I’ve been following Anna Högberg Attack since their debut album.
Usually, they are a sextet, but I guess after a 5 year break since their last album, they decided more is more.
This is a beautiful album. Stunning in its diversity of sound and method. Noisy section, quiet sections, fairly “Jazz” sections. Sad, Happy, Raucus, Joyous, Angry. I just loved it from beginning to end. Two long quarter hour tracks, my only complaint was that every time it ended, I kept hoping there was more. The sort of music I wish I was involved in making! Everything music!
Anna Högberg Alto Saxophone Elin Forkelid Tenor Sax Niklas Barnö Trumpet Maria Bertel Trombone Per Åke Holmlander Tuba Dieb13 Turntables Alex Zethson Piano Finn Loxbo Guitar + Saw Gus Loxbo Double Bass + Saw Kansan Zetterberg Double Bass Anton Jonsson Drums Dennis Egberth Drums
Ensemseglaren was number 48 on 2025’s wire magazine 50 “Releases of the Year” list.
A few years back, well, 2019 to be exact, I made it a project to listen to all 50 albums listed in the wire magazine top 50 albums of the year.
As I’ve been a bit lazy about listening to music, (Who has time to listen when you’ve got a stressful job and also need to practice your own music?) so thought I would try to revisit the idea and listen to all 50 albums wire magazine called the best albums of 2025.
The first album, Number 50 on the list, is “Bye Bye Bird” by Nina Garcia.
Bye Bye Bird is an album of guitar sounds, mostly solo guitar with some looping. There is very little traditional musical content, melodies and such.
Instead the album is primarily textural, using loops, harsh noise, distortion, etc. to create soundscapes of a sort.
I have to say I enjoy it, there are sounds on here I have never heard guitars make. It is a pleasant kick out the jams, set the controls for the heart of the sun, zone out with headphones on, and turn the amp to 11, kind of thing.
Sandpaper for your ear brains and inspirational sound sculpting.
However, it isn’t exactly an “everyday listen” and certainly not for every human, especially those seeking kind solace in their music.
“This is not a recording you can listen to as background music, it won’t let you speak or think, but if you let it, you may experience, perhaps not immediately a full on change in perspective of your everyday life. 8 years after these recordings were made, they are still valid as powerful compositions, made to be experienced on good speakers and are best through a large PA system. This musical material is meant to change your perspective in the making of and listening to music.”
Zbigniew Karkowski
The first track is a brief excerpt of an interview with Karkowski regarding music making and composition/improvisation, which then modulates into a brief excerpt from his music.
The other two tracks are recordings of live concerts from 2012 in Basel and Laussane, Switzerland, respectively.
I am not quite sure what to say about these two brutal slabs of mind altering harsh noise and can only imagine what it might have been like to be in attendance for their performances.
I can’t say that I enjoy them, exactly, but I do find they encourage a certain meditative mind set which enables me to switch my mind off from thoughts of the world.
“I’ve recently been interested in building layers of intentional chaos and exploring perceptions of order and the natural human tendency to seek and find patterns within that sound. There is a deliberate contrast between the controlled chaos simulating the natural world and the synthetic sounds I’m working with.“
Two longer pieces and 4 shorter pieces.
Names of the pieces use words in combination with three primary words, Flock, Flap, and Chirp.
Sounds seem primarily programmatically generated or manipulated. While it says below that these were recorded during a “sampler performance”, the sounds themselves seldom sound as if they were drawn from the natural world, except in the most abstract sense.
With the quote from their website which opens this writeup, it is hard to know how many of the event streams are simply set in motion and how many of them might be manipulated during their progress.
In general, what order which is expressed in the pieces is more like the order of nature sounds than the order of music. I.e., in general, there is no apparent tempo in most pieces relating the divergent sounds to the other sounds. When tempo does develop in events, as in track 4, “FLOCK1_MILCHI”, the tempos of the different event streams converge, but don’t affect the tempo of other event streams.
As if, in an algorithmic forest, we are listening to the sounds of algorithmic wind ticking through algorithmic branches as algorithmic creatures frolicking in that artificial world, all to the tempo or progress along the events of their algorithmic day.
On the other hand, while synthetic, it is not particularly harsh or dissonant, and somehow a pleasant feeling of lightness or almost whimsy is present in most pieces.
As an exercise, I recommend you listen to “Chirps” by Steve Lacy and Evan Parker, before, during, or after listening to Flocking 19 by Shedding.
“Assembled from July 2019 sampler performances in Milwaukee (Jazz Gallery) and Chicago (Elastic Arts)”
Track names involve various combinations of the letters, “H”, “J”, “P”, and S” and a modifier. “SHJP Slow”, for example or, “JPSH Color Dust”.
Music is various electronic percussion, often nearly painfully syncopated, with various organ-ish keyboard washes or accents floating over that percussive bed. The stereo sound field is very dynamically and enjoyably used for the various elements of the pieces.
The music itself, despite its syncopation, has a lighthearted feel, not one of menace.
If I were to put it in the vicinity of anything, it is a bit along the lines of British electronic music duo Autechre.
Yves De Mey, along with being an electronic music creator, is a sound designer, producer, and engineer based in Antwerp, Belgium. He has done work for soundtracks, video games, etc.
