Jonna Sandell, physician and violinist, is the instigator of this concert, the inspirer of this superstring session. An email arrived with the news of the event, to be held at Fylkingen. Jonna, like myself, is a member of Fylkingen – Sweden’s oldest culture association -, and as a member you are free to arrange concerts and other events. Jonna at first had a grander plan in view; a string festival – but the final cut was this octet concert.

Jonna Sandell is active in various settings, for example in her performance group KEL with Lisa Hansson and Anna Littorin, in the New Music ensemble ReSurge with Lars Bröndum, Ulf Åkerhielm and Lisa Ullén, and in the improvisation group Yxoid with Lisa Hansson and Yann Le Nestour, as well as in The Great Learning Orchestra . I don’t know when she finds the time to heal the sick…

The prospect of a string session at Fylkingen excited me a lot, since strings convey such a rich sound, with an abundance of overtones that, in a good setting, may transform the listener and bring him/her along on a shaman’s journey through elevated levels of consciousness, into the hinterlands and back, to take possession again of an anatomy that, as the years pass, appears more of a nuisance than of bodily joy… The email announcement from Jonna that the string mix would be two violins, four celli and two contrabasses further raised my interest: The violins that can cut the velvet of the sky in sharp incisions; the celli that speak almost the same tonal language as the voice of humans; the contrabasses that may rumble like gut-shattering thunder through the humus layers of life… and all of them revealing secrets in the dancing Northern Lights of their overtones, for anyone to interpret…

I brought my Edirol hard disk recorder and hopped the train for the one-hour ride to Stockholm. The day was warm, the city on the waters beautiful – so despite the weight of my backpack with all the recording equipment and camera gear, I walked through the Old Town past the King’s Castle, through the cool shade of the medieval alleys and along the waters all the way to Fylkingen in the old Munich Breweries on Torkel Knutsson Street.

On the way I sat for a good while on a grassy slope, in the shade of some leafy trees by the Bay of Knights at Slussen, watching the sail boats and the old wooden motor-boats (reminding me of the archipelagos of the 1930s and 40s, with the music of Dag Wirén and Gunnar de Frumerie) taking turns passing under the bridges of the old floodgate area between the Salt Sea (the Baltic Sea) and Lake Mälar, the bridges connecting the Old Town and Söder (the South District of Stockholm), the sun reflecting in the well-polished wood of the old boats, and glimmering in all the windows of the many centuries old buildings across the water, on the south side of the Old Town. It was a moment of rest and beauty amidst all the commotion of the Capital of Sweden on a warm summer’s day of June. The summer sounds of the city of Stockholm (without the noise of modern traffic, mind you) have been described the best by Carl Michael Bellman (1740 – 1795) and August Strindberg (1849 – 1912), and I thought of these two national emblems while resting my legs and back, sipping a cold fluid out of a bottle. I couldn’t help but reminisce some about three Stockholm lovers of mine from days past as well…

It was a good rest in the afternoon, but finally I got on my feet, swung the heavy backpack onto my back and continued, sandals protecting me from direct contact with the hot street, all the way along the Bay of Knights, until I reached Fylkingen. Only one of the players, cellist Sören Runolf, and Jonna Sandell herself, were there. I left my backpack in the security of the empty performance hall and went back out, up Torkel Knutsson Street, turning left on Hornsgatan Street until I got to the Maria Square. It was so hot – comparably, by Swedish standards (probably considered quite cool in Dallas!) – that I preferred the shady side of the street.
Under the greenery of the hardwood trees in one corner of the Maria Square, a Salvation Army wind ensemble was playing beautifully, and I almost felt a tear in the corner of my eye, because these nonconformist Christian songs in their bare sincerity always touch a sensitive string inside me with brutal force. I want life to be that simple, to be able to trust like that.

I made it across the park to a coffee-shop across Saint Paul’s Street, where I sat for an hour, sipping coffee, feeling the air from outside coming in through the open doors, hearing Salvation Army music carried on the wind from the far side of the park. Beautiful summer. Beautiful City. Beautiful people. Beautiful feelings.

