Kajsa Lindgren - WOMB (2018) [Hi-Res]

After last year’s first record with Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, Berlin’s Hyperdelia comes back with a second release – a lucid underwater music composed and arranged by Swedish composer Kajsa Lindgren.

»WOMB« is a musical narration for abstracted ears and bodies – engulfing a listener simultaneously in subaquatic sonic environments, distant dreams, memories and voices from the unknown: where time and space fold into each other.

The initial material of field-recordings, interviews and compositions has been re-recorded and re-amped underwater in a swimming pool – and has been re-arranged now for stereo home listening. It’s like we’ve travelled from the outer space fantasies into the alien underworlds to surface in your homely headspace.

»WOMB« at times resembles Gustav Mahler’s distant rememberings, dramatised by Björk, in other moments the sounds become tiny and intimate, when »WOMB« makes one think of Felicia Atkinson's music, while the environmental ambiences reminisce the static music of Kevin Drumm. The delicate layerings of field recordings, re-recordings and environments makes »WOMB« a fascinating phonopoetic fiction, that conjures its own surreal virtual ecology: of distant strings, filtered through hydrophones (on cocoon), deep sea creatures singing to a de-tuned toy piano (the garden), of folk songs sung through telephone hiss (on all the other children), of waves crashing at the sea shores of Narnia (the inanimate world pt. 2).

Kajsa Lindgren is a composer educated in both western contemporary music and electroacoustic composition, based in Stockholm.

Kajsa explores different sonic relationships within specific environments in both sound art and electroacoustics, her work focuses on field recording with which she sonically investigates ecologies and eco systems. These works become musical research studies of underwater worlds or of public spaces in the city. Kajsa has studied electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

»WOMB« is Kajsa’s first full length record. There will be an underwater release concert in Stockholm, at Storkyrkobadet on 2 June, a virtual reality installation online, followed by a digital EP of remixes of the original material.