As SUPERPANG is a label known for releasing abstract electronic music and noise, Yves De Mey’s “01A08” is a fairly accessible, light hearted, and enjoyable album, I found myself gravitating towards putting it on often during my trips back home from band practice in Oakland over the last few months and weeks Or when my mind is tired and needs a bit of non-demanding syncopated relaxation.
“All tracks produced by Yves De Mey in Antwerp, August and September 2020”
I have to admit I do not get this SUPERPANG release.
It sounds like a sample of a type writer or a closed high-hat cymbal which has been sped up or slowed down and then repeated a number of times at that speed. Then these series of samples are sequenced against other similar sequences which have been altered to different speeds.
The blocks of samples are sequenced relatively sparingly across the audio field and the apparent volume levels are left fairly low overall.
When I first put it on, I wasn’t sure if it was on at all, or if my car was making a new and surprising, but not particularly concerning, ticking sound.
Interesting techniques, but to me, the overall effect is of walking into a room full of very competent and very busy typists.
“Composed through experimental scheduling algorithms that explore the duality of immediate, direct events with gradual and evolving processes.”
While not quite as academic an exercise as, “Data sonification of the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence,” that does sound a bit dry. Fortunately, the sounds generated by the exercise are not so dry as the theory.
One thing I like about Volume & Void is that the progression of the pieces, while not musical in the traditional sense most of the time, do have a natural feel. Like sitting on your porch listening to a thunder storm. There is no “Theme and Variation” or “Call and Response”, but certain sounds have repetitive characteristics that evolve or change as the pieces progress.
Some parts of pieces might sound like a close mic on an insect chewing a leaf. Others a the sound effect from a b-movie of a hovering UFO. Others a needle scraping across a vinyl album. Or even tap dancing shoes. But certainly none of the more typical sound sample or rhythmic hallmarks associated with more commercial electronic music. Some nice speaker stretching low end booms, though.
There is a lot of variety in sounds and an active use of the sound/mixing/space/mind stage to blend or transform the various sounds dramatically. Quiet to Loud, Loud to Quiet.
The album is always progressing and always interesting, and, like a thunderstorm, you never quite know what will happen next.
It is also a very different experience to listen to loudly in the car and on headphones, in ways I can’t quite quantify.
As the name of the album implies, a lot of the album’s “musicality” and “listenability” comes from the tension between the “volume” levels of the sounds used in contrast to each other and the tension between the sounds and the “void” between the sounds.
“Stash System and sounds created during the summer of 2020 in Scheveningen, The Hague.”
Another recording I have gotten stuck on for a while, however, given the name of the artist, I set a deadline of March 14th to write it up.
Sound Sources: There are things that sound like pressurized gas escaping from a pipes or orifices flowing across a close mic. There are also things that sound slightly like toy organ drones. There are purely electronic squiggles.
Any of these are often manipulated or hacked with processing/editing or panned across the sound field.
There really isn’t much here that approaches the traditional melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content associated with Western Musical traditions, even Electronic Dance Music or Drone. Rather, these compositions are closer to the spirit of Musique concrète, despite the fact that the sound sources seem to be produced rather than recorded.
Or closer to the way sounds sounds are repetitive without being melodic in nature or manufacturing/technology.
There is variety of volume and types sounds/processing used across the different pieces.
Though, I wouldn’t say there are aspects of drama or tension.
Or, if there is tension, it is more a curiousity about what will happen next than any sort of tension/release. And, then surprise about what does suddenly happen in the course of any given piece.
On the bandcamp page, it says “Japan”, which might indicate the artist lives in Japan or is Japanese. All of the artist’s albums are named with letters from the Greek alphabet, this one is “μ” or lowercase “mu”, the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. All the albums on their bandcamp page were released between Spring of 2020 and Fall of 2022.
The song titles are fairly cryptic, ranging from long series of numbers to characters to random letters to single words.
I’ve been listening to it, off and on, in the car for a month or so and even though it isn’t that long, in total, it is never boring.
“All objects by 3.14. Mastered by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros”
There are 32 tracks on this album, most are around a minute long, with two approaching an epic 4 minutes.
Most of the pieces are grouped by name: Canto [A-C], Rima [0-6], Aiôn [0-9], Drip [0-9]. Along with the Canto songs, three named songs bracket the collection, “Time-Image”, “Movement-Image”, and “Recollection-Image”.
I can’t say I can particularly detect any similar organizational method or sound source used for pieces with similar names. Occasionally there are sounds which might have been created by instruments, but mostly this feels like manipulated noise/sound sources. There certainly isn’t anything that qualifies as electronic “music”, closer to the spirit of Musique concrète.
Some albums drop you into a sonic worlds all of their own and this is one of those albums.
I found it compelling from start to finish. Definitely a favorite, (so far,) from the SuperPang library.
Even though the pieces are short, there is a feel of progression between the various short bursts of sound.
I will say, for best effect, I think you should listen to this album with headphones or in a quiet room. It is not particularly good driving music.
“Porya Hatami (b.1981) is an experimental sound artist based in Sanandaj, Iran. His compositions explore the balance between electronics and environmental sounds, utilizing processed acoustic and electronic sources. and field recordings. His debut album released on the UK based Somehow Recordings in January 2012.”
“Composed and recorded by Porya Hatami in Sanandaj, 2017”