On my way back down to Fylkingen I took another route, walking some smaller side streets, and by a church I found a bulletin board by the fence, with all kinds of announcements of concerts, sermons and street sales. I also saw a number of handwritten papers, scribbled all over with some kind of rambling reasoning about politics, culture and health care – I think – and I took a few quick shots of the handwriting with my small Ixus camera. Parts of two sections of these freely rambling thoughts are now layered across front and back of the CD cover of the Jonna Sandell String Octet recording Superstrings. All the pictures here were taken that very day in Stockholm, the 11th of June 2006, before, during and after the show. The nocturnal picture with the names of the performers was taken out the train window across the Bay of Knights as the train began pulling out of Stockholm. The building at right in the late night picture is the famous Stockholm City Hall, where the sermon for Olof Palme was held in 1986, and where the Nobel Prize proceedings take place each year. The architect was Ragnar Östberg (1866 – 1945), who also drew the main church of my hometown – Nyköping (Shitville) -: the Nicolai Church.

I got back to Fylkingen in time to set up the gear, while a couple of guys I won’t identify tried to fix the lighting – but as it is almost every time at Fylkingen, the lighting always gets worse after the guys try to fix it, and it was the same story this time. Where I sat, for example, in the audience front row, I was blinded by a light from behind me to the right. It was so ridiculous, but the problem is impossible to solve, since anybody in charge at Fylkingen won’t listen – and they’d probably tell you that everyone’s in charge anyway. I’ve suggested that some professional people from one of the Stockholm theaters be brought in for some lighting tuition – but to no avail. The best lighting at Fylkingen is NO lighting. Ridiculous indeed!

Anyway, I set up the microphones and the Edirol while Jonna discussed with the other musicians how to place the audience chairs and the different groups of musicians. It was decided that there’d be four groups of musicians for the first set, spread out in a semi-circle in front of the audience. For the second set the musicians would be more spatially together, in a somewhat tighter semi-circle, and the placement within the group of the musicians would be different for the second set.

The concert consisted of seven improvised pieces. The first five improvisations of set 1 were played by varying duos of players, and sometimes of trios, while all the eight musicians participated in the last piece of set 1 and the single piece of set 2.

Set 1 was occasionally disturbed by my old friend (?) Ulf Nygren – poet and writer – who, for completely inexplicable reasons kept clearing his throat, even though he didn’t have a cold and no breathing problems or anything. Another problem with set 1 was a slight disturbance from a buzzing power supply outside the performance hall. This is another very irritating peculiarity with Fylkingen that everybody knows about and nobody does anything to remedy. It makes Fylkingen less suited for recordings.

Second set was fantastic though. It was not cut up into minor pieces, but consisted of one 29 minutes long work of great artistic and sounding quality. Ulf Nygren controlled himself and the buzzing of the power supply had ceased.

Lets talk some about the different pieces.

Improvisation 1 [1:23]

Like barbed wire through mist, at 4 AM late May, Swedenland, this emerges quietly, slowly, a caress in the sleep, feelings tested, ambience felt, the atmosphere of great care installed and agreed on. Consensus of Tenderness.
As I listen to this meager stretch of a violin, a cello and a contrabass on repeat – and Ulf Nygren’s hawking – I get a fine arts sense of Gavin Bryar’s music: something relating to Three Viennese Dancers or After the Requiem; so thinly applied, in tender transparence. I could prolong this work by layering and repeating – it would be worth the trouble, and also excise that never called-for coughing…

Improvisation 2 [3:47]

A wave motion of scraping celli moves back and forth across the sounding space, nagging in sturdy motions of the bows, pressed-down into roughly chiseled expressions. There are drones hidden in there, where after the music thins out into the vicinity of inaudibility. Just prior to the conclusion, a more conversative cello talks in itchy figures across the sour soundscape.

The track 2 experience is a much rougher one than the track 1 one. It feels like the players are cutting the crap and getting down to business, the varnish crackling and the real state of mind and soul appearing in its vile grin!

Improvisation 3 [3:03]

A violin – scratchy, itchy – greets you from the left, doubling with a contrabass that murmurs in irritation. The contrabass mumbles and mutters, while the hoarse violin nags and nags, not trying to diffuse the argument in any way. However, after a while, the violin shuts up and the contrabass gets his say, rising through the pitches, reaching his falsetto emotion, neck high.

Improvisation 4 [2:36]

Cello and violin come forth in a romantic dance, slow and dark, Eros lighting the bodies of the instruments in meaty sermons of the flesh. After some slow-motion sweeps, spiraling in hands-on, blotting-paper-tight embraces, the two seem satisfied with a tender, close stillness – and perhaps this is the most chamber-like duo of this CD so far, excelling in musical brilliance and a tight discipline that you seldom find in improvised music. This little piece is really wonderful. The cello at times roars forcefully, while the violin scratches the back of these murmurs with the sharp fingernails of its playing.

