Piece number 4 – Ictus – is divided into three tracks, numbers 9 – 11.
The first section – Infernal Machines – introduces itself in a dispersed, strutting motion, heavily paused, in an almost percussive musical statement, wherein the combinations of the acoustic instruments vary, from a solid tutti totality of partakers to solo stretches of audio.

After a while the musical imagination of the players result in startling musical lines and figures, of for instance the double bass and the piano taking off on a roller coaster adventure ‘round the vicinity, suddenly relieved in this venture by the violin and the guitar, who keep up the same fast tempo and the general characteristics already decided – by the players or perhaps by the score. It would be a conclusion on my part that this particular piece is scored. The double bass and the piano pick up again as the violin and the guitar fall silent, and this exchange of the same phrase between – suddenly! – two duos, fall right into place, enlightening the listening with a swinging pleasure!
The violin, alone for a little instant, then takes the auditory lead as the gang follows suit and kicks in, down the lineage of this most hurried and elegant rush!
The music turns conversational, the violin asking something or even stating this or that; the guitar commenting or simply replying, and the others interfering, making their voices heard.

All kinds of diligent variations and combinations occur, like the violin fiddling along at its frantic red speed while the piano inserts some sparse, deep, blue tones, achieving an incredible tension between tempi and pitches.

The looping thoughts of the violin rise with the piano – maybe with the addition of a pre-recorded and slightly manipulated piano – towards a crescendo, which, however is replaced by some last second thoughtful and reconciling musical figures.

Section two of Ictus is called Shivering Souls. It presents an inconspicuous beginning with a slowly stroking bow across the strings of the violin and a withheld, sparse piano that silently talks to itself. I can see Jonna Sandell and Lisa Ullén in their absolute presence in the moment, in crystalline concentration, their benevolent auras determining the atmosphere; a scent of Nag Champa incense and a friendly seriousness that elevates the spiritual level of those present.

I’m not sure, but it feels like the piano is either slightly prepared, or that Ullén is playing directly on the strings, or could it be that the guitarist manages to play in a timbre and pitch that makes it almost indistinguishable from a prepared piano or a piano played on the strings with the fingers? The effect of this uncertainty is nonetheless very beautiful and fluent; apprehensive…

The violin – or is it the double bass!? - keeps an endless, harsh but soft-spoken barbed wire drone going, in front of which the piano trickles and smalltalks, but all this in a foreboding sense of something that is about to dawn on us… but it doesn’t appear to be so serious after all, since, not long after, the double bass bursts out into a jolly melody that seems carefree enough not to care about invisible dangers – or is it just a dance under a dying star?
The piano runs jovially along, and I get a sense of two old friends leaning mentally against each other down the path; be it two old-timers on a country road in Hungary or a couple of drunken brats in a trashcan alley in Brooklyn. There is a timeless bond of fraternity at this stage of the music.

The acoustic guitar embellishes the strut with sudden spurs of polished figures, until it gets into a weird counterpoint with the others, picking gently while the double bass provides the deep rhythm and the violin shadow plays way up on high, before it veers off into its own mood of expression, taking some long stroked glances across the motion of the music, like a scout up in a tree, seeing what’s ahead.

The violin looses itself in its own thoughts, gliding up and down in semi-glissandi, Stéphane Grappelli style, while the double bass keeps its steady minimalist beat for the dreamers. The piano utters some fastidious backbeat comments on the forth-welling entourage, the whole musical rig swaying and bumping along the road towards… bread and fruit and wine?
The guitar keeps pretty much in the background, but is discerned now and then in auditory gaps in the musical flow, always in an acoustically polished and restrained voice.

The whole group then simultaneously begins to climb up through the pitches, like a tsunami nearing the beach, in an up-surge of startled emotions, it seems, until, with half a minute to go, the suspected crescendo once again – like in an earlier piece – on that suspended feeling, still in silence carried on invisibly by the inertia of the force of the music, dissipates in a sudden halt and some grave remarks between the instruments, like when a director at a movie set suddenly stops the action to go over some details.

