Al Margolis of Pogus productions is an enthusiast; one of those frantic dreamers and doers, to whom we pay the utmost respect. Without these spontaneously combusting spirits, there’d be much less beauty and excitement on the planet.
Al has given us so many great recordings through his company, but this time he really exceeds my most sanguine expectations.
This is a CD with compositions by Hans Otte – another extraordinary person. The works stem from the 1970s.

When I slid this CD into the player without reading the table of contents, I was truly surprised by hearing my native tongue; Swedish! I was just as surprised to realize that the voice belonged to one of Sweden’s most famous and infamous enfants terribles; Karl-Erik Welin (1934 – 1992); an organist, composer and experimental dare-devil of an uncanny intensity and intellectual brilliance.

The text that Welin recites is anonymous to me. I’ll provide the author when I’ve found that information. Here is the text in Swedish, followed by a translation into English:

This recording comes from an early collaboration between the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Bremen in Germany, resulting in this sound-bridge; this simultaneous concert. These events became common in the 1980s with all kinds of simultaneous concerts in vast sound bridges all over the planet, but this one directed by Hans Otte was quite early. However Margolis got hold of this bit is a mystery to me! I talked to text-sound guru and radioman Bengt Emil Johnson, who vaguely recalled the event, and who promised to look into it, searching the vaults, to find out, for example, where that text comes from. That text, by the way, is read in German later on in the recording. Since it’s one of the organists – Welin – who reads the text in Swedish, I assume it’s Zacher who reads it in German. It is also recited in French inside the piece, and perhaps – very obscurely – in English too.

With the ticking of a wall clock and the slower beat of a grandfather’s clock inside an unsteady, bubbling tone – a leftover from some kind of alarm; a distress call continuing long after everybody’s blown to kingdom come – a female voice comes across loud and clear and close, in just one word: “Ich”. Karl-Erik Welin begins his reciting, a xylophone figure moves in a sinus pattern along the timeline – and the “Ich” keeps recurring in intervals of a few seconds. That’s how it keeps on for a while: the clocks, the rippling remains of an alarm of sorts (not alarming, though; not piercing, but in a withheld, pleasant but eerie manner), the wave-form xylophone (or marimba), Karl-Erik Welin’s Swedish recitative and the lady’s Ich. It becomes hypnotic, but all the same so diverse by nature that you can focus your hearing here and there, keeping the experience compelling, interesting.

I have a deeper appreciation of this section, I believe, than most listeners who will acquire this disc, because I am Swedish, and so understand the existential text that Welin recites, and also because Welin has such a very special place in the hearts of many Swedes, at least in contemporary culture circles – but even so, the progression of sounds and the way they’re chosen and arranged by Hans Otte allows for an artistic influx that isn’t otherwise limited by lingual properties.

(By the way, when talking about Karl-Erik Welin, there is a famous rumor stirring about him, ever since the 1960s. He’s said to have destroyed a grand piano with a chainsaw at a Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art) concert, and in the process almost cutting off his leg, being carried of the stage and hurried to hospital. One of Welin’s contemporaries, i.e. a man who was as involved in the Swedish contemporary scene as Welin – the poet, writer, composer and musician Bengt Emil Johnson (who is working just as hard till this day) recently revealed at a seminar about text-sound art at Stockholm University, that the piano wasn’t a grand piano but a wrecked old piano that Fylkingen had sold to Moderna Museet for a couple of hundred Swedish crowns for the occasion. Welin did use a chainsaw at the end of the piano destruction, and since he wasn’t familiar with handling it, he began sawing along the keyboard, so of course the keys flew all over the place and the chainsaw bounced, so he actually did cut his leg, but it was fixed with three stitches…)

The Ich is handed over to a male voice after a while, but keeps up the same way.

As Welin closes his reciting and the Ich is spoken by a male person, I also realize that the muffled remains of the alarm that I spoke about earlier has transformed – probably gradually – into a wobbling static noise, of a kind you might find on the shortwave band. The xylophone or something like a xylophone keeps tripping up and down and around in its eternal figure.

The wobbling noise turns more elastic, gluey, sticking to the tune like glue to a racing bike rim.

Suddenly – but not in a surprising way – a barrel organ enters, also in a very simple, hypnotizing repetition. Someone breathes slowly and heavily, the way you might breathe at the doctor’s office when he want to listen to your lungs. The xylophone has stopped and the barrel organ has taken up its melodic figure, using the xylophone’s well-treaded marks on the score.

