DAVID GRANSTRÖM, Empty Room - LP

Release date - April 2th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2102
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) Obsidian 09:22
2) Aeon 10:56
3) Sapphire Visions 04:50
4) Occultations 10:08
5) Transience 04:45

Credits:
All tracks composed, recorded, performed and mixed by David Granström 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Photography by Aron Mattsson
Cover design by Greenpointless

///
On »Empty Room,« David Granström works with slow transformations, cyclical and isometric patterns as well as just intonation as a way to create harmonic stability, allowing his long-form pieces to develop their own unique temporal and spatial qualities. A prolific figure in Stockholm’s experimental drone scene and a collaborator of Hallow Ground label mates Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson, the Swedish composer navigates through moments of quietude and crushing volume on these five tracks. Sonically and atmospherically, the pieces on »Empty Room« simultaneously call to mind Fennesz’s most meditative work or the physical experience of seeing Sunn O))) live, blending guitar recordings and synthesised sounds with forceful effects similar to those of Mario Díaz de Leon’s Oneirogen project while still being as moving and delicate as Alessandro Cortini’s solo work. The album is marked by melodies and harmonies that are the product of a peculiar working process that turned the composer into an intent listener collaborating with, rather than simply using technology. 

Having been invited by the self-organising artist group The Non Existent Center for a residency to Ställbergs Gruva, a defunct iron ore mine in Sweden’s Bergslagen region, Granström took his guitar as a starting point for his compositional work that heavily relies on real-time sound synthesis. »I seldomly use the instrument as a sound source in the final compositions and rather transcribe and orchestrate the harmonic structures using sound synthesis,« he explains. »On this album however, I chose to include the actual recordings of the guitar in order to extend the spectra between non-referential synthetic sounds and embodied referential sounds.« Working with precise tunings in order to blend the timbre of the synthesis with the harmonic structures of the composition, he created composite sound objects in which the harmonic elements blend into each other. 

Through the re-amplification of synthetic musical materials from the inside of the abandoned mine, his original compositions were enriched with site-specific sound qualities before he further refined them in a singular working process. Granström works with algorithmic and generative processes, using the SuperCollider programming environment and thus blurring the lines between generative and creative forms of composition. »One of the things that I like about this way of working is that it creates a distance between myself as a composer and myself as a listener of the music that is produced entirely by the system,« he says. Granström’s technologically aided eschewing of the conventions of composing doesn’t make the end result any less personal, however. By listening again and again to the newly generated output, Granström simply took on a different role in the process of finalising the music, with the technology and the sounds becoming his co-authors. 

By creating systems that generate music, he gains a new perspective on (musical) time, says Granström. »There doesn't have to be a fixed length to the music at all,« he explains. »And by writing music with this in mind, my focus tends to shift towards writing cyclical structures that gradually change and transform over time.« Simple parts, in other words, that emerge as the five complex wholes that form »Empty Room,« a record that itself seems to take on different forms with every new listen.

DAVID GRANSTRÖM - Occultations (HG2102)

Taken from the album 'Suisse Redux' released as LP and Digital

François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298)

https://thomasmusic.bandcamp.com/album/tired-of-everything

7. nothing happen

American avant-electronic musician and essayist Bret Schneider holds no institutional allegiance to one artistic medium. His background encompasses a wide range of work experiences and reveals a man who is connected to the world around him in complex, alienated ways. His thoughts on music and philosophy are intertwined into a billowing exposition. But when exploring the dark recesses of his more aural works, there is an inherent flexibility. Phasing percussive elements and frayed droning lines all lead to a perpetually shifting feeling for an aural uncanny. As fractured as his music can be, there is a dim spark of rumination that threads through his synthetic machinations.

On his latest release, “Xilinx,” Schneider taps into a primordial electronic noise—the kind that rests just on your periphery, unwinding itself to reveal myriad sordid circuits and disjointed projections. These tracks maintain a wired mania, expressing an unsettling undercurrent of ragged repetition and warbling drones. There’s an unexpected elasticity to Schneider’s cabled rhythms, and they often shift across several temporal lines before turning inward, struggling to illuminate an intimate dissonance or imagine a multi-chambered core. Displaying a raw and unusually concise knowledge of how these sounds might fit together, “Xilinx” is part zoetrope, part post-industrial dreamscape. It is an inquiry into the idea of internal movement, a contorted experiment in musical patterning, and an experiment in self-replication.

Xilinx

Bret Schneider - VaVE1

Music inspired by Raaijmakers' electronic music from the 1960s, and his writings on sound composition, particularly "Cahier M: A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound".

TA: Serge Modular feedback & sine/pulse generators, contact microphone.

Two short excerpts from a longer piece.

Please use speakers, not headphones, because of the inner-ear phenomena involved.

Homage to Dick Raaijmakers (excerpt 1)

Metamorphoses

Serge & Mondriaan

Zach Rowden in an American musician dealing with the acoustic and performative possibilities of the contrabass. His fierce improvisational approach strips away the raw textural make up of this iconic acoustic instrument, rendering a complex timbral transformation of its sound and a complete obliteration of the listeners own understanding of the sonic potential of the contrabass. Zach’s promising release for XKatedral, “Tasked”, is a brutal harnessing of pyschoacoustic rhythms and microtonality through the minimal instrumentation of contrabass and feedback. 

XK14

Zach Rowden - Fog area

Quitratue

2020 NNA Tapes

https://leya.bandcamp.com/track/wave-actress-remix

https://ffm.to/y2onrq1

LEYA -- "Wave (Actress Remix)"

Souvenirs cachés / Innermost

Souvenirs cachés

HALLOW GROUND 
is a platform for Music and Art that leads to Visions.

It was established in Lucerne/Switzerland by a group of individualists, idealists and first of all artists. We act as publishers, hosts and performers.

www.hallowground.com

DAVID GRANSTRÖM - Occultations (HG2102)

Hallow Ground

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