MG: Yes, I think that's a very good observation and a pertinent remark. When I first was in the process of envisioning the music in the early 2000s (after going through a very thorough crisis where I more or less stopped playing the saxophone and more or less quit playing jazz and free jazz) I realized that I had this desire for the music to be more of an environment, a place or a terrain rather than primarily being an object, an architecture or a means of individual or collective expression. I also felt something of a frustration with what I perceived as a dichotomy and separation of compositional and improvisational practices, and that there should be so many possible gradations of the spectrum between freedom and fixation that perhaps weren't being explored. So gradually I started to envision a musical environment in which the musicians were allowed and encouraged to move freely in accordance with their own judgment and individual dispositions while at the same time being governed by the same overarching principles or perhaps rather just simply being part of the same creation or environment, a creation or environment which was in more or less constant flux, change or transformation while at the same time always being the same. To provide a potential which could be realized in more or less an innumerable number of ways while still being coherent and retaining a clear identity.

JG:  Yes, and as a happy accident you were moving through that process of exploring new intersections of freedom and fixation precisely when Simon Reynell (Another Timbre label head) found his personal interests and tastes shifting to  a similarly imagined territory; your inaugural release on Another Timbre, Ist Gefallen.. was published in 2012- Reynell has said in a couple of interviews that that was the year he began to commit more of his focus for the Another Timbre catalogue to the open score possibilities. not to place too fine a point on this but how fortunate is the timing and confluence between the pools you were entering into as a composer and Reynell's curatorial interests as one of a very few publishers of experimental music?

MG: Yes, crossing paths with Simon at that time definitely was of great importance to me. His initial response to (and continuing interest) in my music was (and still is) very encouraging and initially came at quite a crucial point in my musical life. For a number of years, during the period when I first started experimenting and developing my music after more or less having quit playing jazz and free improvised music, I had had this feeling of increasingly becoming more and more isolated and that my new work seemed to fall in between categories, that there didn't seem to be too many obvious or existing contexts, platforms or communities for the music that I had in mind. So on the one hand starting Skogen and reaching out to and inviting sympathetic musicians like Angharad and Toshi that already were part of an international community of experimental musicians, and on the other hand establishing contact with Simon both proved very valuable in breaking this feeling of isolation that I had. And in a larger perspective I think Simon's work with Another Timbre has been very important in making these different kinds of music more visible and in creating a sense of community and belonging to listeners and practitioners alike. And in initiating and encouraging new projects he has been an invaluable catalytic force as well, of course.

And as regards the idea or perspective of sentience in the context of music I have often felt and thought that sound and musical materials are very delicate matters that one must be very careful with. There is of course this indeed very well-known quote of Feldman's where he, when asked by Stockhausen what his secret is, answers that he doesn't push sounds around. And for me that very much goes for people as well, neither do I like to push people around nor do I myself like to be pushed around. So I guess my music perhaps to at least some extent may be considered as some sort of response to the delicacy of sound and music as well as people.

JG: As I have been listening to your music I have been revisiting the journal writings of the Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud, specifically Air of Solitude - bear with me in providing some context for this linkage- in 2014 Jurg Frey was our house guest for a week during the preparations and rehearsals for the Wandelweiser festival I presented in St. Paul; one night he  talked enthusiastically about his regard for the writings of Roud, elaborating a little on the poet’s creative process and how that process resonated for Jurg as a composer. This sent me searching for Roud’s journals and poetry available in English translation- about which there is relatively little-much less commentary in English-  the salient aspects about Roud that I find in listening to your work of the past decade: Roud lived in one place, a family farm in Carrouge, from 11 years old to his death at age 79. He developed a regular practice of walking through the countryside with a journal, noting any and all variations in the landscapes-fluctuations in weather, the attendant seasonal changes, the fluctuations in his moods, perspective, et al. After many years of this practice, Roud wrote that at times these intimately familiar landscapes appeared as “elsewhere”, utterly changed by his close observation of them. In a journal entry about his melding with these landscapes he wrote, “…it enslaves us gently, in the manner of a symphony.” For decades Roud would lift passages from earlier journals and poems and enfold them into newer texts; this process creates, to my way of reading, work of both constant flux and a clear identity.

