Split Series Vol 2 (FRIM Records 06)

Aviva Endean from Australia, Henrik Olsson from Sweden. Two different composers and performers in the global society of improvised music. What connects them is that they shared an evening at the bookstore Rönnells Antikvariat in Stockholm during the Sound of Stockholm festival in 2022. Now they also share this cd, the second volume in FRIM Records ongoing Split Series. They represent two distinguished voices, but there are similarities in that they both, in an improvised manner, take point of departure in music they have composed and performed before. In the case of Aviva Endean, it’s a kind of live reworking of some similar ideas that she used on the album Moths & Stars (Room40, 2022). In the case of Henrik Olsson it’s about memory and how the human factor affects it, when he revreates an improvised composition, Common Ground, he performed two years earlier.

From her debut solo recording for Norwegian label Sofa in 2018, in which she solely improvised on acoustic instruments, Aviva Endean developed new skills when it came to record Moths & Stars. In her own words it was a way of braiding disparate strands of sounds together, to play with the listener’s sense of time and space, bringing our awareness to the tactile qualities of sound by using extremes of close mic techniques, pickups, and the use of recording in vast acoustic spaces. As on Moths & Stars, the composition presented on this cd features instrumental parts interwoven by not only lo-fi electronics and field recordings, but also with voice and of course clarinets. In creating different environments, in which she is in no rush of leaving, this is an evolving composition. The air streams from rotating plastic pipes and the pre-recorded field recordings and folkloristic flute telling a slightly different story from the electronically developed sounds of outer space she is creating with all its comprehensive darkness. Into this sonic environment she brings her clarinets, letting them build new polyphonic surroundings with extended techniques and circular breathing. In thinking of the title Moths & Stars, the composition becomes quite physical in resembling earthly life and spacy emptiness, you could nearly call it a kind of old-time program music. In not only juxtaposing the sound sources, the acoustic with the electronic, the different techniques, Aviva Endean boldly takes the music into different moods and atmospheres. To bring an overtone flute, and even some psychedelic tones, into this electro-acoustic surround is a brave thing. And it turns out very well.