Sunday, February 8, 2009
ulvisa
Ulvisa was the name given to the cat Lovisa by my step-daughter in her early years. Ulvisa the prowler, Ulvisa the croaker.
This was also the first song I made this way – guitar, found sounds, electronic devices and computer – for about a year and a half. Melody and rhythm. Intimate, flowing, a minimalist groove. I forgot how I loved the sound of electric guitar. Immediately after, I made the song Vibrachord Vessel.
background
In 2003, upon coming by a used minidisc player, I started experimenting with combining looped field recordings with impressionist guitarplaying using my computer. Compositions grew out of the interplay of the four components: home PC, Fender Stratocaster, my humble person and its musical qualities, and the sonic world of my hometown Gothenburg, as selected and filtered through ther portable memory that was my minidisc. Composition started by looping a segment of found sound, then by way of my guitar trying to find my way into its rythmics, melodics, temper, texture - to meld my own sonic capabilities with that of the looped recording and the world contained therein. Instruments were added, and song structures was constructed by looping, layering, adding additional rhythm, and then further
By some reason, I never tried to get it on record. I didn’t know the name of the music, and somehow it seemed a bit presumptuous or arrogant to name a piece that did not belong to myself, but was borrowed from Gothenburg’s world of sound. In 2005 and 2006, I continued the project meanwhile performing my duties as a bass player in the noise rock trio Coarpnc, but still I didn’t feel that I had the right to claim the music I made in my home, using found sounds. 2007 and 2008, I kinda forgot the whole “electrified stringed instrument”-concept. Those years were musically dedicated to the heavy two-step electro project Upstarting Rehearsal (2007) and the dark and twisted one hour disco symphony of Argonauts Of The Vast Unspecific (2008; composed as a present for my girlfriend Jenny for use in workout sessions).
Three days ago, Jenny told me about how her daughter, which is also my stepdaughter, as a little girls decided that she had to have a cat. Moreover, as the cat was selected, she decided that her name had to be Lovisa. Only she couldn’t pronounce it herself - she had a long series of alternative names, none of which really sounded like Lovisa. The first of those names were Ulvisa. Jenny still isn’t really sure how she determined that the correct name was actually Lovisa.
I’m not reallly sure why, but hearing the story, I understood that Ulvisa was the name of a dub techno piece I had been working on. Working further with the piece, I realized that it also needed some guitar work. When the whole thing was finished, nothing remained of the dub techno piece I started with, but there was obviously a relationship with the old found sound recordings. Later the same evening, I decided that I had finally gained the right to name the musical pieces made with my minidisc. Yesterday I named the whole project Viral Life, and wrote a kind of manifest on the whole thing, setting up a myspace site for the whole thing and started giving names to the different songs. I realized that some of the names had already been there for some time, others I had to make up, but I did it. This means that Viral Life lives again, or was just born after a long period of fetal status, or finally emerged after many years of just potential existence.
Anyhow, this means that I have just launched the project, alternately closed it. In either way, I’m finally free to move on.
viral life
thoughts come from somewhere else, sometimes they get combined and something new emerges, but it’s still a viral movement. life’s movements, its patterns and logistics - all is functioning according to the logic of the virus. inspiration means: open yourself to the epidemiologic, viral character of the world itself. the world makes its music, using me as a person, when i play the guitar, program my computer, compose these pieces - it’s all a matter of the world folding in on itself, reflecting upon itself. it’s all new and it’s all used.
broken and battered, intimate and tender, ugly and quite pretty, too. it was already there, but i made it sound a certain way and hold together by a certain manner. and even that manner probably came from somewhere else; it must have.