So it is with your compositions of the past decade: I set myself to listening through your eight releases in the eight years you’ve been published by AT, attuned to this idea of your folding and enfolding cells, fragments and canons in a lineage of pieces- clearly there are memories and materials that establish your “clear identity”, a “clearly articulated environment”, as you referred to it in an interview with Reynell. This genetic material has specific characteristics- threads of melancholia, dissolution, the claims of memory, pools of intervallic relationships with headwaters as divergent as Dowland and the American songbook. It seems as if, to some extent, you revisit and reframe familiar materials, which become elements of a new environment created by each newly rejoined or reconfigured ensemble. Maybe the familiar pools of melody and intervals are made “elsewhere” by the inclusion of improvisers like Toshi Nakamura.

Henri-Frederic Amiel, a contemporary of Roud, said “Every landscape is a state of the spirit.” This all plays into why I told you I hear your compositions as a new sort of field recording.

MG: Yes, I haven't read Roud myself but Jürg has told me a little bit about his life and work and from your description of Roud's methods it sounds as if there might be some similarities, perhaps not as closely related or analogous to Roud's procedures as Jürg's own compositional practice as I have understood it but still related somehow. Even if I don't keep (and use) a journal or a sketchbook in the same way as Roud did or Jürg does, I guess there definitely still are these specific, recurring topics and patterns in my music that you so perceptively point out. Perhaps one could say that the individual pieces are different outcomes of more or less the same (or slowly evolving) gene pool, the same way that different takes of the same piece are outcomes of more or less the same conditions. And I guess that's very much how what we call style generally works, both in terms of individual style as well as in the sense of broader musical historical trends or perspectives: once certain conditions are established individual traits tend to even out a bit, at least when seen from a certain distance. But I think it's important to, if not to (re)invent the wheel, so at least to try to cultivate and treasure the sensibility and ability of experiencing something unknown arising from the seemingly well known. To me these are among the most joyful and thrilling musical experiences one could have, and the collective intelligence and sensibility of the musicians are indeed one of the most important prerequisites to actually make them happen.

JG: To date-May 2020- you've released eight ensemble pieces on AT, with five different group configurations -the core unit of Skogen is expanded and elevated by various guest musicians from the realms of baroque music, noise and improvisation. Your intuitive aim- "something unknown arising from the seemingly known"- is realized within a collective of musical relationships extending back 15 years, as well as many completely new encounters.

This sort of experiment- layering and enfolding known and unknown musicians from disparate musical practices into scores with fixed and fragile, notated and malleable elements- has seldom been attempted in quite this manner. The risks are daunting- the risks of pastiche, of a diminution of the respective strengths of players confronting new intersections of style and substance- I think we're in accord on the idea that it is these very risks of failure that create something new, music against reproduction, as Phillip Larkin observed, "like something almost being said."

In past interviews you've always cited the gifts and sensibilities of the ensemble members in realizing your pieces-I want to ask you to expand a little more on the collective experience, one you refer to as contingent, fragile and resting entirely on trust. How, from your perspective, does the ensemble work?

MG: Well, when it comes to how the ensembles work and what makes the music work, I must say it's always something somewhat mysterious about how things (sometimes quite suddenly) fall into place, particularly when working with new ensembles. That's something which very much escapes or transcends notation (at least in my particular case) and which very much is the result of just playing together, of getting acquainted with the materials and the specific dynamics of the actual ensemble, of cultivating a common practice where everyone gets familiar with the materials and find their own individual and particular ways of navigating them while at the same time getting attuned to the musical environment in its totality. And yes, I guess there is always a risk of failure and an element of danger to this almost ritualistic process of almost trying to conjure up or invoke the music. At the same time I must say that I feel quite confident in how it works: how the nature of the materials and the intelligence and the sensibility of the performers provide a rather dependable potential for the music to arise from.

