into a shaman realm, where I feel I need fear nothing, where my spirit is cared for, and where I feel safe. The trickling sounds of water have transformed into an ethereal bliss of tumbling, transparent golf ball-size spheres, glittering and gleaming in the light of enlightenment way across Reaiddájávri and the valley towards the descent to Sälka…

This is where the music moves over into part 2 of The Fools Trilogy; The World Museum, from which three sections are submitted. The first one, at track 8, is Woodland Devil, on kazoo and electroacoustics. Kazoo was a popular sound source among one-man-bands in the 1960s and –70s.
It begins like a Christmas jingle melody out of Camilla & Maria Gripe’s captivating Christmas Calendar TV-series Trolltider (Troll Times) from the late 1970s; a harmless but perhaps a little shrewd melody that sounds almost popular, if it wasn’t for something a tiny bit off in the progression of bars. It feels like the melody skips a bit here and here, similar to what The Beatles did in All You Need Is Love, if you know what I mean. The simple melody is tripping over itself regularly. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I get that feeling. With the kazoo chorus (yes!) this gets absolutely cartoonish; little goblins sitting all around on stacks of books and on top of loudspeakers and at edges of tables, dangling their feet, leaning their heads this way and that… LSD-like, completely out of their wits in a calm, withheld madness that, however, is bursting at its seams…
The “What??” timbres at the end lead over to Ugly Trio.

Ugly Trio at track 9 is very short, on bombarde, rozok, viola, whiplashes and electroacoustics.
Bombarde is a kind of oboe; a folk instrument from Brittany. Rozok is a Russian folk instrument; a wooden trumpet. I have no idea about whiplashes. When I see the word I think of car accidents and years of pain in the neck, bit this has got to be something else…
The ringing of timbres in here – except the lingering “What??” layer - make me think of Södra Bergens Balalaljkor (The Balalaikas of The Southern Hills); a progressive, Marxist group of musicians from the 1970s who romanticized the kolkhozes of The Soviet Union and posed with statues of Lenin and Stalin, and who made great music. I studied ethnology in Stockholm with one of the main singers of the band in the 1970s.
This is a nagging, intrusive little piece, which gets on your nerves and under your skin pretty badly, in a tickling way. The landslide rumbling at the end lead over into Submarine Tune.

Submarine Tune at track 10 sports trombones and electroacoustics.
The rolling rocks of the landslide keep up, sounding a bit like the distant, muffled noise of one of the glaciers calving at Tarfala just behind Kebnekaise in the most alpine area of Swedish Lapland, where I’ve spent a few days all by myself once, in the hut, when no other hikers were there and even the hostess decided to descend to the Kebnekaise mountain station for a while, leaving me completely alone in the mist with just that occasional glacier calving rumbling and a couple of causerie collection by Torsten Ehrenmark… It was like spending a long time in a think tank. Daydreams became almost real, night dreams carried important messages from people and animals from all walks of life, and I was at the periphery of something revealing and very important, I felt. Existence bared itself for me, somehow.
This fantastic rumbling soon gets to feel submarine in the music of The New Culture Quartet, as water can be sensed, and it feels… sounds like a serious matter; heavy stuff going on way below (and I’m not talking sex!).
The watery and bubbling sounds open some kind of dark cathedral way below the surface, light from above just barely reaching down, dissolving in the cold water like faint memories of a dream…
The music turns into a soundscape, in the vein of Hanna Hartman or Hildegard Westerkamp or Claude Schryer. Deep thuds and murmurs are unidentified, and long, winding high-pitch trombones sound like forlorn spirits at loss in the dark realms… A ringing telephone sounds completely out of place here, unless this serious and sad sound world is a dream that the telephone signal is a bout to cut short. An even crazier whim of Rabe et consortes is the first recorded words on the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison – Mary Had A Little Lamb – which are inserted in this here Submarine Tune… rinsed in the deep sea water…

