MONOLIGHT - Free Music

With Rune Grammofon, the label he founded four years ago, Rune Kristoffersen continuously investigates the outer spheres of contemporary electronic music and jazz. Counting the crème of Nordic music, including Deathprod, Alog, Supersilent, or SPUNK to name but a few, the label’s unconventional releases have proved to be as diverse as exiting.
After officiating as one third of pop combo Fra Lippo Lippi that he formed in 1978, Rune Kristoffersen has turned to more experimental grounds. Far from the more traditional techno sound of his first Monolight album, published in 1995 on Norwegian label Tatra, Kristoffersen breaks off with traditionally structured ways of composing and recording music to explore the realms of improvised electronic compositions. Working with a very simple set up – a digital synthesizer, two analogue and a few effects processors - each track is built around very few sounds and processed in real time by Kristoffersen, leaving him with no margin for error. As he puts it himself, “if it a good take, it’ll be kept, if not, it’ll get binned”. The result is nothing less of impressive. The control over the sonic patterns gives the compositions an incredibly organic feel, as they seem to seamlessly evolve from one structure to another. Close to some of the dogmas of the Musique Concrète movement, Kristoffersen provides here an interesting form of freestyle electronica, not based on magnetic tapes as the likes of Pierre Henry or Pierre Schaeffer experimented with in the fifties and sixties, but achieving similarly evocative minimalist sonic landscapes made of microscopic sections expended or reduced according to the experimentation. Intricate melodic shapes and mechanical rhythmic configurations form and disappear at random, never interacting with each other more than necessary. Isolated and devoid of proper rules, the atmospheric constructions are entirely focused on sounds. The most recent recordings, namely the Duo Abstractions series, take the process to even more extreme territories, as Kristoffersen obviously is more comfortable with this hit or miss creative process. Although particularly arid, the four scattered segments of this series are exhilaratingly complex and diverse.
Free Music is not the most accessible of records, but the cohesion of the work presented here, and its fragility – Kristoffersen emphasises that, due to the particular process of composition, these tracks cannot be reproduced twice – gives it a very human touch.