Dan Söderqvist

Everything’s Going Green with Twice a Man

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The legendary Swedish group, Twice a Man, have dropped the first single from their forthcoming album, The Coloured Breeze Is a New Dimension.

“Birds Eye View” is an absolute corker that fuses the band’s passions for the ecology and bleeding-edge music. Laden with organic sounds and grounded rhythms, the track straddles the theatrical and the pop stages with ease.

The pain felt by the Earth comes through strongly on the new material. The wounds scraped onto its surface by capitalism cannot all be healed, but the scars can be softened. Twice a Man have created the soundtrack for its healing.

 

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Great Meditations: From the Silver Box to the Sea with Söderqvist

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Dan Söderqvist is best known as the singer in Twice a Man. He is also a prolific artist in his own right, with not one but two new albums on release. A New Victorian Age captures some of Söderqvist’s unreleased instrumental music from the 1990s, demonstrating his work for video games and dance. Murmures is an installation work that was created to accompany the art exhibition of the same name in the summer of 2023. Between them is a space, both temporal and stylistic, that illuminates Söderqvist’s creative range.

A New Victorian Age includes early versions of the material that found its way into the soundtrack used in the three-dimensional video game, Kula World. Made by a Swedish studio for the PlayStation One in 1997, the game involved navigating a ball in a puzzle maze that grew in complexity as the player progressed. Söderqvist’s sound design was more progressive and trippier than a lot of soundtracks from that time, making extensive use of the Roland TB-303. It might have said “computer controlled” on the face, but the silver box was able to respond very well to human interaction. Söderqvist married it to soaring quitars and keyboards for an electro-acoustic journey that was a whole lot hipper than Mario’s own backing music.

The Kula World sketches are collected on the album together with material originally intended for the computer game, OBAFGKM, and the dance performance, Pleiades. Fans of Ozric Tentacles and Juno Reactor will find a lot to like in this set, but it is also essential for any follower of Twice a Man.

Murmures was originally recorded for the show of the same name at the gallery, La Part du Rève, in Perpignan, France. Consisting of twelve pieces, based upon portraits of 19th-century persons, the installation was created together with the French visual artist, Tempora Flow (aka Jenny van den Arend). Intended to be played in a quiet room at low volume, the material is based upon field recordings, gathered at a variety of locations, ranging from a fountain in Salamanca, Spain, a church in Greffeil, in the south of France, the Swedish island of Öland, and other sites across Europe. Over them is read a poem in Swedish by Eric Johan Stagnelius, “The Poet.” Each of the sections is based upon a graphic piece, reflecting the appropriate theme by Tempora Flow, which can be seen online at temporaflow.eu

Murmures contains contributions from Tempora Flow, Noiz Elfje, and Maria Ericsson. The field recordings flow into each other, while Söderqvist mixes them with synthesisers and reverb. Insect musicians call to each other while bells chime and water splashes. Birds and bees combine with voices and what might be sampled strings. The results are deftly handled, and Söderqvist’s sensitivity to both natural and human sounds keeps them in balance. It is a tightrope walk, but there is serenity on the other side.

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Recalling the Future with Twice a Man

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Sweden’s legendary act, Twice a Man, have released a tour of their output between the years 1982 and 2022. The material is collected on Songs of Future Memories, a 3-CD compilation from Germany’s Dependent label, with two new songs and thirty-two from the band’s extensive back catalogue. The physical edition also includes a 72-page hardcover book with notes from Ecki Stieg.

The importance of Twice a Man to Swedish and European pop and theatrical music cannot be overstated. From the point at which they transformed from Cosmic Overdose, at the insistence of New Order’s promoter, the band has led from the front; both in terms of their styling and in their messages about the social and natural environment. They might have changed their name, but the group – organised around the core of Karl Gasleben and Dan Söderqvist – didn’t give up their affinity for psychedelic soundscapes or explosions of surrealistic energy. Instead, they set up structures within which new sounds could be formed and social concerns could be channelled.

As this compilation shows, Twice a Man have taken a much wider perspective than many of their peers; adapting to the shifting sands of fashion while maintaining a Brechtian distance that prevents them from being pigeon-holed. Are they prog or new wave? For the theatre or the dancefloor? Do they look at internal psychology or social movements? The answer is: any and all of the above, depending on the moment. There is no one truth about Twice a Man, but there is an organising principle to their material: it isn’t like anything else.

From the proto-techno of “Russian Tractors” to the pulsing symphonic movements of “High in the Clouds,” this collection is a master-class in European electronic music. Spanning forty years of work, Songs of Future Memories draws on an exceptional tradition of experimentation and composition. The two new songs presented here, “Lotus” and “Dahlia,” emerge from that crib impressed with a unique inheritance. Twice a Man remain a work in progress.

