ISAK SUNDSTRÖM / Five Dramas For Swollen Emotions

The histrionic Swedish artist Isak Sundström (Rocks & Waves Song Circle) embraces the fascinating sound world of the “spoken word”, infusing new expressive perspectives to this genre with original sensitivity. These five vocal dramas are based on the subtitles of some films by Douglas Kirk, texts that describe the sound effects and events that occur outside the screen. But the result is rather that of a new dissolved narrative, of another space that explores the boundaries of emotional imagination. In this way, the poetic interest seems to fall on the totality of human existence, in an open dialectic between earthly and supernatural, profane and religious, nature and divinity, heaven and hell, light and darkness. The atmospheric frame is supported by an electronic carpet, drops of piano fall soft and slow, while the modulations of the voice are enriched and intensified by a colorful orchestra of percussion and wind instruments. The narrator’s voice of Vincent Williams has something of the typical “black” vocal emphasis of American spiritual jazz, but which alternate with moments of pathos and ecstatic transcendence typically Nordic and European.