Genre: Avant-Garde

Track Listing:

01 Blue Horizon
02 Just a Little Too Small Diameter
03 Difficulties 
04 Setoda Night 
05 Bangkok Bingo 
06 Very Strange 
07 Honda Civic 
08 IP Parlova 
09 Unknown Conversation 
10 The Tower of Silence 
11 Evening in Ban Klong Hang 
12 Such a Long Journey 
13 Africa-Greenland 
14 The Tipping Point 
15 Welcome, dorm rap 
16 Total Information Awareness


Scandinavia has given the world a lot of stuff, although one may not immediately be aware of them due to the stoicism of Swedes, Norweigans and Finns; those peoples don't make a lot of “noise” or toot their own horn about their major accomplishments. This is also the case with Jorgen Knudsen who has just put out a new CD, entitled Wealth. It is a very artsy set of pieces. The off-key piano banging, forte,adds a classical touch to it and is a nice jumpstart from droning, frothy noise-ambience.

This new CD, Wealth is an album full of odds and ends: noises, drones, percussive sounds and a certain Stockhausen vibe to it, especially via the aforementioned piano rattling. Besides that the disc goes through all sorts of loops and hoops; there is a lot of “stuff” layered in each cut: samples of street noises, snippets of conversations, metallic clinking and clanking and just a whole lot of loops and samples that underride the magic music that comes in and out all the while. The 16 tracks on Wealth aren't too long: they average in at about three minutes. The entire CD clocks in at around 50 minutes or so. Some of the tracks that come to mind when talking about it include: “Bangkok Bingo”, “Very Strange” and “Evening in Ban Klong Hang” (Ban Klong Hang being the city in Thailand where Wealth was recorded. Those three aren't necessarily the 'best' – that is something that each individual listener has to decide – no one can definitively proclaim these tunes or those songs are the peak of the album.

The whole CD is a linear graph, with the peak being in the middle, as is usually the case and it slowly ebbs until it ends. As far as any “radio-friendly” singles (hahaha) – forget it! At the end of Wealth, the last two tracks: “Welcome dorm rap” and “Total Information Awareness” take the album out in a chilled, smoothed-out way, evening the cataclysmic syncopated noise-cum-harmony.

The man has a history too. Jorgen Knudsen, who hails from Bergen, Norway and originally studied to be a chemical engineer, also studying “...history, science and the history of art,” according to the Quasi Pop Records website. Knudsen is a versatile guy, not just a musical rock 'n' roller, he has also written and/or participated in some performance art pieces and audio installations, the former done mostly with the Norse dance troupe, Baktruppen. Before becoming the solo act he is today, Knudsen was half of the more beat-driven but also an experimental duo, Information, along with his cohort Per Henrik svalastog. The two put out several releases on both the Rune Grammofone and Beatservice labels. Their last release was 2002's Biomekano, on Rune Grammofone records. There was also an Information compilation CD released in 2003, entitled Money Will Ruin Everything, a selection of some of their finest works, which, of course, is a subjective call, but there is a way to pick their best stuff in a semi-objective way.

So, the total verdict of Wealth is a non-hesitant “Guilty”! Guilty of being a potpourrri of experimentality that is pleasing to the ears: droning synth sounds, intricate percussive piano chops, a gamut of samples: snippets of conversation, urban street sounds, bizarre and unidentifiable noises and environmental, ambient undercurrents.

To tell the truth though, even though the CD's music itself may not be the most original form of music, it does, however, fit in nicely with their family of like-minded indie artists and bands that have been proliferating faster than rabbits in the past few years or so. This new generation of ambient/experimental bands are treading into a musical frontier that picks up and goes much further than their descendants such as Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Soft Machine, Can and Henry Cow, just to name the ones that come to mind the quickest. It's nice to know that the genre is still alive and kicking and remaining independent and staying underground, where the best music is always made, where the most refreshing and original of stuff evolves.