JG: Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost extends the lineage of your scored environments; for the third time you’ve assembled a tentet for a recording. The collective sound is without clutter, with long passages of pointillism, whispers, undergrowth rustling, at once low-volume and highly dynamic. I am pleased you acknowledged the “somewhat mysterious” element of your composition. To single out just a few facets of the collective sound, I have to say how aware I am on this one of the brilliant colors of Ko Ishikawa’s sho and the subversive play of Toshi Nakamura. I’m not using subversive as a pejorative- Nakamura frequently adds sand and grit to an environment that is otherwise as lucid and brilliant as a mirror. Also, I hear the spirit of gamelan threading through your prior works and this one-this is seldom remarked on in the reviews I’ve seen.
Of course the ensemble in toto sounds fantastic; to your ears, are there aspects of Let My Weary Ghost… that are distinctive from you earlier releases on Another Timbre?

MG: Well, as you also pointed out I guess I also consider the new recording very much an outgrowth or continuation of our previous work. And I was of course very happy to be able to include Toshi, Ko, Angharad, Rhodri and Simon in the ensemble this time, they are all wonderful musicians and contribute greatly to the music in the ways that you describe.
It's also interesting that you notice something of a gamelan influence in my work. Even though I have never tried to use or relate to particular techniques or forms associated with Gamelan I have for many years had a very strong affection to Javanese Gamelan music in particular and have listened to it quite extensively on and off for a couple of decades or so. For a long time I have also had a fondness for Gagaku, another wonderful orchestral tradition which has inspired me greatly, even if I don't have too much technical knowledge about it. But even if my knowledge about these traditions is very limited, I do think they have been very influential to me anyhow, along with many other forms of music from different ages and geographical areas. I guess that my own work in certain respects perhaps may be considered something of an attempt to synthesise all these different experiences and affections that have become part of you, to try to resolve or integrate sometimes seemingly opposing tendencies into a coherent form, into some sort of oneness.

JG: It’s been a pleasure to talk a little about your work after listening to it for a number of years; I want to leave off for now with a remark you made in your guest lecture at the New England Conservatory of Music last year-it seems apposite to these strange times; you said, “No grand theories on my part...(but) a simple desire to get to know this music a little bit better, of perhaps making oneself a little bit more at home in the world.”

MG: And thanks for taking your time listening to the music and coming up with such interesting perspectives, it's really been a pleasure on my part as well. Hope to see and hear from you soon again!

Reviews:

