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Maximal music. A chorus of Disney-fied whistling leads into the synthesised sounds of jungle animals, as impossibly lush, sensual strings transport us to the South Seas setting of some corny Hollywood movie or coconut-flavoured TV ad. What might be chirping bird-calls (sounding suspiciously like short-wave radio signals), and an insistent peck on the piano give way to demented percussion, spiritual-sax and an Alpine brass fanfare that\u2019s drowned out by electrical storms of yowling distortion. There\u2019s electronic raindrops, a duet for bongo drums and ring-modulator, plus various versions of nature music in the expansive, widescreen mode where Sibelius meets John Williams. Add weird electronic wig-outs mixed with kon-tiki lounge and it\u2019s suddenly like John Zorn hanging with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen round at Martin Denny\u2019s place. Welcome to ‘The Exotica Album’ by \u00d8yvind Torvund. This is maximal music, where a gallon\u2019s worth of content is squeezed into a pint-pot of recording time, and it\u2019s great.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00d8yvind Torvund\u2019s super-maximal adventures in far-out Exotica: think John Zorn hanging with Stockhausen in Martin Denny\u2019s kon-tiki lounge.<\/p>\n
Commissioned by the Bit20 Ensemble and premiered at Oslo\u2019s Only Connect festival in May 2017, \u2018The Exotica Album\u2019 features the Ensemble conducted by Trond Madsen plus star guests Kjetil Moster on sax and Jorgen Traeen on electronics. Although it\u2019s difficult for any summary to do such mercurial music justice, composer Torvund\u2019s audaciously playful suite re-imagines in collage form the chunky edifice of those Fifties and Sixties popular styles categorised variously as \u2018exotica’ or \u2018lounge\u2019 (and repopularised in the late Nineties and early Noughties as part of the craze for retro-modernism), together with a wealth of historical reference points, from early electronic composition to cartoon music. But rather than the flip pastiche or cracking-a-nut-with-a sledgehammer cynicism that often characterises high culture or avant-garde encounters with popular forms, Torvund\u2019s attitude to his sources appears genuinely knowledgeable and affectionate. There\u2019s critique, but it is coming at least partly from the inside, Torvund is even emerging from the experience smiling, as it were, because his vividly imaginative music manages to retain some of the innocence and delight associated with the originals. There\u2019s also a knowing nod to that era’s more optimistic attempts to reach out, however clumsily, to the frontiers of other cultures (other galaxies, even), and to the experimental and \u2018out-there\u2019, just as Sun Ra\u2019s interplanetary aesthetic was inspired at least partly by Les Baxter\u2019s ersatz moon safaris. The very contemporary re-evaluation of one era from the perspective of another is echoed in Rob Young\u2019s witty liner-note text, where a once bright exploratory vessel, The Rainforest Morning, ends up – in a parable that recalls J.G. Ballard – as a useless, rusting hulk.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe piece grew out of a wish to do something on the exotica genre and link it to early electronic modernism\u201d, \u00d8yvind Torvund says. \u201cI felt a connection to both the world of exotica, to Les Baxter, Martin Denny, etc, and also to early electronic music, to Stockhausen and G.M. Koenig, who made these sonic diamonds where there is so much love in each naive little \u2018pling\u2019. I had an idea to combine the two worlds using the idea that they were both wanting to explore and deal with the unknown. I also had this mental image of one of the pieces being like going up a river in a canoe and suddenly discovering these abstract installations or sculpture in the jungle. So I started writing tunes that were clearly inspired by the sounds and colours of Fifties exotica, and then added abstract compositions and improvisations that ran parallel to the tunes and sometimes interacted with them. Jorgen Traeen and Kjetil Moster then began to represent the more modernist\/abstract part of the material, with synths imitating waves, rain, birds and other natural phenomena. The tunes are inspired by composers like Esquivel, Martin Denny and Les Baxter, and also the collage work of John Zorn, Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay."<\/p>\n
The result, rather than being a dry, academic-sounding rehash of pre-existing sources, provides a continuously diverting listening experience where the rate of change never lets up. And \u00d8yvind Torvund, despite the wealth of references and inspirations, convincingly develops his own musical language, just as The Exotica Album\u2019 attains its own structural integrity by successfully creating a distinctive over-arching form to support the myriad of constantly evolving musical parts. Remaining true to the spirit of its sources, whether low exotica or high electronic modernism, \u2018The Exotica Album\u2019 also sounds impressively new, honouring the great tradition of sonic experimentalism by boldly going as far out as it can.<\/p>\n
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Remaining true to the spirit of its sources, whether low exotica or high electronic modernism, \u2018The Exotica Album\u2019 sounds impressively new, honouring the great tradition of sonic experimentalism by boldly going as far out as it can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":36810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[36],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36515","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-hubro","7":"product_shipping_class-cddvd-shipping","8":"uni_artist_tag-bit20-ensemble","9":"uni_artist_tag-jorgen-traeen","10":"uni_artist_tag-kjetil-traavik-moster","11":"uni_artist_tag-oyvind-torvund","12":"uni_artist_tag-trond-madsen","13":"uni_artist_genre-contemporary-music","15":"first","16":"instock","17":"taxable","18":"shipping-taxable","19":"purchasable","20":"product-type-variable","21":"has-default-attributes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/36515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=36515"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=36515"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grappa.no\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=36515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}