Triple Music

SOFA is proud to present Muddersten’s third album Triple Music.

In the spring of 2020, Muddersten did not go to Japan. Nor did the trio collaborate with alive painting artist Akiko Nakayama as planned before the global lockdown. Instead, a video triptych was made by Akiko and sent to the trio serving as a score for a musical performance. The piece was commissioned by Muddersten and had its first performance at the Periferien Festival in Oslo, in August 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic. 

In the video, we see variations of liquid colors in swirling streams, floating textures, and bursting bubbles. Live painting in constant transformation serving as both a score and a conductor. Every now and then Nakayama places a fixed object or a solid form into her stream of floating colors, streams that effortlessly find their way around these obstacles.

On Triple Music the trio uses sonic ready-mades as a method for improvisation. Pre-recordings and sound-loops that can be considered as musical analogies to the objects and solid forms in Akiko's alive painting. When incorporating these musical ready-mades into the performance Muddersten's improvisational flow constantly has to adjust and adapt itself to whatever musical ”other” the tape machine or turntable presents. A vinyl LP called Fyloop (FYLP 1033) from 2013 is one of the main external sound sources used here. When playing this record the pick-up needle won't move towards the center of the LP as it usually does, instead each track leads back to itself in a never-ending circular repetition. It's impossible to know what sound-trap you will be caught up in, just drop the needle and deal with it. These stubborn little sound loops are like islands in the stream as the improvisation gently find its way around them. A strategy that makes you roll with the punches and go with the flow, in order to provoke greater flexibility in the musical practice. The plan here is to have no plan and to stick to that no matter what. Always expect the unexpected. 

Perhaps this musical exercise in adapting to external circumstances can be useful also on a larger scale as humanity is now doubtlessly facing an overwhelming amount of obstacles. Obstacles such as non-negotiating collapses of entire ecosystems or a dramatic rise of the sea levels. Uncompromising consequences clogging our previous streams of exploitation.

From now on we will all need to be flexible improvisors and find a way to cope with the unforgiving aftermath of our own abusive behavior by humbly adjusting and adapting ourselves to a new flow. Eco-modernism, the transition movement, collapsology and the preppers all present their take on a plan B. But these plans in general tend to be somewhat one-dimensional which, by the way, is the reason why plan A won't work in the long run.

Any plan B will require a whole lot of acceptance, adjustments and adaptations to what we cannot control. So, the future is perhaps not so much a composition but rather a series of improvisations between all of us and the dramatically changing conditions around us.

Let us all be improvisors with slightly bent knees moving into the unknown.

Henrik Olsson, April 2023