Norwegian Håkon Thelin’s new solo CD is a sonic safari into the realms of the contemporary double bass, even though the outset to begin with have your associations go way back into earlier musical periods – until the extraneous noises that occur set you on the right course again, into contemporeana.

The double bass is a versatile instrument, to say the least. You may compare the frantic screeching and hammering double bass on some of the recordings in Iancu Dumitrescu’s Edition Modern series with the sensitivity and contour of Edgar Mayer’s double bass renditions of Bach’s Cello Suites, or with the hypnotic soaring of the double bass of Stefano Scodanibbio in his collaborations with Terry Riley. It’s a very rich instrument.

This CD may at first, superficially, appear as one of those contemporary recordings that you listen to once and then put on the shelf, as the case is with so many modern releases… but there is more here, and simply Thelin’s choice of musical material makes listening interesting and revealing for anyone with some experience of modern art music.

As with many new music recordings, listening is sharpened with time, with every new spin of the CD, as you get into texture, overtones, structures and intellectual as well as lower chakra experiences of the sound as such.

Track 1 – Introduction: Minuet in C – composed by Thelin, is a funny little piece of short duration. It is a minuet, very sweet… but with added noises (Ingar Zach; percussion) as of kitchenware flying, sauce pans and kettles being cleared off the table, for… love making? I don’t know, but pots and pans flying in a frenzy remind me all too much of an Austrian text sound work by Katharina Riese called Ein Hörspiel über die Liebe. Sure enough, the gasping breath of a woman has its telltale too… On a less erotic level the background noises may also remind you of Paul Lansky’s Table’s Clear from his CD Homebrew on Bridge Records. Håkon Thelin’s Minuet is an erotic one, though, no doubt!

Track 2 is Valentine for solo double bass (1969) by Jacob Druckman, which seems to commence with the opening of a bottle in an echoing cellar; a sounding mimicry of a cork being drawn out of a flask. It’s a formidable piece, in which Thelin utilizes his voice and oral cavity in all kinds of manners, yelling, whispering, sighing, clicking – and he treats the double bass as a percussion instrument too, knocking and hitting and fondling the body of the instrument, as well as bouncing the bow off of the strings in bow and arrow type sounds. Yes, the playing techniques are manifold here, and I wonder how this score ever looks! Perhaps this is a child of its time, you know, those late sixties…

Track 3 is Iannis Xenakis’ Charisma (1971). Xenakis is hardly a composer who has strewn easily accessible compositions around himself. Most of his output is austere, wrangly, hard to wrestle, and his quite many electronic compositions, of late being reissued here and there, are for the most part merciless, uncompromising hardcore sound works that really do demand something of the listener.
This piece was originally written for cello and clarinet, but is presented here on double bass and saxophone.
The beginning is rough, very rough, the bow pressed down hard on the strings, and the saxophone enters in a shrill, penetrating screech, as overtones mix in a cloud of frequencies around the two instruments.
A chitchat event, birdlike in its sudden occurrence, is overtaken by yet another hard pressed bow gesture, until quite solemn, meditative stretches let you rest wearily.
This Xenakis work is short, but involves much excitement, which Thelin and Nystrøm diffuse in glary magnificence.

Track 4 is piece written by Håkon Thelin and Ingar Zach, thus involving double bass and percussion. It’s called Intermezzo: Sonate in B (2004), and begins in a brilliant exchange of percussive and double bassy sounds, the bouncing bow joining Zach’s metallic beats in a jolly figure that dances along like light through icicles on a sunny winter’s day.
This is very rhythmic and very humorous, like the kind of beats you can sit down at the table at breakfast and achieve by hitting glasses and cups and plates with your spoon or your fork and knife. Very enjoyable! Some static of the equipment towards the end fits in like an electric drone – or maybe it’s an intentional sound, or perhaps an unintentional sound that was picked up by the musicians and then used as an intentional one?
Yes most likely, because this thin drone grows in magnitude, to resemble a transparent chord of a fly’s organ, if there were such a thing, and it carries seamlessly right over to track 5, which is Heartbreak Motel / a dog named garage, (2003 – 2004) by Thelin, Zach and Øyvind Torvund; the longest work on the CD.
This thin static keeps up, slowly changing somewhat, turning ever so lightly, picking up high pitch flickering and crystalline residue, while the double bass utters inward comments, directed towards itself.
The layers of the thin drone keeps up, and I still can’t make out what this sound really is, because it could as well be just the humming of some electric motor as some patented electronic sound device, but the piece is for percussion and double bass, so I can’t figure it out – but I like it!
After a while the drone just stops, and some more familiar, but still exciting, percussive stirs enter, harshly, in abrupt and incisive spurs through the bamboo grove of the bass.
Later Thelin ventures into Dumitrescu land, in spectral outpours of great might, as Zach delivers glistening staccatos of metallic showers over the soundscape. Outlandish and beautiful! It sometimes comes across like an electronically treated nocturnal thunder storm; the sudden lightnings of sharp noise and the resounding reverberation of the thunder claps, as the double bass moans and groans deep down in its register like dark curtains of rain across the horizon; yes, like a woodcut by late Rune Lindblad.

Track 6 was written by Bent Sørensen in 2001; the hill of the heartless giant. Repetitious, magically meditative, it opens a serenity of emotions, of soaring thoughts that think of nothing. The lone double bass moves from Japanese koto quotes to meandering, winding rivers of sound through the bamboo, to clear-cut signs in the rock, to flakes and fragments of memories of past lives, as Thelin adds an inward voice to the singing and chanting of the big instrument that he holds.

The final piece, at track 7, is the second entry by Iannis Xenakis, Theraps (1976). This is a quite extended work, which begins in a rhythmic movement of the bow back and forth across the bridge, followed by intensely articulated conversational passages, very peculiarly applied.
More static, meditative overtone rich lines are extended, at times giving the impression of distant movement on the water in the dark somewhere in the tropics, lanterns gliding by in the warmth – but this is momentarily, as high pitched glissandi are bent out of shape and bent down back towards the ground in merciless squeals.
As it almost always is with Xenakis, this is a work of complicated textures and combinations of performance practices that require diligence and the ability of delicate techniques. Thelin handles the situation like a master, and a master of his instrument he is, which this Albedo CD has proven to me – and to further develop what I said in the beginning, this CD is more than a mere demonstration of technical skills and a show-off of avant-garde art music, because I’ve found a lot of high-end listening pleasure here, many surprising moments of incalculable combinations of musical ingredients and an astonishing richness of artistic ingenuity and musical creativity. Praise be!

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