Magnus Granberg has drawn on sources as diverse as songs by English Renaissance composers John Dowland and William Byrd, the 1930s popular song “If I Should Lose You,” Schubert song cycles, Frank Sinatra’s interpretation of “None but the Lonely Heart” and Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean.” So, it should come as no surprise that for “Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost,” he mused on “O Death Rock Me Asleep,” a song attributed to Anne Boleyn (assumed to have been composed whilst she was imprisoned in the Tower of London) along with Bill Evans’ interpretation of Michel Legrand’s “You Must Believe in Spring.” As always with Granberg, these are just starting points. He talks about this approach as “letting preexisting musical materials (rhythmic fragments, tonal materials) serve as a creative impulse which then are interbred with certain methods which transform the original materials and turn them into something quite different… Without perhaps being able to grasp these musics in their totality, I can at least approach fragments of them, getting more intimately acquainted with the music via these smaller fragments, and letting them become part of a new music which in turn is very much informed by fragments of other musics. And all these fragments together are formed into a new whole where the different impulses may not always be immediately traceable, but are still in some way present in the subtext of the music.” The piece, commissioned by the Berlin-based Splitter Orchester for their 2019 music festival, was written for an extended version of the group Skogen, featuring Anna Lindal on violin, Leo Svensson Sander on cello, Rhodri Davies on harp, Ko Ishikawa on sho, Simon Allen on vibraphone and amplified springs, Erik Carlsson on percussion, Henrik Olsson on objects, friction and piezo, Petter Wästberg on contact microphone, credit card, mixing board and loudspeaker, Toshimaru Nakamura on no-input mixing board and the composer on prepared piano. Granberg has been tapping this pool of musicians for over a decade and they are acutely keyed in to his approach toward compositional frameworks built around strategies of constant flux. It is left to each participant to navigate tempo, timbre and the fragmentation and repetition of the materials while adhering to the overarching form of the piece. Central to the framework is a thorough integration of tonal and timbral instruments, amalgamating the harmonic resonance of strings, the percussive attack of prepared piano and vibraphone, the quavering, reedy oscillations of sho and the abraded and gritty textures of amplified surfaces and electronics into an active fields of striated simultaneity and ever-shifting detail.   Listening to “Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost” is a bit like sitting and listening to a marsh at dusk. Individual voices prick out and recede against a freely evolving tranquil sonic field. Each of the musicians progress along their own arcs, informed by what is transpiring around them without ever being directly swayed from their individual trajectories. Granberg talks about having spent time listening to Javanese Gamelan music and Gagaku, and while he doesn’t draw specific techniques or forms from those traditions, their approaches to ensemble structures is certainly evident. The piece starts out sparely, with Granberg’s prepared piano, plucked strings, metallic percussive plinks and sputters of electronics sounding across each other. While the voices slowly accrue, there is a constant balance of density and dynamics which maintains a transparency to the ensemble sound throughout. The choice of tonal material creates pools of harmonic fragments which play off of each other interwoven with the breathy microtonality of the sho and the abraded and scuffed textures of amplified surfaces, electronics and no-input mixing board. It is that changeable mix, in particular, that gives Skogen’s readings of Granberg’s music an unmistakable sound.   This performance was recorded in Stockholm in November 2019, with performances at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival directly before the session and at the Splitter Music Festival in Berlin directly after (captured on video here). Watching the Berlin performance and listening to this recording, one is struck by the balance of form and freedom that Granberg creates, and the sympathetic focus that Skogen so fully embraces. Each performance encapsulates the overarching composition while displaying the spontaneous tacks of the ensemble. This marks Granberg’s seventh release on Another Timbre, and his fourth with Skogen, clearly a fruitful relationship that continues to deliver captivating results.

Michael Rosenstein, Dusted Magazine

No reassuring certainty from the new piece by Magnus Granberg with the ensemble Skogen, either. Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost promises the usual intricate blending of classical and folk instruments with objects and electronics, but things get off to a tense start. The electronics make their presence clear right from the beginning, set in stark relief against the prepared piano and percussion. Throughout the piece, sounds coexist in an uneasy truce that feels like it could end at any moment. Percussive sounds dominate, leaving the strings and winds to run the gauntlet. Electronics are more abrasive and confrontational this time (Toshimaru Nakamura has joined the group here), while never dominating. Instruments such as violin and sho are left to add shading, in ways that highlight the fraught atmosphere more than resolve it. Drums and untuned percussion emerge later – another disturbing addition to Skogen’s sound. By the end of the piece, the situation has insidiously accumulated a sense of urgency; the pace seems to increase slightly – something I haven’t felt in Granberg’s music before – as the music seems anxious to reach a conclusion: rushing, but slowly.