The third and final part of Ictus is called Pendulum. It has a sudden low-keyed tutti start, the piano rumbling, the guitar picking and the violin twittering, and as things almost immediately slow down into a thoughtful violin gesture, neck-stretching, followed by some abrupt instrumental thuds and a meandering, trickling melody line, I get a notion of modern late 20th century chamber music, i.e. a kind of traditional modernism, which can feel safe, secure and homely avantgarde-like – and ReSurge handles this type of music with ease and experience, for once falling into a lineage of tradition, paying their respects.
This piece is itself divided up into sub-sections through the insertions of short stops, allowing for a more distinct change of mood or method, or rather a more distinct marking of the passage into something else.
The guitar blossoms like a flower on a bed of elongated string strokes, as white clouds of June move slowly across a blue sky outside my window like riders in the heavens, destined for precipitational descents below the horizon.

Some of the best chamber playing on the CD appears in the middle of Pendulum, focus shifting between the instruments in a Huey, Dewey, and Louie (Knatte, Fnatte & Tjatte) fashion, each instrument uttering one word each of a sentence, a stroke here, a chord there, building a mosaic out of which a coherence of gestures slowly rises in wit and beauty.
Here the music also turns theatrical. It is very easy to picture some fairytale figures - a tin soldier and a ballerina, perhaps (like in Donovan’s song) - inside this music, as they shyly move about on the stage, hiding behind a pillar, daring a close dance-by, only to shyly retreat again, although sensual attraction and the force of destiny of course will bring the two together at some point.
Ulf Åkerhielm on his double bass advances through a narrative Kol Nidre atmosphere, in a spiraling, oriental figure, succeeded by a short instant of collective havoc, out of which a peaceful pianism with pedal arises, in a dreamy, submarine seaweed fashion, tangling, swaying… sea horses hovering…
Lisa Ullén gently pours her bucket of Glockenspiel glass beads into the conclusion of the piece, which dissipates in a fondling stroke of meditative benevolence…

Piece number 5, on track 12, is RePulse.
Very much apart from what we’ve heard so far on the CD, RePulse creeps upon you inconspicuously, almost imperceptibly, slowly arriving in an electronic guise out of wizard Lars Bröndum’s cylinder hat!
The ominous, droning sound of many gathered pitches – a band of tones compressed and stretched – grows in intensity, drawing ever closer and louder, overtones and all, in a dark ambience with short, recurrent insertions of separate bands of sound, in a Gothic style of mystery and dark forces.
There is a taste of Pierre Henry’s Le livre des morts Egyptien to this part, the silhouette of Anubis through the twilight in the deep rumble.
On the other hand, the ambient structure of the piece with its rhythmical recurrence also points in the direction of ambient pioneers and gurus like Brian Eno and Jon Hassell (Possible Musics, for example).

Lisa Ullén enters with her piano in its natural state as well as altered and manipulated in the most startling electroacoustic Bröndum way, the chords cutting like samurai swords through the air. This blessed mix – the deep rumbling band of sounds, the natural piano and the piano manipulations – causes a wonderfully exciting music to appear, full of uncertain consequences and unforeseeable causality.

The electronics gradually take on new characteristics, wheezing and twittering like swarms or insects, or glittering like reflections on a moonlit sea of the tropics.
The combination of short cuts and elongated whirls, mimicry of radio hum and static, and what sounds like an obtrusive electric guitar, builds a sound environment of restless events in a melting-pot state of affairs, in which solid states move into fluidity and gas and plasma and back, yes, envisioning lava flow back-lashes and gushing geysers.
The bullroarer sound – evidently a Bröndum favorite! – returns and fills in the cracks in the brutality like plastic padding.
Suddenly I realize that I seem to hear distant church bells way inside the fabric of sounds, like those distant bells you may here in French Mediterranean gardens in the shade of trees as you sit, relaxing from the heat with a glass of a cool fluid in your hand; those bells that reach you like a dream from beyond the mirages of a summer’s day, like fragments of memories…

Right off, out of nowhere, the piano utters some harsh reprimands, short but persuasive, as the electronics get more rancid too. There is a messy conversation brewing, a heated argument of instrumental and electronic voices climbing the emotions, over matters unknown to humans; those matters that are discussed instrument-to-instrument, you know.

