Ingfrid : Skymt is a catalogue of potential music that we have embodied over time, on the basis of or within which we improvise. We once spoke about how Skymt is like a kind of snow globe we can shake, where all the tiny bits are contained within the globe, but they manifest differently each time we shake it. Or like a multifaceted diamond or planet which we can turn around and upside-down to view from different angles.
I : Through forgetting and semi-forgetting, the blurriness and the spaces that arise in the disappearances can generate new ideas that both contain and don’t contain that which was.
I : Yes, the listening becomes such an immediate bodily activity that the listening and the response, as it were, become one and the same action and movement.
I : Well said: that’s also my experience. An extremely attentive state, with a lot of activity in the head and body which is very clearly present, but nonetheless out of focus. It is more a concentration on the whole, rather than concentration on a specific detail. Almost as if everything becomes clearer by being unclear, through a veiled gaze. I find this out-of-focus state to be a sort of transformative state. There is something transformative that transpires in the moment of playing, as the sensuous elements go through and out of the body and into the outer world as sounds. Perhaps it can be called ‘creative listening’; a situation of listening with heightened alertness for everything that takes place in the inner ear, combined with the entire complexity of what takes place here and now in the way of sounds and bodily impulses, alone and together. The quantity of impressions is so great that it becomes a hyper-focused, out-of-focus flow. Where the body responds by playing something that does not resemble anything of what is or was in place, but which is nonetheless associated with all of it.
I : Here we are talking about the improvisational situations in which we keep all possibilities open. But when we play in a way that more or less retains a song’s predefined form, the body tunes in in a different way. But some of the first is probably still at work, perhaps in degrees? For example, we may decide to keep an outline or skeleton of a form but otherwise enter a state similar to what we’ve talked about here. Then we will stay open to all the momentary reactions and for both small and large digressions, but we have an unspoken agreement that the digression will nonetheless retain a magnetism to the core of this skeleton.
The Story Lives in the Thought, in the Body, in the Sound
Live Maria Roggen
I didn't know that nothing goes away. For a very long time I thought that everything was temporary. But the freedom of being invisible and not leaving marks, was not real. Neither was the loneliness of not getting marks. Everything leaves an imprint. History settles in us and around us, it's gravity's fault.
Certain connections completely escape me, and always have: place names, chronological events, set lists, scale names, right vs. left, time, numbers. Broad daylight and leading questions just swirl up dust before my eyes, the images flow together and I find it difficult to answer. The rational world is a place where I stay afloat by organizing tasks in lists and boxes and folders and drawers. It works, most of the time.
But I also have a superpower: I have access to the chaos beneath the surface, a web of details and knowledge and experience, tied together with wordless sensory connections, without a shelving system. Down there is everything my body has processed of memories, hits, misses, melodies, structures – rhythmic, harmonic, logical – it resides there as threads of pure sound, as lines in images, as kinetics, dynamics and movement. This is knowledge and material that, if trusted, can become available to me in a fraction of a second when needed. In interplay it's only available if there is a shared musical flow. I was a bit apprehensive before our project, I felt insecure of whether my qualities would serve as strengths in our setting, or not - I feared that I would disappoint, and be disappointed.
And then you approach me. Not sure if I want to. But when in doubt, I'm inclined to stay and see. Where there is doubt, there is hope.
First we wrote the project plan together, juggling visions and ideas, together. Formulating a joint text about possible investigations, processes and outcomes was an important clarification of expectations, and while writing we distilled some important questions. But thinking and doing is not the same. What could these words mean in our practice, a practice that did not yet exist?
We investigated the musical matter from many different angles, initially in line with the project plan, but quite quickly we began to pursue side tracks that we found interesting. Onwards, onwards. New keywords on the white board in our project room. Onwards. Miles long threads of text messages with links to articles, links to music. Sharing funny coincidences, touching coincidences, thought-provoking coincidences we had come across, lists of possible things to investigate. At times we talked and communicated and listened more than we played. I found it immensely fun to map and develop ideas like that, but it didn't completely reassure me, I who was used to find my wordless, embodied answers through playing.
What is thought, in relation to sound? In retrospect, it turns out that all this kneading and x-raying and scrutiny of words and context, was food for more than just thought - it led to playful musical investigations. New associations around sounding examples made us imitate or combine or reverse them in different ways. Our mind play crept into the sound, into bodily experience, into our catalogue of possible sound. And since the investigations were based on interest and impulse, they connected to a spontaneous language, to the chaos beneath the surface.
Everything can manifest itself in sound: Emphasizing words in different ways. Looking at etymology. The potential subtext. The possible translations. The relocation of content - altering the framework of the story: Saint Ursula, in our retelling, regains the Latin meaning of her name: «Little bear» - and Mahler's phrase becomes even more peaceful, almost like a lullaby. Our talk about Vinje's poem Våren, suddenly opens a gate to contemporary eco-sorrow - and as a concequence our version of the song turns into world longing, a space odyssey, where Grieg's chords dissolve in a weightlessness. One of Wagner's melodies is torn out of the embrace with his lovely muse, Mathilde Wesendonck, and instead given a thought provoking meeting with Emily Dickinson, Wesendonck's contemporary. After reading about the author Ernst Josephson's sufferings, his lines about the jagged rose tree take on new colours, and suddenly the story takes in my solar plexus and Ingfrid's neck.
The tons of sounding experience, a web of sound, stored within us and between us, baked into the duo's shared memory. Countless musical progressions, glimpses of sound from rehearsal processes; elements and lines that have been imitated, repeated, distorted, forgotten, revisited, imitated and repeated – with both planned and unintended results – which in turn have turned into new forms for us to repeat, forget and remember. With the body. The body remembers all these ringing undercurrents and overtones and movements with no names, that we both can recognize in the fraction of a second, and reply to, without quite knowing what we just said.
I do not notice which sound escapes me
only where it comes from
My thought forms a sound,
it shoots out and meets your sound
I hear our harmonic meeting
or colliding or adjustment
or our parallel tracks
My thought forms a sound,
it shoots out and meets our previous sound
and your next thought
L : Through our work I have learned that a sort of ‘unconscious listener’ within me handles all the unpredictable and unexpected events much more adequately than my conscious listening/actions do. I don’t call this ‘non-listening’, because I experience this intuitive listening and response as extremely active and requiring intense concentration.
L : In the Skymt-related processes, I have worked with being in an inner state of flow where several elements are acutely present at the same time, although none of them are actually the focus.
L : The three elements I need to hear, simultaneously, without focusing or reaching for them are 1) old remnants and memories of melodies, words and resonances that are not being played at this moment; 2) what you play there and then – which can often go places I don’t expect; 3) what I am singing, myself, there and then. If the flow is broken because I apply ‘my active/conscious ear’ to one of these elements, I lose the real time passive registration of the whole. This happens all the time: I try too hard to summon one of the old lines or something we have played earlier, or I start to analyse or try to capture what you are doing, or I get hung up on what I just sang and start planning what I will do next. Then my ability to handle the next thing that actually happens, and to respond spontaneously and well in real time, disappears.
