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TANKRED, KENT - There is Nothing to Attain

Format: do-CD Label & Cat.Number: Ideal Recordings iDEAL209 Release Year: 2021 Note: ten years after the original release (same title) a full reworking by the Swedish master of 'massive electroacoustic dronescapes' => different from the source material these are often shorter and more noisy / attacking pieces, like wild droning and jerking (sound) machines, liberated from any human input, but there are also more silent tracks.. - "The music is naked, or rather unclothed, inhuman, at the first encounter reminding you of everything you would prefer to avoid." - ed. of 200 copies Price (incl. 19% VAT): €17.50 More Info Kent Tankred (b.1947) is one of the true hidden masters of Swedish electro-acoustic and experimental music. Tankred studied at Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm in the early 70s and he has released a sparse catalogue of fine works, mainly for his and Leif Elggren’s Firework Edition Records as well as Ash International. In 1995 he put out the extremely strong album ”Ordinary Things” on Fylkingen Records. ”THERE IS NOTHING TO ATTAIN” is his first albums since the 2010 CDr with the same title. - iDEAL. * Music is not like people. Nonetheless most music tries to pretend it is human, imitating their movements, feelings, attributes, even opinions. Kent’s music doesn’t pretend to be anything. One quickly forgets there could be a human behind it, even though it may have arisen from some profound game, a concentration on some discovery, combination, principle. The music is naked, or rather unclothed, inhuman, at the first encounter reminding you of everything you would prefer to avoid: leaf-blowers, neighbours drilling the wall, machinery grinding, a screwdriver stripping the thread with a careless move, electric warning signals, all on top of each other. A recent radio programme was discussing whether the phrase “human error” should be replaced by the less recriminatory “human contribution”. Meanwhile a submarine has sunk into an ocean chasm and the 53 aboard who might still be alive will run out of oxygen before they can be reached. A struggle between man and machine. But here there is no struggle, the machine is likened to any other natural phenomenon. It just is, does what it does, or doesn’t, in its own time which is neither fast nor slow since it doesn’t have to be compared with anything, has no purpose, no significance, is neither good nor evil. A god like Einstein’s, indistinguishable from nature in its entirety. A galaxy does not rotate in order to be beautiful or strong. A fan does not make something flap about randomly in order to trace a certain pattern. In the starkly dystopic early science-fiction film On the Beach (1959) a Morse signal is detected from a region where all life should have been eradicated by the atomic winter. An expedition is sent to resolve the mystery. In a completely lifeless industrial zone they find that someone, before the radiation wiped them out, had hung a coke bottle on a string from a roller blind balanced so that the random flapping of the blind caused the bottle to press the telegraph key, producing a haphazard stream of code which inevitably from time to time formed meaningful words and phrases. I am hard put to explain what it is than can suddenly make the music so entertaining, so jocular in the midst of this objective, mundane mangling. Yet one does get reminded at some point that someone is behind all this, has discovered or molded, has chosen this; perhaps not a joke but pure serendipity. Just as things originate so must they vanish, by one decision or another – a handbrake, a puncture, a flying catch. The process “concludes”, or purports to, as when someone suddenly wakes you from a dream which you forget immediately but retain the echo of a feeling. Or you are surprised by your parents opening the door when you’re in the middle of a game where you can’t remember whether what you’re doing is supposed to be secret or not. And so the cauldron or the ventilation pipes spill out a bus garage, a swarm of drones, or those flying bicycles Leonardo had a mind to make. Johannes Bergmark. https://idealrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/there-is-nothing-to-attain