Everything on this side of death was the purview of the Vita Duvan, which opened in the northern coastal city of Luleå in 1856 as Sweden’s only true panopticon prison. The concept was devised in the eighteenth century by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who envisioned the panopticon as a means of reform and rehabilitation as well as control: designed in the round, the panopticon would allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single guard without the inmates themselves ever knowing whether or not they were being watched, effectively compelling them to self-regulate their behaviour. Subjected to the whims of an avaricious all-seeing eye, inmates were expected to put their best foot forward, working fixed hours and completing all of their chores, while the totalising force of the panopticon was also conceived as a way to move beyond the horrors of public humiliation, torture and capital punishment.
Bentham’s ideas proved influential but were rarely put into practise, as the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and Pentonville in London led a trend towards central halls with radiating wings, which were not true panopticons although they still separated prisoners into individual cells. Up in Luleå, the Vita Duvan with its nine-sided tower and two floors remained in operation as a panopticon prison until 1979, during which time it detained people for a range of crimes including theft, perjury, drunkenness and vagrancy, domestic violence and even miscarriage and abortion.
Commissioned by Statens Konstråd for Luleåbiennalen 2020, the composer and spectralist Maria W Horn created a suite of vocal and electronic music as part of an installation for the decommissioned Vita Duvan prison. Seeking to capture both the anxiety of observation and the sensory deprivation of isolation, the suite was presented as a multichannel sound and light installation where the imagined voices of individual inmates were represented by loudspeakers which spoke to one another across the prison cells. Now set for release through the Stockholm label XKatedral, the opening track of Panoptikon which gestures towards the brutality as well as the suffocating omniscience of the prison uses call and response vocals to strive and strife towards a sense of community, with Horn’s winnowing architectures accompanied by the singers Sara Parkman, Sara Fors, David Åhlén and Vilhelm Bromander.
Honing in on the small village of Seyðisfjörður, which lies diametrically opposed to Reykjavík surrounded by mountains on the east coast of Iceland, the oral obsessor and dauntless utopianist Björk dusts one off from the vault as a means to fund and support ongoing protests against open-pen salmon farming. The track stems from the Vespertine era and was rediscovered earlier this year, with Björk enlisting Rosalía and Sega Bodega to add vocals and production effects to the dancehall beat, luring a Spanish-language audience as an added boon as intensive salmon farming has proved especially controversial and widespread in Argentina and Chile.
A swirling descent which clasps through the undergrowth, the whorling centrepiece of Teresa Winter’s new album Proserpine takes the climax of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy with its lapses of breath and mushed crumbs of seedcake passed mouth to mouth as a sort of leitmotif for desire, which it spreads thickly through gauzy organ drones and looped vocals like purpling rhododendrons producing their mad honey. The bassist Devin Hoff, most recently one half of the incendiary Mendoza Hoff Revels, pays poignant tribute to his dear friend Ariel Tonkel, the Japanese producer Wata Igarashi produces a trio of forgotten tales culled from his debut full-length Agartha, while on Forest of Tines the synthesist Egil Kalman emerges through a thicket of cables and wires to play the Buchla 200.
Best known for the Aura suite which was composed in tribute to Miles Davis and released as the American jazz icon’s final album in 1989, scored for a big band and blending jazz fusion with classical impressionism as he drew inspiration from Gil Evans as well as the composers Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives, the self-taught trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg had taken a break from the stage before his return to live performance at DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen in February of this year. Ushered by the guitarist Jakob Bro, the set comprised material from their 2018 album Returnings and from Gefion, which marked Bro’s leader debut for ECM Records, with the duo joined on this occasion by Mikkelborg’s old Aura collaborator, the acclaimed percussionist Marilyn Mazur. The result was Strands which finds the trio of Danish improvisers gazing out over a low tide, as Bro’s rippling guitar textures lay the canvas for Mikkelborg’s restrained and elegiac yet still winsomely sonorous breaths on the flugelhorn and trumpet, while Mazur cuts a swathe over by the rock pools through burgeoning gongs, bowed metals and rumbling drums.
Black Truffle and the sound artist, ethnographer and independent filmmaker Yasuhiro Morinaga present the first album-length documentation of Sombat Simla, known throughout Thailand but especially in his home of Mahasarakham province as ‘the god of khene’. Captured over the course of one day, the pieces on Master of Bamboo Mouth Organ, which was originally released unedited back in 2018, range from molam folk songs played inside of a cattle shed alongside the percussionist Mali Moodsansee and the cymbalist Pattaradon Ekchatree to solo incantations whose long tones and chugging rhythms have been described by the Bangkok Post as like ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.
And hard on the heels of his hermetically sealed and domestically abundant twenty-first studio album, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy both lifts the lid and screws the cap on his Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You era as the folk crooner eases on down the road with a holdall in the form of that record’s title track, bringing Emmett Kelly, Blake Mills, Shahzad Ismaily, Jim Keltner, Heather Summers, Lacey Guthrie and Katy Peabody together as part of a wider ensemble. Now just relax . . .
* * *
Maria W Horn – ‘Omnia Citra Mortem’
* * *
* * *
Palle Mikkelborg, Jakob Bro and Marilyn Mazur – ‘Strands’
* * *
Teresa Winter – ‘Flower Of The Mountain’
* * *
Sombat Simla – ‘Lom Phat Prow’
* * *
* * *
björk – ‘oral’ (feat. rosalía)
* * *
dev hoff – ‘Carnelian and Serpentine’
* * *
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – ‘Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You’
