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HENRIK
RYLANDER
TRADITIONAL ARRANGEMENTS
OF FEEDBACK
ALBUM
IDEAL RELEASE: MARCH 11, 2004
REVIEW: APRIL 7, 2004
Ideal
Recordings is the Swedish electronical
label to watch out for at the moment.
Happily releasing albums ranging from
lush ambience to technoid precision
beats and power noise, they are bridging
the gaps between genres that have
always had much in common, but have
spent too long denying it.
Ideal is based in Gothenburg and share
this generous attitude with their
predecessors in that town, the Radium
226.05 Association and record label
that revolutionized experimental music
in Sweden in the 80:s. From Radium
sprang, just to name a few, The Lucky
People Center International, artists
like Carl Michael von Hausswolf (also
an electronic musician) and rock band
Union Carbide Productions, later to
become the commercially successful
and rather bland The Soundtrack of
Our Lives.
Henrik Rylander handled the drums
in Union Carbide, but chose to pursue
a more experimental musical direction
than his former bandmates. On his
first solo album ”Från
en obestämd plats i rummet”
his background in rock is very present,
and though a droning, suggestive work
seems to be the aim, the sound of
the drums and guitars is too close
to an ordinary rock song to ever break
free of that format. Five years hence,
Rylander has changed his sound considerably
on ”Formation”, and this
third album further establishes the
concept he came up with then, namely
the rhythmic use of feedback from
various fx-units.
Henrik Rylander has exhibited audiovisual
art and some of the tracks seem to
have developed from that context.
His trademark rhythms have become
pulses of sound, and the sound textures
are mostly vibrating hums, drones
or low rumbles rather than screeching
feedback noise. If the arrangements
could be called traditional, it is
only in the sense that Pan Sonic and
others have established something
of a tradition of finding and using
the unintentional and otherwise unwished
for ghost sounds of the machine, which
Rylander can’t help imitating
to some extent. ”Speaker as
Microphone to Speaker” touches
on the clicks’n’cuts genre
while ”Flange” is closer
to Masonna-style Japanese noise. Still,
it is a focused and intense album,
leaving your ears quite raw from the
experience.
MATTIAS
HUSS
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