The piano could also be viewed as the one safe spot amidst worlds in uproar and havoc, clouds in shreds and high winds all around, gravity hesitating and shifting – the piano the only sane object around… Its keyboard utterances are at least recognizable in this frenzy, viable… in some way secure… in this disorder, this scary and threatening electronic turmoil … so I hold on to the body of the piano, as was it a life raft in a roaring sea…

More harmonic – but still dubious – sections follow, with drifting elves’ organs and drawn-out light house fog-horns through the dusk, in a fairy-tale, Moomin Valley kind of vision; the Hattifatteners charging up below the thunder clouds, sparkling with electricity in silent flocks out on remote islands in the rain… and somewhere a big loneliness is materializing; the Groke…

Piece number 6, at index point 13, is Flux #1.
Ulf Åkerhielm opens this work with his double bass, in a melancholy, introverted gesture that has its atmosphere in common with some of the most touching parts of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Suites as performed by, for example, Robert Cohen or Alexander Baillie.
This unconstrained association steers my thoughts in the direction of double bass players who indeed have set out to record music written for cello. I believe the most known example is Edgar Meyer’s double bass recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites.

As Åkerhielm drifts over into a more Russian mood, he is joined by the tender touches of Lars Bröndum’s guitar… and the light piano fingerings of Lisa Ullén inside the hovering morning mist of Jonna Sandell’s violin, in low drifts across the strings up near the bridge, with a slightly loose hair of the bow, the stick gently held by the pad.

I am startled by the wondrous beauty of this music. I’m lost in sheer concentration on the subtle shifts in pitch and timbre, as I let myself be comforted by this very human touch, like a remembrance of my mother’s gentle hand across my forehead when I was four years old…

Flux #1 brings the essence of a culture of refined feelings, on the fingertips of these gifted musicians, who’ve had the luck – or destiny – to come together like this for a meeting blessed by the Muses.

The piano begins to sound like the reflections of the many glass windows of the high-rises you pass as you travel the rail into Stockholm from the south, arriving across the bridges toward Stockholm Central Station; those sudden, shiny bursts of light, and those short glimpses of the silhouettes of the people who live behind those windows… and it’s a contemplative feeling, as if your eyes and fingers just passed lightly across a membrane of life; that mysterious disturbance of spirit across the curvature of the planet…

More intense passages follow, as the music thickens and picks up momentum, in a kind of privately arguing manner, like burning thoughts fighting for space inside someone’s mind, eagerly seeking a solution in a dire situation.

In a feeling of sudden ease – or perhaps resignation – the line of thoughts in the music sink to the ground like dry leaves after the passage of a whirlwind, letting the mild temperature of an early fall garden shimmer under the apple trees…

The violin moves closer, talking in bent lines of semi-glissandi values, flexing this way and that, like the tilting of the head in the presence of a good person you trust but need badly to talk to in a serious situation.

Yes, this is a hilly emotional landscape, painted by the musicians with violin, piano, guitar and double bass; an inner landscape with grassy knolls, refreshing, meandering rivers and horses grazing, which could be idyllic, weren’t it for those ominous cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon, easily mounting into thunderclaps.