The static wobbling has now ceased altogether, and the music is more transparent, allowing for silent pauses, as just the heavy in-and exhaling, plus the barrel organ and the sparsely repeated Ich keeps up.

Your attention as the listener is magnetically drawn in to the music, when it gets more sparse and marked, while retaining its senseless repetitious hue.

A French male voice begins reciting the same text as Welin used, but the Frenchman is kept much further back and is permuted electronically, rendering him a hectic urgency that Welin didn’t have. The breathing keeps up, sparser. The barrel organ remains, in the same short gesture over and over, like a perpetual motion machine.

Here I suddenly realize that the “Ich” has been silent for a while, but now it returns, as the barrel organ gesture – formerly the xylophone gesture – is relieved by the harpsichord gesture. It’s like a relay race!

However, the little melodic figure seems to start tripping some here, kind of loosing it, staggering along as the Ich, the breathing (now stretched quite a bit) and the permuted speech of the Frenchman keep things flowing in this peculiar simultaneous motion of disparate sounding objects.

The harpsichord starts mumbling, spitting out the tones in an incoherent and more incoherent way, until it stops dead, heavy with inertia!

Now an organ or/and an electronically enhanced or bent organ, hits it off in a frenzy, producing two parallel tonal progressions; one electronically wringed, the other one sounding organ-natural, presented left and right.

And the “Ich” is gone. The breathing has stopped. The spirit now travels the Bardo of after-life… but… in this Bardo the breathing awakes in a reflective manner, lucidly, perhaps in the spirit’s almost unconscious memories of the life it’s just left to a growing amnesia…

A minuscule pause is inserted - and then it all picks up again, like someone running through the forest or across the moor – or through his afterlife Bardo – stopping dead in his steps to listen for danger, his heart pumping in his chest while he holds his breath… until he starts running again.

After some time the music thins out, leaving just one organic line, and then just a withered, involuntary breath that extends into the rustling of leaves and decay…

The Ich returns, delivered in a pistol shot mimicry, as if someone in the thin mist of the extended breath was standing at the end of the field, shooting into the haze.

The old melodic figure returns in a muffled piano; a piano laden with cloth, it seems, while the fall rustle of the breath paints a gray nuance and the Ich fires its pistol shots.

The Frenchman returns, but – obscurely - I think I hear a voice also speaking in English in the French permutations. I’m not completely sure of this! I like these uncertainties!
The voices come afore, while the piano recedes at lefty. The piano stops and the barrel organ comes back, to the right.

The breathing – the sparse, recurring in- and exhalations – are drawn out into gravel-paths, raked by an introspective caretaker that hasn’t said a word for years, living in a shed far off into the garden… where nobody disturbs him, and he’s like the wind and the leaves…

Ah, the female “Ich” comes back! Seems like an old friend by now, returning!

A new melody appears at left, sounding like Gamelan – and it’s just a variation of the by now so familiar melodic figure. A German voice now speaks the text, close and clear, and the clocks from the beginning come back, as does the subdued alarm, the long line of distress wobbling through the music, but also reminding me of a bass recorder.

That bass recorder audio is gradually transformed upward into a disturbance, a beautiful disturbance, like anesthesia at the dentist’s, mingled with a returning, winding static noise, with modal qualities. The intensity of this elastic anesthesia static grows into a flaming cold outbreak of the Aurora Borealis towards the conclusion, accompanied only by a sparse “Ich”.

Orient : occident is more recent, written in 1977 and recorded in 1986.
It comes trickling in a terrain glittering with little glass spheres rolling towards you like pebbles in a Lapland glacier brook, the sun in your eyes.
This is the rippling sonic environment into which the oboe and the clarinet enters like two nuances of soothing benevolence, immersing life and circumstance with hope and consolation and a shining beauty from on high, from shaman realms that you may travel at will, if you’re ready, in god-given ignorance of your pain.
The rippling glass bead brook sonorities glisten and gleam, while the oboe and the clarinet paint divine messages in gold and ochre across the permafrost plains of human existence.

That which isn’t eternal isn’t very real. Nothing ends. Nothing starts. Everything is.

Extremely, extremely beautiful!

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