Found Sounds #2

On a hot evening in early August in a bar in Neukölln, Miasmah owner Erik Skodvin wondered whether it made sense that he had sent out promo copies of his label’s newest release two weeks before. »Who would listen to that in Summer?,« he sighed. »I would!,« I retorted with a laugh. However, I did understand why Skodvin thought that the posthumous release of Marcus Fjellström’s »The Last Sunset of the Year,« a collection of pieces originally written for a TV show about the 1845 Franklin Expedition through the Canadian Arctic, might feel somewhat out of context in 33°C weather. On the other hand, I wondered what exactly it was about these 26 pieces that presumably makes them unfit for Summer listening.

As I write this while listening to the album on the 6th of November, the cityscape in front of my apartment on the 14th floor is drenched in fog. Admittedly, this feels apt. As was his custom, Fjellström worked with a mix of sound sources, drawing primarily on the core instrumentarium of Western classical music—strings and piano—whose sounds are subjected to electronic manipulation. »The Last Sunset of the Year« repeatedly abstracts the concrete in order to evoke certain atmospheres. Long, drawn-out drones and muddied sounds with no clear origin are used to express the feeling of claustrophobia and fatalism those doomed explorers must have felt when in search of the Northwest Passage they only found a slow and horrible death.

There is no denying that Fjellström achieved what he set out to do, which at its core is writing a score that, well, underscores what happens on screen, enriching the mere images and the plot with further emotional qualities to help communicate the severity of the situation more efficiently. Taking into account the TV show’s setting and story, it seems only logical that this music would serve as an appropriate soundtrack during the darker and colder days. Then again, couldn’t it also be a literally refreshing counterpoint to sweltering Summer heat? Or, to put it differently, according to which criteria do we classify certain types of music as appropriate for the different seasons?

What makes »The Last Sunset of the Year« feel cold and dark to probably most of us in the warmer and lighter parts of the planet is inherently tied to how we culturally interpret certain musical elements. Think about assumptions like the one that, as a rule, major chords are somehow happy, and minor ones sad, or the one that higher tempos are more energetic than lower ones, etc. These are arbitrary attributions contingent on our cultural relationship with certain modes of expression. With his compositional methods, Fjellström masterfully appealed to a specific set of these kinds of preconceptions, communicating certain moods and emotions effectively for an audience that will subconsciously decode their meaning with ease.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that just about anyone in this world would interpret his music in the same way, especially if they have a different cultural background. The act of communication so important to this music as a TV show score is somewhat flawed because it cannot claim universality.

Music as a »Universal Language«

It is a common trope that music is a »universal language« even though that is an incredibly bold claim. That extraterrestrial life forms would be moved by the contents of the Voyager Golden Record—featuring ethnographic recordings as well as music by Chuck Berry and Igor Stravinsky—seems somewhat improbable considering that it’s very hard to say how the next person would feel about hearing »Le sacre du printemps« for the very first time. When I first did, it left a strong impression on me—but it didn’t lead me to start an uproar as some listeners did when the piece was premiered. How we perceive music is always also shaped by external factors, which means that, even as a supposedly universal language, music has its limits—cultural, social, even political ones, or, metaphorically speaking, linguistic ones.

This doesn’t mean that artists haven’t tried again and again to push or even transgress these boundaries. Kurt Schwitters was one of them. Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern’s »Doppelmoppel, poems by Kurt Schwitters« for the Berlin-based Corvo label sets several of his poems to music, i.e. into motion. Clementi and Stern opt for versatility in their performance and musical approach, cutting up the texts and enriching them with widely different means—throbbing industrial beats, drones, blaring noise cascades, field recordings, and what sounds like mutated circus music accompany an expressive vocal performance than more often than not stands entirely on its own, if only in a multi-part dialogue of phonemes and vocal sounds.

These (re)interpretations (re)contextualise existing material in and for a different time, while other recent releases find their material in the here and now. Take Jan Jelinek’s »Social Engineering,« a hörspiel in 13 acts based on phishing mails the Faitiche founder had found in his spam folder. Transforming them into sound poetry rids such text of its purpose, translating it into a comment on itself. On their newly founded label Spoken Matter, Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter take a somewhat similar approach with their album »micro poems,« a collection of 24 tracks that clock in at 30 minutes each in the digital version and will be released on vinyl in the form of locked grooves. On it, voice artist Ian Hatcher reads out homophones in different languages (»allowed / aloud,« »inside lesson / in Zeit lassen,« etc.).

