JØRGEN
KNUDSEN - wealth
(CD,
quasi pop)
Have you realised how people nowadays wander around
while talking on the phone? Mobile phones did not so much change people in
phoning everywhere, but their main virtue is allowing people to walk around,
be mobile while phoning, thus changing the act of making phone calls all
together. Ten years ago it was only super rich people or power sellers with
headsets that had both hands free while talking and could walk up and down
their vast office spaces. Phoning workshops for people who had to sell on
the phone told them to stand up, because it makes you freer when talking.
But now this has changed. Everyone seems to be walking around. And if you
look at people closely, watch their movements, you will see that they are
again and again walking down the same lines, using the same choreography of
steps, not forming or creating or exploring their space, but using the same
old worn out routes over and over again. I think that wanting to use a
certain liberty but not being able to is making people richer in mind and
spirit than having a certain liberty and not using it or remaining on the
same old path nevertheless.
I picked out this record for reviewing, because, as
usually, I had listened to it enough times to convince myself I has
something worthwhile to say about it, but also, and this is the actual
effective reason, because it has a lot of snow on the cover, and winter
seems to be stepping in any moment, with the rain outside and the
temperature falling. Is that reason enough to chose a record? Piece of
advice, any reason to chose to listen to (or not listen to) a record is good
enough. Act by your whims, act freely, act at random, let the figures and
routines evolve by themselves, it is hard enough to break out the everyday
rut anyway. You might be in for a surprise, like me when I looked more
closely on the cover and realised it depicts four photographys of pool
house, probably somewhere in the south – Asia or California, somewhere,
where palm trees grow (and rent is low) – covered in a good twenty to
thirty centimeters of snow and still falling. What a sight! What an
experience. Please notice that there is still wonderfully blue water in the
pool. A double surprise.
Back to Jørgen Knudsen, whom I know nothing about,
except that he presents an enormous wealth (no pun intended) of different
tracks on this album: avantgarde, chaotic noise, field recordings,
sampledelica, rhythmical electronica, even some glitches found their way
onto this record. It is a fascinating piece of music, broken into 16 smaller
parts, where weird noises and structures happen to sit next to droning
frequencies and then next to slowly prodding instrumental pieces. Sometimes
it is no music at all, but noises being interwoven, sometimes with piano
licks directly from Webern set smack dab into power electronic noise, only
to listen to the sound of a car starting the next minute or to an Asian
woman announcing something or other the next moment.Chaotic and startling?
Yes, but also fascinating and mesmerizing, for instance when a round of
applause slowly turns into a percussive element, sounds like raindrops
falling outside, is underlied with a droning mix of high and low
frequencies, and then cut off, leaving only the headache inducing drone with
nothing else to be covered with, only to be cut off for the same applause a
minute and a half later.
But I learned that in times changing as fast as ours, asking the right questions is probably as or even more important than forming answers. My guess is, that Knudsen incorporates a lot of his personal experiences into his music, from slow evenings with nothing to do to the most intimate experiences, but in a way so cryptic and encoded you can only feel it subconsciously. Noises contrasting each other, permutating into song and back into noise, make for another answer. As Blixa Bargeld said: “Art is the documentation of the dissolution of a problem.” Here is another example, one where it is possible to get lost in, like in a jungle that is right behind a tourist center at the beach, but has poisonous insects living inside anyway.
