Sometimes – though too seldom for my taste… - you have to relate to hitherto completely unknown stuff, that you cannot – however much you try – put in some defined spot, and say; this is what this is! This is the bewildering and happy case with Erik Belgum’s & Eric Lyon’s “Retirement fund – A Chamber Opera”, which enters the sounding space of your listening in an other-worldly guise of an electronism, an electro-acousticism that moves you in thick layers of the colors of the rainbow to some remote inner-space factory of questionable causes. That is the overture of the opera.

However, as silence sets, an impertinent military kind of voice blurts out that you “might want some doggie treats”, and you can tell for sure that this is a guy you’d better obey, so doggie treats it is… Somewhat later the same voice tells you to “get ready for some pure fucking Disney fun”… It doesn’t sound fun, though, but more like you’re locked in somewhere in a dark basement at the mercy of some psycho…
The voice belongs to the “drill sergeant” (Belgum) of the chamber opera.

In between the scenes a little melody is inserted, sounding like… a rowdy pub event, with some metallic percussion and even an accordion! The song is very brief, nursery rhyme-like, but returns like a refrain.

A more somber voice enters, with tales about mental disorders, or the experiences within such a disorder: “Someone has control over my mind”… “Sometimes I feel as if I must injure either myself or someone else”… Man, it’s creepy…

Some electronisms bulge in, taking over the scene. Voice returns: “Children gone. Clothes gone. Plants gone”… Again, electronisms…

As a magnificent bouncing electronic event – fast! – enters, very much like the sounds in Jørgen Plaetner’s “Passerer” on a Marco Polo CD called “Electro-acoustic Music from DIEM” (1991), a completely disastrous monologue appears, uttering words like these: “I ate up my life in great big pieces, but they passed right on through me and came out unchanged in my stool”.

This CD is annoying, as it is amusing and clever. It tells things in a kind of merciless Lenny Bruce-style, in the way it comes across. There is nowhere to hide, really, as Belgum and Lyon pour it all out on you… and I believe this kind of art really is a test of your willingness to try new things, to at least check it out once – and most likely this art is at the forefront of today’s actual avant-garde, opening up new ways of thinking about our present day way of life, our “culture”, if you will. It may well be extremely painful to look at yourself – i.e. your unhidden, un-altered spiritual you – in the sort of mirror that Belgum and Lyon hold up in front of you – but it may be rewarding, cleansing… as the truth always is. Most people will probably turn away immediately upon hearing this CD, but let them take a walk, then… Anyway, people who would find this art too offending wouldn’t venture into this Internet site anyway, come to think of it…

Lately the Swedish writer and Lars Norén has put out some pretty nasty stuff about crime and punishment, good and evil and so forth, in a new lighting. The latest outrage was over his play “Personal file 7:3”, in which a some real live hardcore convicts from the highest security detentions of Sweden were allowed to act. As they were working on the play two of the convicts took the opportunity to get out and rob some banks, carrying high velocity military machine guns. As they were getting away from one of the banks they killed – in cold blood – two unsuspecting cops in a cop car in the little idyllic village of Malexander, and an incredible manhunt proceeded, eventually catching the criminals. Now, that was, all of it, a kind of down home, surreal mix of theatre play and realities of society, and “Personal file 7:3” by Lars Norén was forever associated with brutal cop killings and idyllic landscapes.
I mean to say that “Retirement fund – A Chamber Opera”, has something in common with the Norén plays and the killings in Malexander, in an almost intuitive, dream-like way. Both occurrences tell something about ourselves, it seems, like in a theatrical Mafia set-up on Broadway.

“Retirement fund” winds in and out of the mind, in and out of psychiatric wards and theatre stages, in and out of dreamed realities and real dreams, in a spectacular show-off of intuitive cleverness. It’s just a matter of flowing with the events here, taking in what’s happening and digesting it, as you let the inner logic – hidden away inside the cerebral cortex of the listener, ready to flicker at you from a pop-up window of the mind – move you along through confusion and enlightenment!

Towards the end of this chamber opera of today and tomorrow an “Ant Speech” appears: “No spectacle of the tropical world is more exciting and mystifying than that of a colony of ants on the march”.

The electroacoustic treatment of sounds are always very innovative and sometimes downright surprising, even to an old boy like myself! Then whole set ends with a “Sine Wave Coda” – a beautiful sound just moving down the line till the end of ends.

The whole concept is high-class. The booklet, for example, contains the complete text of the opera, as well as an array of pictures, showing up like in some painting by Öyvind Fahlström, or in a collage by him. The issue is worked-through, artistically, from layout to content, and I regard this as a very important artwork of our day, and as with any really demanding and touching work of art, it has psychological and sociopolitical implications as well.