My name is Anders Søgaard – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music for me is a highway hotel. Open 24 hours a day. There are no receptionists, and you are not given keys. You wander sleepily around the hotel's many corridors, from door to door. Some doors are ajar, others you have to pry open. Behind them all are rooms. Some are sparsely furnished, others are filled to the brim with dancing people. You can stay in there for a few minutes. Some rooms you return to. Many are a bit boring, others almost knock you over. What I like most is the ones I can't really orient myself in. The rooms where I have doubts about what is floor and what is wall. And what the furniture is actually used for. All the rooms fit together. You leave the hotel and drive on along the highway of life. A different person than when you arrived.«

Anders Søgaard is a poet and professor of artificial intelligence and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He has written eleven books and more than 300 research articles. He has three children and lives in a housing community in Roskilde.

in briefrelease

23.01.2022

Finnish Space Travel

Tomutonttu: »Hoshi«

Vauva, 02.12

Kristoffer Møllegaard

The Finnish multimedia artist Jan Anderzén has, with the album Hoshi, released under the solo moniker Tomutonttu, created a true little star. Not only because »hoshi« literally means »star« in Japanese, but above all due to the music itself. There is something cosmic, yet infinitely minute, about the sonic worlds Anderzén conjures—like a galaxy reflected in a puddle, or a space journey in a rocket carved from a hollow tree trunk. Synths emit busy, warm blips and bloops, while ultra-short vocal and instrumental samples create a recognizable blur. At once artificial and organic – soft, rounded, jagged, crackling.

Anderzén approaches sound with a playfulness I simply adore. His music is strange in an incredibly comforting way. It places me in a kind of colorful, trance-like state, only interrupted when, several times over the course of the album, I find myself smiling in delight at a particularly great sound. The synths on »Katse osuu sähköön!« The choral samples on »Kesä oli äkkiä ohi!« Milo Linnovaara’s flute on »Malta lausua ‘AH’!« And many more. Hoshi is an album packed with microscopic moments that together form a frayed, exploding, radiant, idiosyncratic whole—a stellar moment of just under 38 minutes.