SOFA is very proud to release the outstanding debut record of composer/guitarist Fredrik Rasten.

In Six Moving Guitars, the stable sounds of justly tuned consonances are being «activated» by the different qualities of the movements of the guitars. The piece came out of the collaborative work between three dancers and three musicians. The group’s goal was to work with choreography and sound as a unity, erasing the functional differences between dancer and musician and focusing solely on the sonic output of moving or spatially situated sound sources.

Six Moving Guitars is the result of one of the pathways that the group followed. The piece comprises an integrated whole of sound and movement, where all the six performers become moving guitar players and where the moving of the guitars is always instrumental to its specific spatial and sounding effect.

The music and the movements tied to the specific playing techniques and sounds are composed by Rasten, whereas the overall choreographic form is created through a process of playing and investigating the material collectively in a room. The piece can also be seen as a study in how people, without necessarily being trained musicians, can act together in a musical situation based on awareness of listening and spatial orientation.

Fredrik Rasten (b.1988) is a guitarist and composer from Oslo. Explorative work with intonation and related sound phenomena is a key musical tool for his work, both as an improviser/performer and as a composer. He is also a member of ensembles like Oker and Pip and released the album Giraffe, with solo guitar music and songs by Johan Lindvall on Edition Wandelweiser in 2018. Six Moving Guitars is his solo debut.

Six Moving Guitars is released on LP and CD, and includes liner notes by composer Catherine Lamb.


LP / CD can be purchased via sofamusic.no


Liner notes by Catherine Lamb

While I am listening to Rasten’s Six Moving Guitars (collectively choreographed), the kinetic aura surrounding the active, medial, and passively resonating guitar strings articulated by humans in rhythmic motion immediately brings to mind Paul Klee’s arrows. I open up his Pedagogical Sketchbook* from 1925, and find that, while listening to the recordings (in five parts), I feel as though Klee is actually describing and drawing many of the things I am listening to, almost throughout his Bauhaus course, even proportional decisions regarding rhythm and intonation (specifically 2:3:5:7). I highly recommend allowing these two works to coexist together as a listener/reader. For instance, in his very first lesson, Klee describes a moving, curved line as,



I.1 An active line on a walk, moving freely, without a goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward.



So begins Rasten’s Wandering, the moment points become activated, as well being almost the instructions given to the performers, setting forth a collective plane together in the space. I will also include here the most obvious and striking description from Klee’s Sketchbook:



IIII.35. The Circle.



This latter form (Fig. 65) can be expanded through increased motion at the fixed guidance point of the pendulum. The observable significance of such a form continuity, originating at the guidance point, is transposed into larger mobile forms. The purest mobile form, the cosmic one, however, is only created through the liquidation of gravity (through elimination of material ties). This moment is imagined as occurring while the pendulum is in full swing. It will circumscribe a circle which is the purest of mobile forms (...)



Klee was also a musician, and it must be assumed he reflected on the motion of sound waves in air, as he seemed interested in physics and perception. Rasten asks the performers to move themselves, to become the arrows and to activate the vibrating strings releasing sound energies. In Circling, the performers even become their own rotating planets, (later in Pendulating with the bodies of the guitars as satellites), attempting at unison motions in their combined orbits. So we hear the phases of nodal resonances always with their stretching/striating of one another’s articulations, blurring the air between one another, so that dimensionality becomes perfume/smoke. This obscures the space between the moving bodies and allows for combined or resultant forms to bloom in the middle or accumulated space. Meaning that each seemingly small and humble strumming of a guitar string, with its own arced decay and rising and falling motion from axial positions, becomes a passive resonator combining together with others to create stark shapes and vibrant colors with fuzzy outlines (the kinetic energy which placed them there). It’s as though I’m looking directly at a Klee painting! (Except that sound inherently transcends materiality). Frequencies are ungraspable—bouncing, absorbing, coalescing, ever transitioning into a dream to our (the listeners') current waking. The fleshy thumbs on the guitar strings activate the sounds but cannot contain them once they are set into motion in the air— here the material ties are eliminated. The afterimages, however, can leave a meaningful impression on the mind.



Upon studying these five pieces and listening to them multiple times, I find myself in many lovely and strangely correlated pathways. For instance, they bring to mind La Monte Young when he wrote “draw a straight line and follow it” in his Composition 1960 No. 10, where he asked someone to do such a seemingly simple task that can never be perfectly realized, and how such a focused activity (an arrow towards perfection) might have later instigated acts of musical beauty. Or Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 No Manifesto: as a choreographer, she said,



No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe (…)



Rasten’s approach has more buoyancy and playfulness. Where both these former (balanced) strains/ conceptualities could be considered present in his work, the manner in which they are executed are from a non-virtuoso’s individual intuition splashing with another’s, following the beauty of natural elements as might happen in a very clear improvisation. I turn to the composer Jose Maceda, the closest relative (other than Klee!) that I can find to this music, who somehow was able to convince large communities of people (outdoors or in large open rooms) to activate vivid music together through simple instructions on multiplicities of the same musical instrument, not as magic or make-believe, but as joyous physical form unfurling in space.



*Klee, Paul Pedagogical Sketchbook, translated by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Faber and Faber Limited, 1953




- Catherine Lamb, February 2019, Berlin