Dan Fröberg — The Existence Of Do-ti-la-so-fa-mi-re-do Is Everyt
Dan Fröberg's "The Existence Of Do-ti-la-so-fa-mi-re-do Is Everything!" is a true experimental release, 48 minutes of sound (in a single track) that never once skirts near any kind of familiar musical structure, and also could not accurately be described as noise or drone. What we have here is a protracted, impenetrable metallic shimmering, obviously acoustic in origin and therefore texturally rich, full of tone but without actual tonal root. It's too dissonant, cold and meandering for meditation purposes, and the title of the album must be irony, as there's not a single discernable sequence of scalar pitches to be found.
This sound has been accomplished by sampling the performance of a pipe organ player. The timbre of the organ is heard mutated, rearranged and utterly separated from not only its contextual history with the catholic church and traditional classical reportoire, but the natural rhythms and patterns created by the physical functionality of the instrument. Recorded chunks of indeterminate length are interwoven and crossfaded into a patchwork of flux so consistently dense that no ebb and flow of energy can occur. Countless pitches are stacked and sounded together, and the effect is not dissimilar to holding down 10 - 20 keys of an organ down at once, and just letting the the harsh, yet strangely pure and precise sheet of dissonance bowl you over, only with digital processing in play as well, it's a lot more chaotic.
The emotionality of the piece does not seem to have been a concern for Fröberg, as I would be hard-pressed to specify a feeling that is conveyed by this record beyond the kind of disorientation and unease often evoked by music in which temporal organization has been intentionally avoided, the human personality behind the work obscured. Even when the dissonance occasionally evens out into a pleasant, sparkling chord for a minute or two, it feels more like an accidental, arbitrary modulation or mathematical inevitability than the result of a conscious decision.
If anything, it seems Fröberg wants us to focus on the organ itself, and all the possibilities therein. Mostly, he's concerned with the luminous, ringing tone clusters generated by the higher registers of the instrument, virtually ignoring the foundation-shaking bass tones the pipe organ is capable of. I can't argue he's provided a lot of interesting raw sonic material, though with the power of processing he could have easily turned it into something more.
It's very hard to rate this album. It's an exercise in sound for its own sake, and I'm sure many listeners of avant garde would find the timbres on this disk unique and interesting, and that a rare few could even find it beautiful. My own experience has been that listening to this album repeatedly has only made it all the more impenetrable, despite my lasting love of pipe organs, and that I'd likely rather spend my time in a more coherent, evocative or relatable soundscape, or just listen to some real pipe organ music.