To mark the centenary of the birth of Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, The Hardingtonar festival has invited Spire to contribute various works based on his compositions.
BJNilsen | Philip Jeck | Charles Matthews | Jana Winderen | Marcus Davidson et al. will take part in a live event at various times on 21st June 2008 in Norheimsund, Norway.
You can read more in Ballade here
A programme in English can be found here
A full programme can be downloaded here and tickets can be bought here]]>
The Short Night
BJNilsen
[Touch # TO:75, 2007]
CD - 7 tracks
A follower to 2005's Fade to White [Touch # TO:65], BJNilsen develops his work further, based on field recordings and electronics. This time he adds harsher yet clearer harmonies with musical elements to the compositions, creating a beautifully complex and detailed study. Recorded in 2006-7 with mostly analogue equipment, using up to 50 year-old tape-machines, filters and generators that end up being the soft cushion in these cold location recordings.
Boomkat (UK):
Touch are a label that always put quality control above all else. They don't release much, but you can guarantee that when they do release something it's of an almost untouchable standard, and their small but perfectly formed group of artists are a testament to that. They first welcomed Swedish experimental artist BJ Nilsen into the fold in the late 90s, when he was writing under the name Hazard, but since then Nilsen has developed and 'The Short Night', his latest full length record, is for me his most coherent and enjoyable album to date. Nilsen has been busy in the last few years, contributing to the incredible 'Storm' album with field recording veteran Chris Watson and also to 'Second Childhood' with cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir and Icelandic trio Stilluppsteypa, but 'The Short Night' feels like the masterwork these records were building up to. Utilising his tuned ear for field recording, Nilsen blends environmental sounds collected in Sweden, Iceland and England and layers them above and beneath some quite stunning electronic parts. Taking vintage equipment (Sequential Circuits Pro-One, old Scandinavian generators, Korg MS20 etc) and recording and mixing using modern computer technology he comes up with a sound that owes as much to early innovators Popol Vuh and Delia Derbyshire as it does more recent ambient-darlings Biosphere and Deathprod. The mood is one of grim, crust-laden darkness, something akin to being trapped in an abandoned building as the Phantom of the Opera plays mercilessly in a sewer below - but while the mood is shadowy the sounds never become oppressive. Maybe it's due to the hypnotic nature of the compositions that draw you in and take hold of you entirely or possibly the actual character of the vintage generators used but the sounds float in and out of your consciousness with a wool-lined ease. Even as the album draws to a tremulous close with the incredible organ-drenched 'Viking North' and the amps reach eleven it is still washed with a veneer of melancholy and a palatable sheen that takes it above and beyond so many albums lumped into the same category. Touch have done it again then and thrown out yet another high water mark for the genre and a shining beacon in a mire of mediocrity. Huge recommendation.
Storm
Chris Watson ¬ BJNilsen
[Touch # Tone 27, 2006]
CD - 3 tracks
“During December 2000 several significant storm fronts developed across the North Sea and Scandinavia.
Benny remarked to me that he had recorded some of these on the Baltic coast and proposed a collaborative cd project based around our mutual interests in the rhythms and music created when the elements combine over land and out to sea.
We spent the next few years gathering recordings on our respective coastlines and islands during the very active weather windows during the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. This was focused around our following one particular cyclonic system, which veers over Snipe Point on Lindisfarne to the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, and finally descends upon Öland and Gotland where Benny listened in with a favourite pair of Sennheiser omnidirectional microphones.” [Chris Watson]
Fade to White
BJNilsen
[Touch # TO:65, 2005]
CD - 6 tracks
Benny Nilsen writes: "'Fade To White' contains material from the making of 3 pieces which were created within a different season and then edited, re-arranged and re-mixed in the summer of 2004. 6 pieces contain outdoor field recordings from travels in mainly central europe in 2003 [Gdansk/Poland, Narva/Estonia, Sarajevo/Serbia Herzegovina, Arad/Romania, Trieste/Italy], and static indoor recordings from 2004 Stockholm/Sweden, Brussels/Belgium, Amsterdam/Netherlands, Vienna/Austria, Geneva/Switzerland.
I used acoustic and electrical instruments recorded in open spaces picking up the natural ambience, blending those with environmental sounds of nature and then arranged it in the computer, creating dynamic layers of sound that feed from one another."
Land
Hazard
[Touch # TONE17, 2003]
CD - 7 tracks
Well, here's a CD after my own heart. So much so, it inspired me to whip out my qwerty board and beat out a review in syncopated time. A compilation of tracks by person from an icy place, Benny J. Nilsen, recorded during his recent whirlwind worldwide Touch tour of well, of a few places he had to take a plane to get to. My modifiers segue nicely into the first track 'Substation', a mirage of another form of transport (a train) that spreads the bass port wide to allow one of Mr Nilsen's remixes of Chris Watson's wind recordings (see Touch) to whistle and rip it's fury. Nice one! Winds calmed, the laptop insects wind themselves up in typical plug-in display. 'Old Lead Mine' (a couple of moody Sylvian-like track titles here) cranks and clanks down into big space and softness. 'Windmill' (and the rest actually) made me quite nostalgic old timbre in a new coat, or something like that. I found myself back in the early days of ambience, when the word was fresh and considerably more precise and the drugs the same. Almost-melodies, no foreign bodies, arabesque harmonics, corners rounded. spinal trip, gone By the way, I didn't check to see if any of these tracks are off earlier releases (Touch, too), but why should I? This is great the way it is! [Mark Poysden, VITAL]
HAZARD 06_12_03 Live at Generator Festival, Konzerthaus Wien
BJ Nilsen
[Touch # TO:CDR5, 2003]
CD - 1 track
30-minutes of BJ Nilsen (a.k.a. Hazard), working static hiss, wheezing electronics and the buzz of mosquitoes into an indescribably sublime mix. Headphone album of the year. [Dusted, USA]]]>
Hildur Gudnadóttir/BJNilsen/Stillupsteypa - Second Childhood
[Quecksilber # 12, 2007]
CD - 7 tracks
"Now here's an unexpected treat, a full length droning collection of sound from the deft talents of three of Scandinavia's most intriguing sound artists. Hildur Ingveldardóttir Gudnadóttir may be better known to many of you as the cellist who used to be with Mum, or possibly as part of Jóhann Jóhannsson's band, or more recently the guest cellist on Pan Sonic's latest record... so she keeps herself busy then. Here we see her team up with regular Finnish collaborators Stilluppsteypa and Touch's BJ Nilsen for an exhaustingly beautiful collection of spacious cello drones and decaying field recordings. There's something about drone music, it's so easy to get totally wrong - Thomas Koner for instance is a master of spacious, cave-like ambience, but there's a fine line between spacious ambience and pretensious new age drivel. It's nice then to see these masters of the genre (remember those incredible Stilluppsteypa albums on Ritornell all those years ago?) taking the genre a little further, combining the epic atmospherics of Koner et al with haunting instrumental recordings, voices and Gudnadóttir's incredible cello playing. All the sounds seem to mesh together into a dense mass of haunting almost spiritual sound, you begin to hear things that maybe aren't there through the tape hiss and whirr of tape. It's almost like flicking through an old photo album, seeing memories you can't quite place and remembering the flickering ghosts of the past. 'Second Childhood' should have fans of Grouper, William Basinski and Deathprod absolutely beside themselves with joy... this is one for those solitary post midnight moments. Just don't say 'acoustic doom' eh? Highly recommended." [Boomkat, UK]]]>