Swedish experimental but classically-trained church organist Hampus Lindwall, now the organist at the church of Saint-Esprit in Paris, and a collaborator of experimental musicians like Phill Niblock and Leif Elggren, or improvisers like Susana Santos Silva, is also a fine guitarist who, as a teenager, learned his chops copying the solos on Steve Vai records. Brace for Impact sends Lindwall to the scene of his adolescent obsessions and suggests his most personal album to date. Lindwall cites American artist Jeff Koons, who once claimed he only found his voice as an artist when he started looking at the kitschy objects sold in his father’s antique shop while he was growing up. With such an irreverent approach, Lindwall calls the pipe organ «a Medieval Synthesizer-King Kong-instrument».
Lindwall played five contemporary compositions on the huge pipe, seventy-eight-stop organ at St. Antonius church in Düsseldorf in August 2023. Guitarist Stephen O’Malley (of Sunn O))), and the head of Ideologic Organ label) added later distorted and feedback textures on the opening title piece, and Lindwall overdubbed the recording with additional guitars.
Brace for Impact focuses on immediate and raw sounds and structures. The aptly titled opening piece has an undeniable elemental power of a death metal band, and Robert Barry, who wrote the liner notes, imagines it to Iannis Xenakis’ seminal «Metastaseis» (1953-54) if only Xenakis joined a metal band. But it is not only about sheer power. Lindwall explores how the delicate overtones of the church organ correspond with the distorted electric guitar.
Lindwall thanks the duo EVOL (who call their music «computer music for hooligans», inspired by geometry, metaphysics, noise, cosmology, and rave culture), and the Dutch duo JODI, who used networked processes and algorithmic thinking. In later pieces, their influences become clear. The organ overtones, resonances, and dissonant sounds, with electronics and live sound processing, twist the time and space sensibilities, and sketch hyperactive, packed, and fast-shifting textures that contrast with our conceptions of the refined and austere baroque organ compositions, associated with church music. «AFK», for automated pipe organ, flirts with repetitive rhythmic patterns, just like in techno music, but drowns them with volcanic metal eruptions.
A revelatory and disorienting album that makes you think anew about the sonic palette of the pipe organ.
Eyal Hareuveni
Hampus Lindwall (organ, electronics, guitar), Stephen O’Malley (electric guitar)
