WOMB
Kajsa Lindgren
HEX 002 - 15/06/2018
After last year’s first record with Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, Berlin’s Hyperdelia comes back with a second release – a lucid underwater music composed and arranged by Swedish composer and sound artist Kajsa Lindgren.
»WOMB« is a musical narration for abstracted ears and bodies – engulfing a listener simultaneously in subaquatic sonic environments, distant dreams of childhoods, memories and voices from the unknown: where time and space fold into each other.
The initial material of field-recordings of nature and body sounds, interviews and compositions has been re-recorded and re-amped underwater in a swimming pool – and has been re-arranged (partly by way of the impulse responses of the pool) now for stereo home listening. It’s like we’ve travelled from the outer space fantasies into the alien underworlds to surface in your homely headspace.
»WOMB« at times resembles Gustav Mahler’s offstage soundings, dramatised by Björk, in other moments the sounds become tiny and intimate, when »WOMB« makes one think of Felicia Atkinson’s music, while the environmental ambiences reminisce the static music of Kevin Drumm. The delicate layering of field recordings, re-recordings and environments makes »WOMB« a fascinating phonopoetic fiction that conjures its own surreal virtual ecology: of remote strings, filtered through hydrophones (on cocoon), deep sea creatures singing to a de-tuned toy piano (the garden), of folk songs sung through telephone hiss (on all the other children), of waves crashing at the sea shores of Narnia (the inanimate world pt. 2).
Tracklisting
- 00:03:09 - cocoon
- 00:06:17 - the garden
- 00:04:24 - the inanimate world pt. 1
- 00:02:12 - all the other children
- 00:04:23 - far (to reach me)
- 00:10:44 - forest
- 00:10:32 - the inanimate world pt. 2
00:41:44 total
Release
- 500 x 180g, 12” vinyl, 33 ⅓ rpm (via Optimal)
- download (mp3/wav) and online streaming
- online VR installation
- interactive online documentation
- concert in swimming pool (02/06)
- 3-track remix EP, download and online streaming (July 2018)
Credits
Recorded at: Storkyrkobadet, Stockholm
Composition & Production: Kajsa Lindgren
Field Recordings: Kajsa Lindgren
Recording: Kajsa Lindgren, David Granström
Mixing: Kajsa Lindgren, David Granström
Mastering: Rupert Clervaux
Artwork: Cathrine Bowitz
Interview & Texts for documentation: Malte Kobel
Video & Photography: Hampus Andersson
Development: Andreas Dzialocha, David Granström
Advise & Support: David Granström, Malte Kobel, Andreas Dzialocha, Ewa Jacobsson, Jana Winderen, Notam
Pool attendant: Storkyrkobadet staff
Voices/interviews: thanks to everyone who contributed with recordings of themselves sharing sound memories, and whom I promised anonymity
Supported by Kulturbryggan, Stockholm