Ben Harper, Boring Like a Drill

Andas, blunda. Granbergs musik hörs som frånvaro eller inslumrande. Ett förandligat ögonblick då hjärnan glömmer bort kroppen utdraget till en timme. Jag följer första impuls och lutar mig bekvämt bakåt medan pianot lägger ut punktvisa toner. Långsamt – som att omsorgsfullt dra ett långt blyertsstreck för att teckna en horisont som aldrig vill ta slut. Jag kopplar av men det är ingen risk att somna, jag sjunker allt djupare i den lågmälda utsträckta musiken. Det som händer kring Granbergs melodistämma av lika delar paus och klang rör sig lika långsamt – fast ibland tvärsemot. Lindals violin töjer tonerna tyst, ett slagverk knattrar förstrött, ur avsiktliga misstag kommer ljud från Nakamura. Så lågdynamisk men ändå ger skivan ingen ro. Med sin lugna andning blir musiken ett skimmer av oförutsebara klanger, ljud, rörelser. Så förandligat sammansatt att snart känns gruppen som en enda kropp, försjunken i sig själv. Det är oerhört vackert men aldrig skönt, eftersom den lever av spänningar som aldrig vill lösa upp sig. Allt upphör med en ton eller rättare sagt mikrosekunderna av tystnad som följer. Så lägger Skogen ännu en inspelad timme till den fintonade gråflimrande musik som är deras. Förändringen ligger i de små detaljerna och helhetens skiftningar i klanger; en värld tecknad med finaste blyerts. Och jag väntar ivrigt på nästa album.

Thomas Millroth, Orkesterjournalen

The time is ripe for fertile exchanges to take place not only between historically distinct musical genres, but also between entire disciplines whose gap has gradually narrowed in the space of just a century. And it shouldn’t be seen as a judgment of merit the fact that, in recent years, much classical composition has become almost indistinguishable from a sound installation, like an apparently autonomous microcosm beyond the threshold of signification whose only principle, as in nature, is existence itself. 
Thoughts go immediately to certain members of the Wandelweiser collective – and particularly the masters of acoustic reductionism Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger –, but more generally to the “community” of international voices relating to Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre catalogue, which since 2012 has given particular importance also to the poetics of Sweden’s Magnus Granberg and his ensemble Skogen. Recorded a few days before the Berlin premiere for the second Splitter Music Festival – the original commissioner of the work – “Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost” responds to a concept of “static mutability” of the sonic material: a space of the mind circumscribed but regulated by benign laws within which interpreters may act according to their individual instinct and sensitivity. 
Thus the author explains the intention underlying the piece: “I realized that I had this desire for the music to be more of an environment, a place or a terrain rather than primarily being an object, an architecture or a means of individual or collective expression. I also felt something of a frustration with what I perceived as a dichotomy and separation of compositional and improvisational practices, and that there should be so many possible gradations of the spectrum between freedom and fixation that perhaps weren’t being explored.” In this (para)expressive sphere, primary heir of Morton Feldman‘s aesthetics, extended pieces favor the illusion of an “objectified” time, suspended in a dimension detached from conscious experience in which sonic events follow one another like discreet shadows on the absolute white of an idealized score. In the specific case, this aspect proves especially true with regard to the live performance, where the minimal gestures of the instrumentalists confirm the impression of a landscape subjected to almost imperceptible jolts. 
As for the present edition, however, one would argue that the studio recording and above all the mixing become an integral part of the composition process: the architect of this wise balance is Anders Dahl – previously alongside Skogen as composer (Rows, Another Timbre, 2013) – whom distributes the ten elements of the ensemble among the audio channels in order to shape an oscillating system of accidental intersections between acoustic and electronic sources; the final outcome doesn’t seem to evoke a concerted action as much as a pointillistic process of manual juxtaposition of the various timbral fragments, an effect that further strengthens the perception of an abstract installative environment rather than an interpretation in the traditional sense. Guided by the caressing strokes of the prepared piano (Granberg), the vibraphone and other percussions – one of the hypothetical Western configurations of the Balinese gamelan –, with utmost poise the different sections of the ensemble travel the parallel paths granted by the score’s limited aleatory: the brevity and spatial dispersion of the interventions causes their random dialogue to resemble a mechanism of more or less matching gears, and therefore an endogenous motion rather than the progressive advancement on a distended timeline. 
Among the most distinctive features remains the fragility of the strings played without vibrato, a sort of chirping that goes hand in hand with the gentle, organ-like blowing of the sho (Ko Ishikawa) and the sparse chimings of the harp (Rhodri Davies). The moderate flow of instrumental improvisations is interposed by the much more pervasive one of Petter Wastberg’s live electronics, flanked by Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixing board: the coming and going of hums and frequencies between the first and second auditory layers makes the overall picture resemble the now historic (and debated) performance of the supergroup MIMEO with the dean of experimental pianism John Tilbury (The Hands of Caravaggio, Erstwhile, 2002), an electroacoustic chimera resulting from an unrepeatable confluence of creative energies. In this way, a refined mix of organic and artificial, spontaneity and taming takes place, replete with a colorless melancholy to which Magnus Granberg’s dreamlike scenario underlies only vaguely, like the chiaroscuro elegance of Vermeer’s “Girl Asleep” shown on the cover. Surely that isn’t just a mere synaesthetic suggestion: both the pictorial and the musical works describe interiors enveloped in the faint glow of a motionless yet vibrant time, mirrors of the soul rather than visible reality. Michele Palozzo, Esoteros Some eight years after his Another Timbre debut, Ist Gefallen In Der Schnee (2012), the good news for followers of Swedish composer-performer Marcus Granberg is that Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost—his ninth release on the label in as many years—is one of his best yet. Further good news is that this album features a ten-member Skogen, the group which has performed on four of the previous eight. Recorded in Stockholm in November 2019, this time out the group is led by Granberg himself on prepared piano, the only newcomers being Rhodri Davies on harp, and Simon Allen on vibraphone and amplified springs, both sounding like experienced members.

