8 Tracks: From Beyond Consciousness with Bendik Giske

Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt wrote this piece based on “Komm, su?ßer Tod, komm selge Ruh” by J.S. Bach. By simply instructing the choir to extend notes, this composition is almost like a piece of generative music. It relies on a system, put in place by the composer, to develop through performance, rather than being written out in full detail.
First time I heard this was on my wake-up radio, being led out of sleep to these suspended clusters of human voice. I ?ve later heard Genesis P-Orridge say that they and their wife Jaqueline Breyer would wake up and inject the other with Ketamine while still asleep. That way one would wake up in some sort of an out-of-self experience, in order to further explore the wonders of the mind. I believe my wake-up radio experience is as close as I will ever get to that experience, and I feel that that moment became a threshold for me. Something had changed after that.

This track is hardly news, but i think it bears repeating. This is the first record i picked up in Berlin after I had decided to move there for an extended period of time. My futured seemed like nothing but possibility, and this became the soundtrack to that sensation. I found my self wondering how this immersive track, which instantly makes my body move, came about: its sounds and their placement were oddly difficult to recognize. I had long worked on ways to free my self from the grid-logic in the music software I was using, and this record seemed to excel at just that. This gave me a lot of confidence in pursuing the idea of giving a human pulse to electronic music. In other words: simply playing it on my sax.

I can still smell the air and feel my own nerves as I was recording this in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo. The space has no windowns, and is covered in beautiful wall paintings from floor to ceiling. It states over the door that everything God creates is pure, and the space celebrates all of human life including lust, birth, death and everthing in between.
The space is incredibly reverberant and I recorded this in a single take with the room singing back to me.
The odd 7/4 rhythm gives me a sensatin of endlessness when I play it, juxtaposed with a symmetric beat in the middle part, its like a coexistence of two different corporeal rhythms in me. I developed the piece in between sound checks and shows one summer, perhaps in need of meditation.

This inquisitive stream of prepared piano, or some sort of hammer-on-string instrument, exploring its way through ever changing and developing landscapes, takes you by the hand and leads you through safe, consonating landscapes and scarier bi-tonal parts.
It feels intuitive to me, as if its grown organically rather than being all planned out. I personally enjoy improvising within a narrow set of possibilities, and this track feels like its doing just that.

This track almost completely abandons tonality as a parametre to explore, instead it relies almost entirely on a kick drum, delay, filters and distortion to create subdivisions and structure.
Quite clearly meant for an audience in movement, it provides something so void of potential conflict as a 1-1 beat. Only later in the track comes a sense of periods and bars, but in the beginning it ?s every beat for it self. A steady pulse. This makes me dance in a way that provides my head with the space to think happy thoughts, and perhaps even journey on to take a meta- perspective on my reality. Quite nice <3

Some tracks instantly make me question if I could possibly play it on sax, subsequently this track has lead to some fantastic discoveries for me, though I have yet to arrive at a cover version.
The track invites you in to discover a non-threatening world of textures and pulses that recieve you as you enter. The seemingly asymmetrical bass line has as an intuitive quality to it, like it follows its own intuition as an improvising person is capable of. Flow. I am very drawn to flow in improvisation, that transcending experience of letting words, notes or movement flow from the body as if it comes from a place that can only be accessed through ritual, not logic.

Pan is a mesmerizing artist capable of creating music as gestures. This trembling and elongated gesture concludes her fenomenal 2017 album Lack in a most calming yet unsettling way. It is like a clear promise that there ?s more to come. To me it resembles a snake pit full of traumas not yet revisited, relations not up-kept, and ideas not yet explored.

Ok, this is a long listen, so I saved it for last. The first track, Monoceros 1, is almost 22 minutes long. Monoceros 1 is a shocking feat, and has fairly been credited to break vast new grounds. In an impossibly long stream of conciousness Evan Parker goes from the abstract, into nature- tonalities well known in so much folk music, through a horde of odd and symmetric beats.
I find it very exciting that so much of development on the saxophone has happened during a time when music was recorded.