If it wasn’t for the clearly Western signature of this art, the inner landscape that is rising in my vision might well be of a Mongolian provenance – hills, grazing grounds, horses, yurts - which again inspires my associations to veer of into unpredictable places, landing me in Terry Riley’s just intonation piece Mongolian Winds from Salome Dances for Peace and further to his unparalleled just intonation work Harp of New Albion.
Associations have a knack of finding short-cuts, a kind of worm-holes through emotional and empiric universes, revealing truths (like in dreams), and I realize that it’s a case of kindred spirits that I’ve come upon and detected, between The Great Learning Orchestra, The ReSurge Ensemble and Terry Riley; this deep spirituality and kindhearted benevolence, paired with an uncanny, intuitive creativity and age-old flow of new ideas!

The guitar, too, has its say, talking in as dark a voice as its capable of, later to rise through the pitches, while the others ripple like trickling glacier streams (jokks) behind it, eagerly providing a musical scenery. All in all, the sound web is more shrill now, more agitated, although emotions and states of mind – at this late stage of the piece – change fast, making it almost hard to keep up, but that’s how life itself appears; hard to keep up with – and the best ambition on the part of a human is to take one life at a time!

Piece number 7 is ImPulse at track 14, coming at you in a slowly solidifying, circling electronic pattern, thin and transparent, winding itself around your senses like were you being mummified.
The music also has a rhythmic property somewhere inside the electronic sweeping, and I see a slow-motion display of a housewife whipping up some eggs for a sponge cake!

However, after a while I sense depth and distance in the gradually transforming layers of audio, even to the extent of imagining bells tolling in distant locations, distant times…
Ullén’s rumbling, roaring piano (like La Monte Young in his Well-Tempered Piano) introduces a new facet to this sound world, but it belongs in the mixing procedure that Lisa Ullén and Lars Bröndum has tended to, because the real, live acoustics of a here-and-now piano enter with aggressive, erratic bursts, Ullén’s fingers hitting like kamikaze war planes into the ebony and ivory, propelling piano tone shrapnel up out of the board, veering past at gruesome speeds in firework trajectories through your listening.

Another way of approaching this particular part of the piece is purely musical, of course, in which case you hear a witty, exact dissemination of piano tones and chords on the suspense-providing drone of the electronic music, building a growing tension in a quite traditional, but nonetheless very effective way, contrasting these properties of the sound; the pointillism and the long, static sweep.
This is a ReSurge combination of electronic and acoustic music, but in a purely electronic way, this effect has never been more efficient and startling than in Pär Lindgren’s 1980 piece Rummet (The Room).

The blue balls of the piano rebound in haphazard angles off of the electronic surface as new electronic properties arise, like saw-blades inside the music, cutting through, saw dust flying. As the piano falls silent, I get a notion of gyroscopes in here, upholding a rigid balance through rapid circulations, or is it the Creator’s spinning top revolving through the ages, keeping the chronology going for men and mice?

A sudden wind-down in the music opens a space for shiny, gluey chords, spiraling like the old-time flycatchers that I recall hanging from the kitchen ceiling of my early 1950s’ youth at the Örstig farm, while the grand spinning top has splintered into a multitude of small tops spinning madly at the outer edges of the music.

A peculiar mix of modality and noise appears, which I allow to cut through my skull with a certain masochist pleasure. The frantic rotation tears up some ground, adding density and a deeper growl to its character, like a Texan twister touching done, evolving into a tornado in the vicinity of Little Elm and its Indian burial ground, due northwest of Dallas.
With about five minutes to go, the relentless and frantic circular movement rises up through the music, into a stratospheric kind of soaring, reminiscent of a granular synthesis of helicopter rotor blades at the Nikkaluokta pad!

Right there this central motion stops as if the helicopter pilot shut down the engine. The piano forces its way to the fore in a slow staccato persuasion in the midst of a hypnotizing elves’ sonority, spinning silvery transparencies around and around in the simmering shadows of leafy trees by the brook…

It is deeply dreamy here, saga-like, fairytaleish… and we have crossed the fine line between the reality called reality and that other reality called unreality, to let our thoughts and dreams rise and sink freely without danger, without body, in a state that perhaps is the ONLY real one… where all places are HERE, all times NOW…

