Sometimes Pax Recordings issues CDR releases, and this is one of them. An earlier one was the successful Left & Right with Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth (Pax Recordings PR90227).

To me it is very interesting that Anders Östberg is a collaborator, since we’re almost neighbors, living in neighboring towns south of Stockholm, Sweden. However, I’ve never met with Anders. I’ve heard his stuff on CDs from The Chain Tape Collective, and I understand he is very active in the art of field recording and post-processing, as well as artworks of different kinds.

Diaz-Infante of San Francisco is one of my domestic gurus of improvised and experimental music. He is extremely prolific in many constellations and groupings, but also as a soloist on piano and guitar, having achieved some of the most introspective and shamanistic piano music available, for example on Itz’at (Pax Recordings PR90245), Tepeu (Pax Recordings PR90247), Ucross Journal (Pax Recordings PR90249 and Solus (Pax Recordings PR90250).
His collaborations with Chris Forsyth have been especially brilliant.

This collaboration between Östberg and Diaz-Infante is a free-form hell of deafening sounds, panning slowly in the heavy industrial steel dust of a rolling-mill; no mercy! Rattling voices inside the thick, dense giant of a sound wave seem to give useless bits of information to dwellers in this hell, like there is a bus depot in hell, and the voices that can’t really be made out are giving schedule information that none of the hell-travelers can make out, making hell even more hellish under the purgatory of compressed and double-compressed helicopter mania and compressor fumes…

Not even The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra in the most industrial of the industrial avant-garde of Sweden, featuring murder-sound-advocator Dror Feiler has quite come up with sounds as thunderous and roaring as these… even though Feiler got close with his Intifadan many years ago, which I heard with my little son (wearing earplugs) in the useless little town of Flen in Sweden, as one of about ten comprising the audience…

I’ve worked at a steel mill years ago, and perhaps this would be a truer rendition of a shift of eight hours compressed into 49 minutes, without hearing protection!

Maybe this is engine world, engine universe, the banging and roaring expanding from the center of that machine tool world…

This is contemporary poetry taken to its brink, taken to its logic progress-optimistic consequences, to the place where stars are poured into the interstellar star-crusher, just beyond the horizon of events… and when everything falls in itself in an infinite acceleration of gravity, the result is a point that grows ever heavier, ever smaller, until it has an infinite weight and an infinite smallness, and perhaps, perhaps… this is the setting for another big bang!

I’ve heard some records on Firework Edition that could perhaps, but not quite, rival this impressive hell ride of machinery, static, hot steel, roaring compressors, humming dynamos and a million crushed celestial bodies, but this is the darnest, most repulsive (to the general crowd) piece of audio that I’ve heard in a while, a good while, or, for that matter, ever… which makes me jolly glad, dear friends, jolly glad indeed.

I like it when guys get the hell out there and force the whole material Universe through the eye of a needle. That is what Diaz-Infante and Östberg do here!