Label: thanatosis produktion

持続音ファンはお見逃しなく!!パイプオルガンを操る名手の待望の2ndソロLP!!同Thanatosis Produktionからの2022年音源[Arch Of Motion]でデビューした孤高のオルガン・ドローン作家Linnea Talp。彼女のお気に入りという、ストックホルム郊外の葬儀場にある小さくて美しいパイプオルガンを中心に、過去4年の間スウェーデン各地で演奏したパイプオルガン録音を纏めたもの。同国のバスクラリネット怪物アーティストChrister Bothen、トロンボーン奏者Mats Aleklintが一部楽曲に参加、パイプオルガンに極限の負荷をかけ十分に空気が供給されていない状態にて偶然性と不確定性の開かれた状態を狙った、非常に振り切れた録音物。







With Variations for Light Waves, Swedish composer doubles down on the focus and intensity that characterised her 2022 solo debut, Arch of Motion. As with that album, Variations for Light Waves trains its focus on the breath and hum of the pipe organ, but it further elevates the deep listening and rich poetry at the heart of Talp’s compositions. Its seven pieces each find a sweet spot on her chosen instrument and then ruminate on its possibilities, in a manner that allows the instrument’s character to be unveiled, gently, patiently, as though being teased out of hiding.

Talp’s journey to where she is now has felt similarly steady and paced. After breaking cover in the late 2010s with her song project, Deerest, with which she released several cassettes and one album, 2020’s Cochlea, Talp dove into improvisation and minimal composition. But there was already a hint of the attention to listening and sound in the title of that Deerest album, the spiral-shaped space in the inner ear containing the sensory organ that’s fundamental to the human capacity to hear. Listening – and listening carefully – is core to Talp’s practice.

On Variations for Light Waves, attentive listening helps Talp sculpt seven pieces as elegant as they are eloquent. They were recorded over the past four years on various pipe organs across Sweden; Talp has particular fondness for “a small, beautiful pipe organ in a funeral chapel outside Stockholm, Lötsjökapellet, an incredible space for listening.” From there, Talp brought in collaborators Christer Bothén (contrabass clarinet) and Mats Äkelint (trombone) to contribute to several of the pieces.

Such is the sensitivity of these two musicians that their contributions merge seamlessly into the aerated flow of Talp’s pipe organ performances. “Air On Both Sides”, an improvisation with Bothén, was the album’s starting point, recorded in 2022 by John Chantler; it’s a radiant, luxuriant bathing in glowing tonality, stretching gently across almost eleven minutes. From there, Talp explored the capacities of the various instruments she encountered, wanting “to hear and highlight the very quiet and delicate sounds that an organ can produce.” Sometimes, she folds in recordings made on the Buchla, juxtaposing the acoustic with the electronic.

This fondness for quietness and delicacy – for intimacy – is shadowed by an interest in what happens when instruments, and sound, are pushed to their brittle limits. Sometimes this happens slowly, as in the closing title track, where a descending run of chords dismantles itself over time, falling into beautiful lassitude. With the brief opener, “She Came Out of The White Fog”, Talp places the pipe organ under stress: “the pipes are literally gasping for their breath,” she says. “They are not getting enough air to reach up to their full tone range.”

The result is a music that is open to chance and to the uncertain. Talp recognises several threads woven through the album: an interest in chords; a desire to explore subtle improvisations; and, more poetically, “light, rocks, a certain landscape by the ocean where I spent a lot of time with my dear grandparents as a child. It’s also about my daughter’s birth. About that specific light, the day when she came to me. Thick white fog, so very bright.” It makes sense that an album underpinned by an interest in limits and transformations should resonate, for Talp, with these moments, of new life, of the endlessness of the ocean.

But there’s also that interest in light – coming out of that “thick white fog” – which seems a lovely metaphor for what sits at the core of Variations for Light Waves. A music that wreaths around the listener, like fog, like mist, like haze; a gentle sleet sliding through the cochlea; but that also has emergent properties, that births something new into the world. A music of constant sonorous potential.