Label: No Label

名作[Spektralkompass - Sterbendes Hertz]同様、氏の大きな転換点となった音源!!ノルウェー出身のダブルベーシストにして作曲家、クセナキスやベリオをはじめとする現代音楽家の楽曲、また自国の伝統音楽の演奏もしたりする強者ダブルベース・プレイヤーHakon Thelin。30年間演奏の探求に真摯に取り組んだ結果、完全に個人の純粋な関心から生み出す事が出来たという、ピアノとダブルベースによる絞りきったミニマム音源[Random Partials - Twinings]。ほぼ反復の形態を取りながらもミニマル・ミュージックとは異なる、全てを削ぎ落とした強固な構造に脱帽。手作りの特殊パッケージ。





Limitid edition CD that comes in origami cover. The CD is made with as little as possible impact on the environment.

After three decades of fooling around with the double bass, my two new releases of bass music (Random Partials/Twinings and Spektralkompass/Sterbendes Hertz) present a seismic change of style, a massacre of elements where everything but the pure essence has been shaved away.

This is a music of study, research, of purely personal interests in sound and technique. It doesn’t portray emotions, and it doesn’t address or describe anything outside itself (the most poetic often lies in the work titles). Everything in these new pieces is cut down to the bone. What left is sound and technique.

And extremes. I’ve always been interested in idiomaticity on the double bass, in “techniques that originate from the instrument itself” (to quote my own reflection from a bygone era in a text called A Folk Music for the Double Bass). But to blur this a bit I want to add idiosyncratic to the idiomatic. Because for me, the golden chest is the one that contains personal and individual rediscoveries of sounds and techniques belonging to the old idioms. By exploring the common-use, I can perhaps walk down the path with others. A path that I rarely step off, but constantly expand the boundaries of, setting new extremes. And pushing the limits, in one way or another, is an absolute necessity in my practice.

In the past I’ve labeled my music contemporary music, plain and simple, but in the process of preparing the releases on Bandcamp, I found it difficult to label/tag them correctly. Is it experimental music, classical contemporary, avantgarde, experimental-avantgarde, classical-avantgarde, minimalism? Browsing the different genres on Bandcamp and checking out the different artists there hasn’t really given me many clues. For example, these pieces might have all the characteristics of minimal music, in fact they are extremely minimalistic, yet I don’t think they fit into the idiom of minimalism. And so on.

The insistence on extremes and the problems of placing the music within a clear genre is making my work a little bit less accessible for both performers and listeners. Yet, this music represents a radical change in direction for me, and hopefully it will gradually find its place among my audience as well.

Finally, as listeners we must of course approach the pieces differently than what I have written about so far. But that’s all up to you now.