Improvisation 5 [2:53]

A cello at right gets into a duo with a contrabass, also at right. They paint fat and glossy signs on the surface of consciousness, in place and clearly contoured for a second, until pulled by absentminded gravity into auditive Rorschach images, staining the imaginary score with sonic residue, moving in and out of existence like the Planck-length strings of the current core of everything…
A drone of Webern-like properties concludes this short but imaginative improvisation.

Improvisation 6 [13:35]

This is where the concert really got very interesting, and thus this CD too. All eight players participate in Improvisation 4, but most of the time taking some kind of turns, i.e. getting into duos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets and also at times the entire octet. I’m not sure if the transformations were in some way pre-set, but I hardly think so. When they all arrived, nothing seemed clear, so I suppose the transformations are part of the improvisation. It is, nonetheless, magnificent music!

A violin duo at left opens in the most compelling Northern summertime melancholy, reminiscent of the fiddle music played by, for instance Nils Agenmark or Anders Rosén, while simultaneously drawing my attention to the tintinnabuli dreamscape of Arvo Pärt or the Baltic minimalism of Osvaldas Balakauskas et consortes.

I can sense the heavy fragrance of Nattyxne (Butterfly Orchid; i.e. Platanthéra bifólia) in this beginning of Improvisation 6.

One of the violins plays a recurrent, laughing, downwards glissando – ah, yes, the falling scale of the Redwing (Turdus iliacus), talking to himself in coniferous forests on a moist day when the trees stand still and the world recuperates…

I don’t often hear violin duos like this, and even though there may be irreconcilable differences, one CD with violin duos spring to mind; Allan Pettersson’s Sonatas for Two Violins, played by Josef Grünfarb and Karl-Ove Mannberg on a Caprice CD from 1990.

The violins – after some hocketing – line up and tread down the line in a giggling run, as one of the celli joins in, providing some depth to the sanguine speed. More celli align. The sounds are now occupying the whole perimeter from left to right. The two contrabasses add some plucking pizzicatos in a pointillist exclamation.
For a while the instruments ease off into near-silence, but the celli open a conversation of semi-serious matters, and the voices of these beautiful instruments are heard left, right and middle as the music is passed on, or as the instruments talk with each other, like four housewives outside the local store, between the parking lot and the entrance.

Half way through, the mighty contrabasses start an argument, one at far right, the other at far left, embracing the entire space in their rumbling clay conversation, like elephants in Serengeti. For a while they play unnaturally – for contrabasses (or elephants) – high pitches, but soon retort to heavy scratching, the bows almost ruined in the process.
Man, it’s like composer Iancu Dumitrescu of Romania/France has entered the process with his contrabass wizard Fernando Grillo! (Edition Modern) The contrabass players are gnawing at the sound like beavers on a tree trunk on an island in Karelia’s Lake Saimaa!

The gnawing is relieved by a glistening display of wrangling overtones high up on the contrabass necks, delivered in a hypnotic deliverance!

The contrabasses – as on a given signal (the intuition and lightning-fast reaction of skilled improvisation musicians!) – simultaneously start to extend a trembling cross-the-canal Lancaster bomber fleet drone! I can almost see the high morning clouds and the ominous atmosphere of a pre-dawn surprise attack on the Germans.

Suddenly one of the contrabasses begins to fall apart in a splintering array of wood and strings (it seems), as thudding, scraping and scratching vibrations are poured into the progression of events – or is it the prolonged door hinge friction of an old, heavy gate that opens on the stale interior of a burial chamber… ancient gusts appalling you…

The other contrabass falls into the same manner, and a stereophonic Pierre Henry reminiscence opens the memory on Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir… Glory days of Musique Concrète!

Isolated plucking of strings arise in one violin, then spread across the instruments while a couple of celli breathe circularly in an embellished drone… and thus, with dancing dots over a long line, Improvisation 6 retreats to silence…

Improvisation 7 [29:23]

Even though Improvisation 6 is such an exciting and beautiful piece, it still seems like the first set as a whole really was just a precursor of Improvisation 7; the sole piece of the second set, which is something all to itself; a true improvisation success if ever there was one.

It begins with some heavy statements by the two contrabasses, managing to completely fill the sounding space to the brim with shovel-fills of dark soil; the musical equivalents of men at work, wiping the sweat from their foreheads while heavy machinery looms in the background.

