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LP
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XK 021LP
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Mats Erlandsson is a composer and musician, part of the vibrantly reemerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound. Erlandsson presents his work both as a solo artist and in collaborations, most notably together with Yair Elazar Glotman and Maria W Horn. The music on this recording is performed by a kind of fictitious chamber ensemble situated in an imaginary room outlined by textures that alternate between gestural foreground and passive landscape. The three pieces contained within this release are tied together by sharing similar harmonic material and instrumentation and could ideally be perceived as parts of one long performance stretching through the two sides of the record. The textural room in which this musical performance operates is unreliable, unstable, constantly shifting in size and activity from sparse and open to dense and claustrophobic. Inside this non-euclidean performance space a chamber ensemble made up of zithers expanded through analog tape transposition, harmonium and organ, double bass, digital FM, feedback-convolution and Serge modular synthesizer perform a music made from justly tuned intervals arranged in a way that blurs the distinction between traditional minor and major tonal harmony in favor of harmonic progression within an essentially modal framework. The material used to make these pieces included non-harmonic sounds and contaminated field-recordings that have gone through a sort of feedback process between digital and analog, or acoustic, processing where the recordings were edited, processed and re-amplified and recorded again in acoustic spaces to shape their character and imprint acoustic identities on the recordings. The tonal instruments were treated in a process analogous to this -- harmonic material built from recordings and digitally generated synthesis recorded, transcribed, rearranged and overdubbed again with additional electronic or acoustic instruments to form a composite electroacoustic instrumental sound.
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2LP
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VAA 005LP
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4-Track Guitar Music is the unassuming title of a cassette by Swedish composer Mats Erlandsson, which was originally released on Kali Malone and Maria W. Horn's XKatedral label in 2018. Composed using only, as the album title implies, a 4-track tape deck and an electric guitar, the music was later modified on the computer and re-amplified in the machine hall of Ställbergs Gruva, a disbanded Swedish iron mine. The music is primarily composed using melodic motifs and canonical structures in which a set of pitches are transposed in octaves and delayed, creating an ever-evolving cyclical polyphony. Contrary to the album's modest title, the music is a tour-de-force of exuberance and stoic catharsis, continuously bordering on a sense of ecstatic serenity, sincere contemplation and restraint. Now, Vaagner present the work on vinyl for the first time via a fully remastered reissue of 4-Track Guitar Music, with the double-LP including a bonus track titled "Cellar" by Mats Erlandsson which was not included on the original release.
As a composer, musician and sound artist, Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly reemerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound. Erlandsson has undergone studies in composition in Stockholm, where he received a Masterʼs degree in Composition of Electronic Music. In addition to his own artistic practice, Erlandsson holds a position as studio assistant at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm. He presents his work both as a solo artist and in collaborations, most notably together with Yair Elazar Glotman. Recent releases include Minnesmärke on Hallow Ground (2020), the collaboration Emmanatemade with Yair Elazar Glotman on 130701 (2020), Hypodermic Letters on Portals Editions (PRTLS 014CD, 2018), Selective Miracles and Valentina Tereshkova (PI 165LP) on Posh Isolation (2016), and again together with Glotman, Negative Chambers on Miasmah (MIA 038LP, 2017). Erlandsson has performed his work extensively, most recently at Présences Électronique hosted by the GRM in Paris, CTM 2019 and The Long Now in Berlin, Norbergfestival in Norberg, Sonica Festival in Ljubljana and in various music and arts venues around the world.
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CD
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PRTLS 014CD
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Mats Erlandsson's new collection of sound work, Hypodermic Letters, released on Portal Editions, embodies a vast array of sonic multiplicities, seamlessly blending texturized harmonicities with harmonized textures. Like light magically made audible, while in continuous disintegration, oscillating between the real and the illusory, the works contained in Hypodermic Letters insistently highlights the in-between only to forcefully push us to the beyond. By challenging conventional ways of structuring the sensory into categories, e.g. the pure and the impure, the changing and the unchanging, or the unitary and the manifold, Erlandsson's work provides an opportunity to let go and to dwell in unstructured phenomenality. Hypodermic Letters is a shimmering interplay of the extremely remote and the radically proximate, the vast and the intimate. A sense of substantial materiality and referential stability is established momentarily only to face its immediate dissolution. Erlandsson's use of ambiguity reveals a fundamental fragility at the core of certainty. But fear not, although elegantly masquerading as ambiguity, the dominating affective state of Erlandsson's Hypodermic Letters is that of clarity. The instrumentation of Hypodermic Letters is a careful combination of synthesized sounds, all of which were generated by analog means, recorded acoustic sounds of stringed instruments and the employment of algorithmic processing techniques. Erlandsson's display of the molding of multi-stable textures with continuities of intervallically modulating modalities ultimately lends itself to a listening experience as intense as it is pure: a non-referential melancholia, a sorrow beyond sorrow. With close attention to the most subtle facets of the sonic and a use of intonation and tuning as an integral part not only of harmony, but of the total field of sound itself, Erlandsson's work makes us aware -- that is, if you truly listen -- of your capacity to enter worlds, or modes of being, and perhaps more importantly, of our capacity to leave our dysfunctional constructions behind.
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LP
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PI 165LP
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Valentina Tereshkova is the debut LP by Swedish musician Mats Erlandsson. Erlandsson is an electronic composer and musician based in Stockholm, where, in addition to his artistic activities, he works as a studio assistant at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS). A student of music since age 10, Erlandsson holds a master's degree in composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. While mainly focused on solo electronic music, he has also composed music for dance and chamber ensembles as well as work for live electronics together with various collaborators. On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space. She spent two days and 22 hours alone in space, manually operating the Soviet spacecraft Vostok 6. Erlandsson's Valentina Tereshkova is a record made up of six pieces of electroacoustic music. It would be easy to argue that the Valentina of the Soviet space mission and the Valentina of Erlandsson's record are different characters all together, but there is a feeling of spatiality in Erlandsson's music that one could speculate is not unlike that of being in a vessel like Vostok 6 -- a small room surrounded by infinite space, and, maybe most importantly, a room that allows for just one person. Erlandsson is a craftsman, a quality most keenly felt in the focused structure of his drone pieces. This is reflexive, heavy-hearted music that almost cynically dissects itself for the listener; the pieces themselves apologize for their melancholia with their compositional brilliance. A stunning debut of a strong new voice in Scandinavian electronic music.
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