Both of these albums highlight the absurdities and the fallibility of language itself as a means of communication as well as our use of it. Others in the meanwhile underline the artistic potential therein. As EPRC, Roberto Crippa and Elisabetta Porcinai use language on its »BODIES« album for Berlin’s Stray Signals label to infuse their synthetic, bass-heavy electronic sound with a sense of instability: the music feels highly defined, every single sound is exactly where it needs to be, but the Porcinai’s whispered words disrupt any kind of balance. »Sonic Behaviour,« a collaboration between Berlin-based modular-synth dub duo Driftmachine and writer Andreas Ammer, inserts language into music in order to reflect on both: Featuring Alexander Hacke and Deryn Rees-Jones as well as Ted Milton, it pays homage to the difficulty of thinking about one without the other.

These thrilling explorations of language in music, language as sound, and the interplay between music and sound on the one and language on the other hand speak to the ununiversality of both, pulling into question the ease with which we make sense of either or both of them combined.

Music Without Words

Going even further than that, Ira Hadžić returns to Cedrik Fermont’s Syrphe label with an album that explores the (possible) connections between a narrative genre and a physical concept: »hard​-​boiled friction,« though featuring vocals by Andrew Munn alongside Hadžić’s use of gongs, mallets, field recordings, and microphones, doesn’t make the artist’s preconceptions, thoughts, or insights explicit. While the album clearly introduces a framework for its own understanding through language in the form of its title, its wordless contents are not easily accessible to the same extent. What is so fascinating about this album then is that it claims to juxtapose two different things and communicates nothing concrete to its audience—a humbling experience.

Something similar happens throughout the boldly titled »Gassenhauer« by the Trio Catch, featuring commissioned works for clarinet, cello and piano by Mikel Urquiza, Daniela Terranova, Matthias Kranebitter, Sara Glojnarić and Mart*n Schlüter, which has been released on Sebastian Solte’s bastille musique. The title used in this context is meant to be tongue-in-cheek: instead of schlager, the trio more likely refers to Beethoven’s »Gassenhauer Trio« for the same instrumentation. Italian cellist Michele Marco Rossi also plays with the expectations of his audience in a similar way with his latest release »Canzoniere.« He refers to a primarily literary tradition, but the pieces by Enno Poppe and Noriko Baba, among others, come without lyrics and can be understood more as songs that focus on the tonal similarities between the cello and the human voice.

Although both albums refer to certain traditions and contextualise themselves within them in a certain way, they do not necessarily locate themselves within them—which could perhaps initially cause confusion among the uninitiated. This could also be interpreted as an intended play on the difficulties of communicating about and above all through the medium of music, which in these cases ultimately remains wordless and attempts to create its own contexts.

Solace, Not Fatalism

Questions of mediation also arise in view of Shahab Jafari's »The Blind City,« which was recently released by the Tehran-founded and most recently Berlin-based label Noise à Noise, which contextualises the album as an instrumental narrative about »a serene village disrupted by a malevolent force.«

Combined with illustrator Sayeh Parsaei’s stunning artwork, »The Blind City« could easily pass as a mere horror story of horned monsters conquering the village. But would a composer who, according to the press release, is »renowned for [..] reflecting social and philosophical themes« in his music ever be content with only giving his audience the creeps? Is there a philosophical, social, perhaps political dimension to this work that it does not reveal in words but instead encrypts in its music? If so, could it be decoded through the score alone? Is it necessary to take into account that this work was written in a country where artists face a lot of restrictions? Then again, would anyone consider such a wider context if it had been created elsewhere?

What »The Blind City« represents is that even as a supposedly universal language music can never escape context even if it tries to create its own. I would argue that this is not at all a bad thing, which finally brings me back to »The Last Sunset of the Year« by Marcus Fjellström, painstakingly compiled by Erik Skodvin and Dave Kajganich over the course of several years after the composer’s untimely death in 2017. To me at least this music did not feel out of context in the sweltering July heat because it so clearly managed to achieve what it set out to do, and while maybe today it perhaps feels more weather-appropriate according to the preconceptions of what to listen to when we have cultivated in our culture, the fatalism so firmly embedded in the story it was meant to underscore doesn’t feel as tangible right now.

Instead it gives me a strange sense of solace in a new and unforeseen context—a few hours after waking up to the news that Donald Trump has been re-elected into the most powerful political position on Earth. I can’t quite say why, because also my language is neither universal nor perfect, but what I do know is that the complete ununiversality in any kind of art form is to me not a deficit, but a strong feature. It guarantees that all art and thus also music is infinitely malleable, shaped as much by intention and methodology of its creators as it is by the contexts in which it is being perceived. Which means that even presumably »dark« music can sometimes light up the darkest of days.