Piece number 8, at index point 15, is entitled Impromptu.
It’s a very short pastime, sliding into view; an impressionistic piece of music, carried in style and grace by Lisa Ullén’s sensitivity.
It easily places me at a painting by Monet or Renoir, with shadows playing across the waters of a river-bend while dragonflies in turquoise and cobalt move jerkily in and out of vision.
It leaves you in a summer day hypnosis, a ticklish feeling between your eyes, your hand grasping a bottle of mineral water…

Piece number 9, placed at track 16, is Premonitions. It enters on the deepest voice of the double bass, way down there among pitches that you have to dig for. Bröndum’s electronics soar in like a wind in a Tibetan mountain pass, prayer fliers streaming in the cold air under the snowy summits.
The music consumes you in an overwhelming sweep around your existence; your life an unlikely outlook, before you sink back into the realms of minerals and retreat into the atomic jitter of the elements… to reappear in a successive life, time and again, until a distant enlightenment, millions of lives ahead, may eventually liberate you of physical properties!

Yes, and the Tibetan fragrance may not be all that unlikely, since the sounds of the double bass and the electronics at times indeed arrive in a mimicry of Tibetan monks in a lofty monastery, their growling basses repeating an Om Mani Padme Hum over and over, until a high altitude trance befalls them, levitating the whole experience in to shaman realms.

At this stage the music also transforms into a trembling, acoustic play of illusions, not heard of since Gilius van Bergeijk’s blessed Over de Dood en de Tijd (an homage to Schubert and his Death and the Maiden), which inspired in me this text, suited as well to be associated with ReSurge’s Premonitions:

The double bass returns in a flurry of miniscule metallic electroacoustic drops of steel, like a giant redwood saw shaking off the dew drops from on high as it enters the flesh of the tree.
The electronics dip into a grayish brew of boiling matter, behind which the bass meanders and winds in the vapor, before it falls silent in the high-pitch ringing of the spheres…

Piece number 10, at track 17, is called Circuit. It opens in the swaying, bulging ether of soap bubble organs from beyond, softly, magically coloring your hearing in a richness of overtones… as withheld shrieks from inside metallic ornithology pry open the nature of matter, the innermost poetic content of electricity and its electroacoustic counterparts, down to Planck length vibrations of existence as we know it.

Strange things do happen at these early outposts of Circuit, as, for the first – and only - time on the CD, sounds that may be regarded as vocal or semi-vocal make themselves noticeable, still in a beaked and winged guise of metallic stature.
The diligence of the Bröndum electroacoustics right here is on the level of maestros like François Bayle and his guru-state French colleagues, as the music twirls and twists in garlands of shining auditory metal.

Bröndum backs up these shiny, bending surfaces with darker, ambient content, building a massive sonic machine that can move a lot of dirt, if need be.
Synthetic barrel-organ entities merge with this colossal effort, moving like a renaissance Rabelaisian entourage across the perimeter, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel pulling along, farting and burping at their heavy loads.
The vibrating, trembling tinsel sounds remind me of Jean Schwarz and his Goethe electroacoustics in Quatre Saisons, as Lars Bröndum makes this piece his outmost effort on this important CD, producing electroacoustic music of a kind and a class that I’ve hitherto been unaware of in Sweden! Masterly!

The last piece, number 11, at index point 18, is an entry called Elegy. The title might give a hint as to the musical and emotional content, as Lisa Ullén alone at the piano spreads a somber atmosphere of introspectiveness and remembrance, in a tune that wanders much of the range of her instrument, in, to begin with, hesitant, careful threads, which evolve into a gradually more outspoken pianism, concerning articulation as well as volume.

The mood once again turns meditative and circumspect, as Ullén takes on the guise of an aged woman of the arts sitting on her late-life porch, as summer draws to a close in her garden when the glow of this life grows fainter and the illusion of it all dissolves like morning mist in the first rays of sunlight – and the shadows of this life sink back into a silence from whence they once rose, and out of which new sounds will rise, again and again… Fare-the-well!