 

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In the Garden of Dark Flowers

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

cd166f05e8736fca295049f8ae5b6f09_400x400What fills the spaces between dreams? Listening to the music of Dan Söderqvist, the Swedish progfather, it’s hard to find any gaps in the tapestry of the subconscious. Dark Flowers Awake, his latest album, weaves together collaborations chosen from the years 2002-2010, interlacing the surreal and the subliminal in a matrix of exotica.

The trip begins with two songs made with Anne Sulikowski, the Canadian composer and psychiatric nurse also known as Building Castles out of Matchsticks. Sulikowski provided the rhythm tracks for “A Seagull’s Dream” and “La La Land,” but Söderqvist’s palatial constructions are assembled from more appropriate materials: deep grooves that grind in a way reminiscent of Silver Ghost Shimmer; ethereal vocals that unfold like fractals; synths that maneuver between the stems of flowering poppies.

“Pretty Blue Forever,” incorporating lyrics by Gregory James Wyrick, moves in the direction of high-quality dream-pop. Detroit-based Wyrick’s art is a kind of surrealistic grotesque, and Söderqvist underpins his words with rhythmic patterns and synth sweeps that draw in spacey guitar lines with the sonic reach of a Vostok capsule. The final decay stretches on, until its trajectory passes the horizon.

The other highlight is “Blue Evening (Version),” a revision of a track that previously appeared on Twice a Man’s 2002 album, Agricultural Beauty. Its words are drawn from the contemporary Indian poet, Anjum Hasan. With a mesmerising rhythm built around a simple tabla beat, the song grows organically, forming a web of drones, bells and pads infused with the scents of sandlewood and jasmine flowers. It is sensuous, exotic and perfectly balanced between naturalistic and synthetic modes of expression: sounds from gardens where you feel secure.

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Dan Söderqvist’s Solo Album Speaks Volumes Without Words

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

0004083404_10Dan Söderqvist is well-known as one-half of the electronic group Twice a Man, but he began his musical career in 1969 as a guitarist with Älgarnas trädgård, a progressive rock band. The experimental tradition that he grew up with, artistically, is evident in his first solo album, A Defence of Poetry: there are no spoken words, but the title references an essay by Shelley, in which the importance of sound to poets is emphasised.

Gathered in this album are six tracks, of which five are original compositions dated between 1989 and 2013. Despite their diverse inspirations and backgrounds, there is a definite unity between the instrumental songs. They are held together by the human voice, which is emulated in its collective, choral form to make sounds but not words, and naturalistic references that give each track a feeling of place or time.

“The Cherry Orchard” is a piano-based piece that sits neatly between the processed sound of Harold Budd and the naturalistic work of Virginia Astley, but it has dimensions of its own. Söderqvist explains in the notes that:

The last play by Chekhov has always inspired my mind. Among all Russian literature that I fancied in my youth it stood out as the essence of nostalgic sentiments. I have not yet had the honour to work with the play in whole. As an example i wanted to make a fragmented version. Reading it through i found the character of Ljubov, the mistress of the house so intriguing, that I decided to make a piece with some of her lines from the play. The atmosphere of lost childhood, the beauty of her garden, now in jeopardy of the axe, evokes memories of her life, of lost dreams… It`s melancholic, a feeling I love and know perhaps too well.

“November, You Humming Mist” begins with an Asian percussion style, before synthetic strings waft in, coming in layers like cool air blowing through bamboo. Harsher organ sounds emerge from the fog, rising and falling, before giving way to wind chimes and a fragile tranquility.

Tension returns with “Nacht,” which is built around the spine of a looped string hit and gradually becomes more rhythmically complex before dissolving into choral sounds. Night is followed by “Morgen,” which makes use of processed found sound and draws the choral material more prominently into the mix. These tracks are companion works, composed following the death of Söderqvist’s mother, but they work organically as a preparatory stage for the samples and synthetic strings of “After Life You Will Hear Voices of Your Childhood”, which was commissioned for a dance performance in Gothenburg. As a reference point, “After Life…” has some echoes of Pierre Perret’s legendary cassette, Gaia, la Terre, but it is distinctively in Söderqvist’s style.

The album closes with “Heilige Dankgesang,” in which all earlier traces of brooding and anxiety are expurgated. Like movements of a symphony, each track has its place on the arc of the album, and Beethoven’s song of thanksgiving is imbued with pastoral calm. The album doesn’t just end; it comes to rest in a place that T.S. Eliot famously described as “the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering.”

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