Title: umf
Format: 4×7″ vinyl
Label: Lamour Records
Cat nr: lamour078vin
Genre: Kraut
A: Umf 3’12
B: Bloiko 4’11
C: Olobo 4’09
D: Huju 3’35
E: Higo 4’21
F: Blung 3’54
G: Wulla 3’38
H: Gorem 3’55The box “Umf” with four vinyls is a tribute to two major sources of inspiration: the Dadaist Hugo Ball and the German kraut pioneers Cluster. Featuring some sci-fi (crackling movie music from the 50’s) and mixed percussion from Asia (Java, Japan, Korea). Somewhere out on the periphery, Ball and Cluster meet in a common idea: That everything has a sound, and most sounds can be music. This is actually the original format from 1949, when the record companies demanded a little more from their listeners. At that time they were forced to choose the playing order by stacking the discs on top of each other on the designed gramophone player. Long before today’s playlists.
Umf is thus an individual album “at your choise”. It makes some demands. But it can be worth it. A mosaic where each song title gives a hint of how the music sounds: umf, bloiko, olobo, huju, higo, blung, wulla, gorem.
Mikael Strömberg (Igor) has been working with sounds and syntheses since the 1970s. He has written electronic music for art flights and smoke sculptures, exhibited entire cities as sound sculptures, designed sound for trucks, started a sound atlas for endangered sounds, etc. Musically there are influences from German Kraut, ethno, early electron music, “classical” music and sound art. For many years he has collaborated with cartoonist and writer Joakim Pirinen, and together they have created both radio theater and a series of albums, such as “Africa” (2005), “The Wonderful Life of Birds” (2006), “Beauty Murder” (2008) and the story “Gonki” (2017) at Erik Axl Sund Rec. Under his alias Igor, Strömberg has released several concept albums, all with a special soundscape and history. “Fast & Slow” (2015) contains music that Strömberg “heard” when he was lying on the operating bed and in the respirator in the spaces between sleep and wakefulness, when in 2012 he suffered acute aortic dissection. “Kyllaj” (2018), the suggestive music is based on recorded ocean waves from the world’s oceans, especially eastern Gotland.
“The Unseen Film” is an hour of audio cinema. The music is based on field recordings made in St. Petersburg’s Orthodox churches and around the Nevsky Prospect boulevard. The idea is to create an “unseen” (2019) film by Andrei Tarkovsky; a kind of continuation on Stalker, Solaris, Nostalgia and Victim. But here it is the listener’s who project the film inside the eyelids with their imagination.
Läs längre text (svenska) om Mikaels tankar och historia bakom skivan