This sturdy string exchange of vibrating persuasions keeps up for a while, sort of ridding your ears of any residue of earlier soundings…

The celli and a violin then directly connect as the contrabasses fall short of breath and calm down, speaking in the most beautiful garlands of tones. The contrabasses return and join in with growling second thoughts, as the totality of the octet involve themselves in a circular conversation, speaking inwards in a tight formation of sonic Schönheit.

At this stage one of the contrabasses provide a slow, rhythmic breathing to the web of sounds; a sparse, recurring dark stroke, like the swell of the ocean, the boats heaving, rubbing their fenders against the granite of the quay. This heartbeat inside the music makes a soaring, hovering thoughtfulness possible through the ensemble, and the musicians make the most of this spellbinding atmosphere.

Two of the celli attack with speedy force at 2:34, cutting up time and space in two piles of shredded audio, left and right. The contrabasses follow suit, but pull the strings a little further, into elastic glue that sticks to numerous points all over the hemisphere.

The violins enter inconspicuously like shrewd cats sneaking into the light and out of it again. At around 5:00 the celli burst into a jolly, backwards march, trotting along, gathering momentum while more instruments join.

Things die down into near-silence; just a smooth, withheld violin stroking our best hearing, and a contrabass plucking absentmindedly. A cello enters a beautiful, melancholy melody line, while a contrabass talks in muffled pizzicati, the music dipping into the humus layers of our fields and meadows. A short, recurrent figure in a cello spreads across the octet, providing a hilly topography of floating resilience.

Sudden sharp pizzicati jump from one of the contrabasses and spread like fire to other instruments, in pointed thorns of audio: pointillist octetisms!
Scraping pine bark music leaves violins and celli and claws at our perception in lustful pain.

A forest of pizzicati is invaded by long violin and celli fingers, finding their way through the octet underbrush. The outing is rhythmized and orderly, almost Norman Bates meticulous.

Numerous glissandi and trills fly like serpentines, while a cello mimics the slumped walk of a brown bear and the violins the jagged flight of a flock of songbirds. The sun is shining through the music, onto a forest meadow…

Leaning this way and that, a gang of semi-transparent forefathers, holding on to each other, staggers into the meadow; stringent (sic!) figures from our past, looking just like contrabasses, celli and violins, using the bows for support, like old mountain hikers in Lapland!

A tender and intense, persuasive language is spoken by these strings, messages of longing and withheld passion handed back and forth in the music.

Once again, at 17:27, the music gets wild and fierce, short of breath and very upset. A violin tries to diffuse some calm way inside the uproar, and, against all odds, she succeeds. The havoc slows down, in speed as well as volume, and some residue grumbling scratches are exchanged between the contrabasses and the others.

Here the music gets into a kind of groove, which soon thins out into the breathless beauty of a sincerely singing cello, while violins and contrabasses support it the best they can: an astounding passage!

At 20:08 another magic passage begins in the fast trills of a violin and the sparse plucking of a contrabass. The whole octet gathers round and moves as one instrument, albeit in various voices, inwards in the music. A contrabass breathes heavily across the bog, way inside this forest of strings. One of the players – I can’t figure out which one – calls out in a few wordless exclamations, in falling glissandi, like an owl.

A swaying, tumbling march gathers momentum, plucking and thudding along, in seriously jolly motions, passing the rhythm back and forth in a hocketing manner, finally thinning out and condensing into ice crystal sonorities in the most brittle violin playing.

One of the players starts slapping his hands onto the body of his cello, which suddenly is a percussion instrument. In return, a shower of pizzicati is delivered by the others. The music is all consonants for a while!

When someone starts scratching his instrument in scarping sounds, the combination of those rough sonorities and the pizzicati plus the still ongoing cello percussiveness turn the music into an upset hen-house event… and a little later, as the violinists play a mimicry of wet balloon rubbing, the music gets transparently rhythmical, in a mysterious submarine sea horse gallop!

At 25:30 a final marching event is inspired by one of the contrabasses. All join in, in a playing so tight and jolly and perfect that it is hard to understand that this really is an improvisation. It sounds like an echo of some playful dance figures in a piece by Stravinskij, Shostakovich or Vainberg, and it keeps up a good while, never losing track or falling apart, but it gets more and more inventive as the players start experimenting with various playing methods, all within the formation of the suddenly emerging playful little drama march! Then all of the musicians decide that it’s enough, and the music just plainly ceases!