Track 11 is the first track from the third part of The Fools Trilogy; Narragonia. It’s called Uncle’s Last Dream, as opposed to his first one from Ship of Fools earlier on. The instruments are flute, kantele and günthrophone, plus electroacoustics. The günthrophone is described as thick PVC tubes that are tuned, hanging in holes of a wooden disc. The palms of the hands strike the ends of the tubes. Hm…
After an initial crashing event a steep upward glissando blows hard, gathering force and timbres, thickening, swelling into a rich rumble which also allows for grinding, rusty hinge incidents, beautifully spaced, hanging like old chandeliers from the dark, timbral ceiling of the sound, and you’re in the belly of the sound here, moving with the sound creature in a sound world, swaggering across the marshes under the moon, in an eerie feeling of H. G. Wells’ War of The Worlds in Orson Welles’ and The Mercury Theater’s famous rendering from 1938, which scared the wits out of American citizens who listened in on the broadcast. It’s alien music, introducing outer space ingredients, or possibly a gloomy foreboding of a dark, cold, future – but, hey!, a flute melody on the jollier and more lyrical side is heard, and the music gets calmer, homelier, soft and smooth! Perhaps it’s a fainting from the cruelty, into an unconscious realm of scent of wild flowers and visions of antique gods with golden locks on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea?
A Morton Subotnick Silver-Apples-Of-The-Moon electronic bubbling is deciphered behind the silky screen of smoothness, and it carries through to track 12.

Track 12 is Mykophone d’amore. Mykophone d’amore is also the name of the instrument, and electroacoustics is present as usual. Well, what the friggin’ frog is a mykophone d’amore? Well, it consists of tuned pieces of roofing tile resting on foam plastic, to be played with soft hammers.
A fast melody in beautiful mykophone d’amore timbres – clean, gleaming – soars away, with creaking doors and scraping anomalies attached like tin cans to a newly wed couple’s car. The music is a mad mixture of Pierre Henry and Steve Reich and a little Jean Schwarz. You name it, we like it! These guys really extend my listening, and the do it with delicacy and wit!

13 is called Shrinking Trio. It contains sounds made with clarinet, 2 trombones and electroacoustics.
Again, it’s a frivolous fairytale march down the Marshmallow Main Street of Candy Town, and I can almost hear horse shoes in there, tripping along, the horse proud, tail raised – is it Rocinante? I can well picture Folke as Don Q… and Fuzzy as Sancho Panza… (no offense…)

In track 14 – Fanfare; a short piece – things are turning wilder as the guys move on, seemingly in a gauntlet run, which they seem to clear pretty good, coming out into a Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour kind of environment. Same instruments as in track 13.

Track 15 is also a short one, called Aragon, Growing Trio; with the same setting as 13 and 14. Here they play with different simultaneous tempi, different layers, making it joyously intricate and complex, though the different parts are simple in themselves. It’s great fun, and very clever!

16 is The Hub, pure electroacoustics.
The melody that was played with in the preceding section is treated to an electroacoustic guise here, but retaining its main characteristics, in a kind of looking-back, recollecting remembrance of pre-electronic worlds, slowing down little by little, into a heavier, soon circling, swirling dance of drooping figures, heads bent, feet dragging, energy draining, as if sucked into the whirl of a black hole… at the edge of the horizon of events… and still with a peculiar, glittering Christmas feel…

17 is called Contrapunctus, utilizing willow flutes and electroacoustics.
The guys spread them beads of electroacoustically generated rhythms and bright percussive elements without any sense of shame, and it grows into a playful gesture, which hints back at baroque masters of sorts, no doubt, more and more – hence the title, I suppose. I don't know if it has anything to do directly with, for example, Die Kunst der Fuge. As the flutes join in with sharp, high pitches the score opens the last track.

Majestatis is the fitting title of the last part, with accordion, 2 trombones and electroacoustics. It opens in a pompous stanza, which is mirrored and shadowed in a prog kind of way, and if you’ve heard Kebnekajse and Träd, Gräs & Stenar, you know what I mean, I hope, because this is a funny jester mix of folksy elements and old, majestic homages to died-away kings…
The phone rings as the music eases out in a repetitious little figurine…