Two idiosyncratic improvisers-sound artists share a performance at Rönnells Antikvariat, a bookstore and music venue, in Stockholm in November 2022, organized by FRIM (The Association for Free Improvised Music), and offer expansive solo sets.

Swedish composer Henrik Olsson opens the performance, playing turntables with metal bowls, aluminum sheets, glass, a bamboo stick, and other objects to present a fresh live rendition of his composition «Common Ground» (version 26. Versions 1-25 offered a series of 25 only recordings of an acoustic DJ set for two rotating vinyl players totaling just over twelve hours) (2020). Olsson describes this enigmatic, sound-oriented composition as an exploration of free improvisation and memory, intertwined with the human element’s role in reconstructing from those very memories. He reconstructs masterfully these highly immersive and quite tangible expressions of sonic memories and invites the listeners to lose themselves within this composition.

Australian clarinetist Aviva Endean (of Australian Art Orchestra) revisits in the second set concepts from her solo album Moths & Stars (Room40, 2022) where she attempted to «have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky». She plays on clarinets and plastic pipes and uses field recordings and electronics, and offers a different but still distinct, immersive experience. The beautiful, extended version of «What Calls In The Quiet» from Moths & Stars suggests a mysterious and, naturally, ethereal atmosphere of most intimate and vulnerable territories, cleverly flirting with statis and silence.

Both sets are delicate, quite otherworldly and captivating and offer an intimate proximity and lucidity to the sound.

Eyal Hareuveni

Henrik Olsson (turntables, objects), Aviva Endean (clarinets, electronics, voice, plastic pipes)