CM Von Hausswolff — 800 000 Seconds in Harar

The Swedish multi-disciplinary artist CM Von Hausswolff visited Harar in Ethiopia in 2010 on a commission to produce music for a play based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud. The French poet lived in the city for the last seven or so years of his life where, according to Hausswolff, his “presence persists” to this day. While it is not clear how these bold tones, brimming with intense energies, works with the play (‘Jag är en annan’ written by Michael Azar and directed by Ulrich Hillebrabd), it offers a powerful and poetic experience in its own right.

The album consists of two contrasting pieces both conceptually linked to Rimbaud: the first is built from sounds of the city, the second purely from electronic oscillators, one of which is slowly spelling out one of Rimbaud’s poems (Le Dormeur du val) in morse code. But the conceptual link in this audio-only setting, while certainly important to the compositional process, does not extend to the listening one. Instead, it once again showcases CM Von Hausswolff’s fascination with combining rich tones in space to trigger and manipulate their inner properties.

The first piece, ‘Day and Night’, is divided into three parts, and opens with the sounds of Harar’s daytime teeming with life, from children playing and singing, through the rush of air and water, to the songs of birds and the chatter of insects. Logically, its second part indicates night through the absence of movement except for a dripping tap’s uneven rhythms. Both documentaries are threaded through by the relentless, irregular throb of a single bowed tone, initially produced by a local stringed instrument (a ‘krar’) and subsequently extended on Hausswolff’s computer. Despite its deep, stubborn presence the sounds of day and night remain unaffected, casting the tone as an invisible, questing energy that subtly gains power the nearer it gets to its goal. By the time of the third and final part the long note, now nearly 15 minutes old, is finally joined by a loose succession of other bowed pitches providing a kind of release or a blissful contrast both sacred and unnerving. As more new tones emerge the column of energy continues to gain strength, at times impossibly so, to forge a formidable sound that has the power to release adrenal flows in the listener.

The second concluding piece has similar properties to the first, deploying more totemic energy through its long layers. But, with the control afforded by its tone generators arrives a study in micro and macro rhythms. Here the equally bold but now electrical tones form the audible equivalent of moiré patterns creating ever changing slippery rhythms as they fluctuate with each other. All this atomic activity is underscored by a slow, cumbersome beat of morse code, designed by chance yet affording fresh perspectives on the combined frequencies with which its boulder-like dots and dragged dashes interferes.

While ostensibly an exercise in drone, the rich details and contradistinctions carefully borne throughout the work make it as complex and compelling as free jazz or psychedelic jams. And these intricacies sound different depending on the listening environment, seeming better on speakers than headphones so as to allow Hausswolff’s deluge of sound to fill and interact with a physical space, bringing a further dimension of variances to the party. However experienced, though, it can leave ones eardrums palpitating for a while after the disk has finished such is its power and charm.