Currents - Jens Hedman & Paulina Sundin

TRACKS:
 
1. Crisálida, 8:48 min
CRISÁLIDA (by Paulina Sundin) is inspired by the alluring surroundings of Andalucìa del Mar in the south of Spain. As I travelled through the country, I was struck by its multi-layered beauty, how the different perspectives formed a whole: children playing in the village square, birds singing in the orange trees, dramatic vistas unfolding as an unpaved path snaked its way up the mountain side. In Crisálida I have tried to reflect musically upon its complexity and beauty.
Crisálida is ”program music” to the extent that, for me, there is an underlying story, which is told in the music. However, it is not my intention that the listener should recognize this story, instead it is up to each one to find his own story or to listen to the piece as absolute music. The raw material for the piece consists of recordings from the south of Spain and additional synthesis. The first performance of Crisálida was at a student concert at the Stockholm House of Culture in 1996; since then, it has, among other functions, represented Sweden at Sounds of Sweden in Birmingham, and was also performed together with Currents at Hey Listen, the international sound conference for acoustic ecology arranged by the Swedish Royal Academy of Music together with World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and Stockholm European Capital of Culture 1998.
 
2. Relief, 11:25 min
RELIEF (by Jens Hedman) deals with music and sounds as if they were visible interacting objects, with form and shape, moving in a three-dimensional landscape before your eyes. In Relief I have tried to create an almost visual wall of sounds, where certain sounds can stand out in relief against the background of others. I have employed a compositional techniques; whereby, I have composed certain central sections and then reused them, readapted them and created yet something entirely new from these sections. In this way, the music is continuously being born out of the sounds of the music from earlier in the piece.
The sound material for Relief originated in the large amount of sounds created for the piece Respirit, for percussion ensemble and tape. Respirit was first performed at the Inventionen festival in Berlin in 1993 by the percussion ensemble Kroumata. My idea is to return to this sound material after a few years in order to compose two pieces for tapes using the same material.
Relief has been performed at a large number of concerts and radio broadcasts around the world, among others at World Music Days 1998 in Manchester in the UK, ICMC 2000 in Berlin, Spring in Havana 2000, Rien – Voir in Canada in 1999, and VI Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1999. The piece was also awarded first prize at the Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music and Sonic Art Competition 2000. Relief was composed at EMS in Stockholm.
 
3-6. Currents, 12:32 min
CURRENTS (by Jens Hedman and Paulina Sundin) is a musical tribute to our hometown, Stockholm, portraying the flows and streams in the city from four different sound perspectives. The work also deals with the changing seasons and different times of day. It was composed at EMS in Stockholm and all the sound material was recorded in the city and its districts using a Neumann kunstkopf microphone. The first two parts were composed in 1996 and the remaining two in 1998. Each of the four sections can also be played separately as short electroclips.
The first performance of Currents was at ”Hey Listen”, the international sound conference for acoustic ecology arranged by the Swedish Royal Academy of Music together with World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and Stockholm European Capital of Culture 1998.
 
7. Clandestine Parts, 8:09 min
CLANDESTINE PARTS (by Paulina Sundin) is inspired by the dreams I remember from my childhood. At times, sleep was haunted by vivid nightmares, full of fear and technicolour dread. But ever so often, like a soft whisper drowning out the noise of chanting mob, I was relieved by a purely joyful dream with a happy ending. Clandestine Parts was composed specifically for this CD. The piece willalso form the basis for a future and longer 12-channel work, specially commissioned by the Swedish National Concerts for the open-air pavilion Elektrofonen. The piece was composed in the electronic music studio at University of East Anglia and at EMS.
 
8. Mix-Up, 8:20 min
MIX-UP (by Jens Hedman) – 500 sounds in 500 seconds, fragments from my favourite music – pieces which have formed my compositional aesthetics, combined to form a web of gestural and rhythmic expressivity.
In this piece I have given full reign to my love of gestural attacks and the use of a very large number of sounds as collaborating building blocks in this composing. The raw material comes from music that has meant much to me, music which I have listened to again and again and that has become a part of my unconscious. This music has surely shaped my musical language. I thought it would be interesting to use fragments of this music as the raw material for my own composition. I chose 500 short sections from a large number of pop, jazz, and rock songs as well as classical pieces and contemporary music. I then transformed them so that they could not be traced to the originals too easily. Each sound also had its own acoustic space and movements in the stereo image. Using these 500 building blocks, I started to compose a piece that hurls itself back and forth between order and confusion. As I listened to a large number of my old favorite records, composing this piece also became a review of my life. Each little clip of music carries memories; here, these memories have met up, mixed and joined together into a non-linear flow of images.
 
9. Reflections, 9:00 min
REFLECTIONS (by Paulina Sundin and Jens Hedman) is based on our earlier piece, Inside Round, which was made for computer animated video and EAM. Like the earlier piece, Reflections is a symbolic journey, a reflection of life, travelling from birth towards death and purity. Reflections was composed for a concert tour with the theme Life and Death, visiting churches around Sweden in 1999. The piece is also available in 8 and 12-channel versions and these have been performed at, among other places, the Rien – Voir Festival in Canada in 1999.