ANDERS DAHL – hundloka, flockblomstriga 1

(CD, Häpna)

Sheep are funny animals. They get up at four o’clock in the morning in summer, at the first glimpses of daylight and start to graze. At about nine o’clock they go back into their confines and don’t get out until the heat of the day starts to cool off. Sheep are also easily afraid and, quite true to the cliché built around the personification of animals, sheep tend to walk one after the other, or at least they go where the group seems to be going. But the funniest thing of all is seeing sheep run. That is even funnier than seeing chicken run. Yes, at times I wish I would live in the country. Life is easier there in many ways. I would try to ignore the ignorance, the xenophobia and the mindlessness and focus on the trueness of nature, the circle of the seasons and the good food. City dwellers lose their connection to what is real and what is not because they have lost their connection to nature. And the next step usually is convincing themselves that there is nothing true, never was. But “just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

Some of the aforementioned is true for “Hundloka, Flockblomstriga 1” by Anders Dahl as well. It consists of three connected pieces of music played with guitar, bouzouki, violin, clarinet, percussions and various effects by Anders Dahl and then edited and re-edited and worked on on a computer. All three tracks are called Hundloka, which is swedish for cow parsley, and that is nothing but a small, very common plant on any kind of pastures in Scandinavia. Names to protect what is contained in the tracks themselves. Because the jangling and swirling tracks are an argument for structureless music superficially.. On closer inspection you realize that there are structures, but they are so loose and hidden so well beneath the rublle of the instruments that they easily go unnoticed.

The resulting melee of Dahl’s endless mixing and varying range from soothing multilayered pieces of post-modern folk music (akin to Bill Frisell but substantially less arranged) to intricate and subtle ambient noise intermezzos to akward oppositions and effects that are welcome in some parts of the free improvisation avant garde. No matter how many times Dahl has reworked these tracks and their parts, the main way of working is definitely subconscious, where tones and their order evolve in a stream of non-decisions and non-reflection. “2. Hundloka” is the more akward of the tracks, bringing on free time percussions, clanks and boings, reworked on the computer for further randomness, and thereby stressing the measure of silent / noise dynamics and putting a lot of testing onto the listener. Other than these moments the whole record is rather of a more soothing, harmonious (in its own way) and almost happy variety. Track 2 is the one where the sense of being at loss of orientation is the strongest, but then again, this might be just a false impression by the reviewer.