As with past Granberg pieces, for "Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost" he used existing pieces of music as creative impulses to aid its composition, but without merely copying parts of those sources. In this instance, the album title hints at one source, as it is a line from the poem "O Death Rock Me Asleep" written by (or for) Anne Boleyn—Henry VIII's second wife—when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1536, awaiting execution for adultery; the poem was set to music in the late 16th or early 17th century, by an anonymous composer. In complete contrast, the other source was Oscar-winning French composer Michel Legrand's "You Must Believe in Spring" (which Granberg first heard in his early youth, as recorded by pianist Bill Evans); hearing of Legrand's death in January 2019 prompted Granberg to use it.

Granberg's resulting piece is not rigidly composed, but consists of five large pools of musical materials, ordered into a number of sequences that are combined with a temporal framework which governs the piece throughout its duration—in this case fifty-six minutes. The musicians navigate freely within this, aided by a set of guidelines and their own musical judgment. This means that, straight from its first notes, the music is striking for its openness and sense of space; the beginning, middle and end of every sound can be heard clearly, with notes being placed so that players do not obscure each other's sounds. Occasionally electronic noises rumble underneath other instruments, but never loudly enough to mask them or distract attention from them; altogether the pieces of this particular jigsaw have been put together sensitively and intelligently. Throughout, the rhythmic patterns which notes create are frequently redolent of tranquil, soothing natural sounds such as distant water dripping from trees in a forest or the babbling of a brook, with Granberg's prepared piano frequently leading.

Altogether, "Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost" follows in the footsteps of past Granberg compositions played by Skogen, and shares their strengths—sensitive composition, empathetic group playing and a calm soundscape which richly repays repeated listening. Its beauty is not to be missed.

John Eyles, All About Jazz

Music can be very precious, with a few notes carefully positioned leading to a strange sonic universe. We have reviewed Magnus Granberg and Skogen before (reviews here, here and here) and his approach to composed improvisations continues to astonish us.

Like with the previous releases, this one hour long piece evolves slowly, quietly and intimitaley, with barely noticeable changes adding layers of nuances and perspectives.

