Alvin Lucier has always been the enfant terrible per preference for many contemporaries, never tiring in finding new ways of making and hearing sounds, from the most unlikely sources or in the most unexpected ways. I recall, for example, the first time I heard Crossings for Small Orchestra with Slow-Sweep Pure Wave Oscillator, rumbling through the sub-woofer, in fact moving objects in my room out of place!

This time around Lucier’s pieces are interpreted and performed by another enfant terrible, the blessed percussionist Matthias Kaul, who has issued a number of extremely interesting and exciting records, sometimes in collaborations with others, like, for instance, the experimental violinist Malcolm Goldstein from Vermont, and in art gallery circumstances.

The title of the CD gives associations to the Beatles and Strawberry Fields Forever, and that has its significance, as we will see later.
The title of track 1 – Distant Drums – gives at least me associations to legendary disc jockey and country singer Jim Reeves, but I doubt if there is any solid base for such a connection.
For this piece Kaul used tam-tams, kettledrum, bass drum, frame drum & saw blades, all of which are made to resonate with the vibrations of other, smaller instruments struck by the performer. These smaller instruments are for instance bells, temple block, talking drum etcetera. The bigger instruments are placed around the performance space, and Kaul moves around in that space, playing. His position relative to the bigger instruments, as he hits the smaller ones, determines the kind of resonance that will occur, and that resonance is brought to the fore by amplification via microphones.
The beginning is sparse and soaring, in a cow bell-like glare. The atmosphere is foggy, misty, Japanese, perhaps; surely meditative – but the intensity of the attacks increase after a while, causing other kinds of ripples on the face of time. You can distinctly hear how the sound moves with Kaul in the performing space, and how the different instruments that are placed around the room pick up the vibrations of Kaul’s playing, resonating with different voices; a fascinating diffusion of soundings through the ether.
The beating itself is almost monotonous, but the resonance changes make it all worthwhile, in an alien, estranged kind of way. This is something to really listen hard for. You get caught in this act of listening; it takes you away, brings you along. Fascinating! It’s a sensation of being spellbound by sound.

Track 2 is Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra. The whole piece, about 17 minutes long, consists of the sound of a triangle that is being struck. This may seem a meager diet, but for the eager and attentive listener, this is an exercise in observation, for things do change in here, in terms of tempo, volume, dampening and so forth. These seemingly very simple means sometimes bring forth the most interesting results, depending on the listening ability of the listener. It’s like an exercise in meditation, and the high pitch shrill of the triangle glistens and shines in a mist of overtone gold dust, as far up in the register as your hearing can follow.
Between these fast, rhythmic attacks Kaul formulates a soaring spatial sounding atmosphere that changes properties in much the same way you can transform a vowel in your oral cavity by slowly opening or closing your mouth. It is an interesting endeavor to sit and listen as this overall atmosphere changes its qualities of glistening bliss and penetrating piercing.

Track 3 is much shorter, called The Sacred Fox. This is a sound poetic work, much in the vein of something Sten Hanson might have made. Matthias Kaul speaks a number of syllables into different spaces, like cans, hoses and so forth. He restrains himself to very few sounds, like KON – OKK – NKO – KKN and so on. The result is a good sound poetic piece of audio!

Track 4 is entitled Opera With Objects. Here we have a pencil hitting another pencil. Simple as that. However, as in the case of the triangle, numerous atmospheres rise out of this ascetic idea. A solid base for variation of sound is guaranteed by the different kinds of surfaces or objects the pencil being struck is lying on or rested against, like a cardboard box, a jar, a plastic cup and so forth and so on.
The idea is very much related to my old friend Sune Karlsson’s thinking in his gargantuan work Phonia Domestica, through which he achieved 12 hours of sound from similar experiments and realizations in his apartment in 1988.

Finally we have track 5 – Nothing Is Real.
A wonderfully transparent simplicity is at work here, sending rippling fragments of Strawberry Fields Forever out on the tones of a reverberating piano, as if submerged in time, in short spurs joined by long echoes and almost silences. There is an air of temporal distance and closeness in here; like fragmented or disjointed remembrances floating about in one’s mind, sending reflections of gone worlds into the shadows of a soaring NOW, or like shots of pain from repressed moments of anguish.

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