The band consists of Magnus Granberg on prepared piano, Anna Lindal on violin, Rhodri Davies on harp Toshimaru Nakamura on no-input mixing board, Petter Wastberg on electronics, Ko Ishikawa on sho, Leo Svensson Sander on cello, Simon Allen on vibraphone and amplified strings, Henrik Olsson on objects, and Erik Carlsson on percussion. It never sounds like a tentet, the texture is so thin it sounds like only two musicians playing at any time, even it that is not the actual case.

Granberg emphasises the importance of the musicians themselves to participate in the same composition but by playing and rehearsing it, adding things and developing into something that becomes very much their own, yet without changing the nature of the original concept: "I guess there is always a risk of failure and an element of danger to this almost ritualistic process of almost trying to conjure up or invoke the music. At the same time I must say that I feel quite confident in how it works: how the nature of the materials and the intelligence and the sensibility of the performers provide a rather dependable potential for the music to arise from".

The title is inspired by the poem "O Death, rock me asleep", allegedly written by Anne Boleyn, queen of England and second wife of Henry VIII, before her execution in 1536.

O death! rock me asleep, Bring me the quiet rest; Let pass my weary guiltless ghost Out of my careful breast: Toll on the passing bell, Ring out the doleful knell, Let thy sound my death tell, Death doth draw nigh; There is no remedy There is no remedy

My pains who can express? Alas! they are so strong, My dolour will not suffer strength My life for to prolong: Toll on, thou passing bell, Ring out my doleful knell, Let thy sound my death tell, Death doth draw nigh; There is no remedy. 
 Alone in prison strong, I wait my destiny, Woe worth this cruel hap that I Should taste this misery? Toll on, thou passing bell, Let thy sound my death tell, Death doth draw nigh, There is no remedy. 
 Farewell my pleasures past, Welcome my present pain! I feel my torments so increase That life cannot remain. Cease now,thou passing bell; Rung is my doleful knell, For the sound my death doth tell, Death doth draw nigh, There is no remedy.

The art work of the album is a painting by Johannes Vermeer, "A Maid Asleep", possibly painted around 1656.  "The misbehavior of unsupervised maidservants was a common subject for seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Yet in his depiction of a young maid dozing next to a glass of wine, Vermeer transfigured an ordinary scene into an investigation of light, color, and texture that supersedes any moralizing lesson. While the toppled glass at left (now abraded with time) and rumpled table carpet may indicate a recently departed visitor, X-radiographs indicate that Vermeer chose to remove a male figure he had originally included standing in the door­way, heightening the painting’s ambiguity", according the text of the Met, where the painting is exhibited.

In an interview on the label's website, Granberg describes his music: "When I first was in the process of envisioning the music in the early 2000s (after going through a very thorough crisis where I more or less stopped playing the saxophone and more or less quit playing jazz and free jazz) I realized that I had this desire for the music to be more of an environment, a place or a terrain rather than primarily being an object, an architecture or a means of individual or collective expression. I also felt something of a frustration with what I perceived as a dichotomy and separation of compositional and improvisational practices, and that there should be so many possible gradations of the spectrum between freedom and fixation that perhaps weren't being explored. So gradually I started to envision a musical environment in which the musicians were allowed and encouraged to move freely in accordance with their own judgment and individual dispositions while at the same time being governed by the same overarching principles or perhaps rather just simply being part of the same creation or environment, a creation or environment which was in more or less constant flux, change or transformation while at the same time always being the same. To provide a potential which could be realized in more or less an innumerable number of ways while still being coherent and retaining a clear identity."

A poem, a painting, an ensemble. They result in music that is at the same time a calm resignation, a desire for rest and peace provided by death, but just not yet. The intimacy of the moment. The closed space. The tension in the narrative. The space dominated by what is not visible: the cause and the consequence, the past joy and the coming pain. There is the actionless waiting, with conflicting thoughts and emotions creating a dynamic tension, almost unseen, but more present than perceivable, determining the inherent ambiguity of the moment: asking for the welcoming peace of death.

Granberg is a master.

Stef Gijssels, Free Jazz Collective