** 2026 Stock. Original 1978 Copies that may show some signs of long storage wear. ** Electronic Music captures Sven-Erik Bäck at a crucial threshold, stepping from the world of string quartets and church motets into the charged, unforgiving arena of the tape studio. A central figure of 20th-century Swedish art music, Bäck was steeped in chamber playing and sacred repertoire, yet closely aligned with the Monday Group’s push toward a modernist idiom that embraced serial thinking and new technologies. On this recording, that background becomes a kind of ghost infrastructure: the formal clarity, contrapuntal instinct, and spiritual tension of his instrumental and choral works are transposed into a medium where instruments vanish and only sculpted electricity remains.
Rather than treating electronics as a novelty or an invitation to pure chaos, Bäck approaches the medium with the same structural discipline that underpins his symphonies and chamber works. Lines are articulated as carefully as if they were bowed on gut strings, yet they consist of oscillators, filtered noise, and sharply etched attacks that cut into silence like engraved marks. His earlier embrace of serial and pointillist techniques informs the music’s sense of distribution: events seem placed according to an invisible grid of proportion and balance, even when the surface feels fragmented or austere. The tension between a clear architectural overview and impulsive, energetic detail - often noted in his acoustic output - is here heightened by the unforgiving precision of electronic sound.
What gives Electronic Music its particular charge is the way Bäck’s deep engagement with church music and early repertoire quietly haunts the circuitry. Even in the absence of text or liturgical reference, there is a sense of invocation in the way tones emerge from and recede into silence, as if the tape itself were a resonant nave. Harmonic fields sometimes feel like severely abstracted chorales, their intervals stretched, thinned, or disassembled, yet still bearing the contour of a question pitched upwards. This spiritual undercurrent does not soften the music’s modernist edge; instead, it sharpens it, framing electronic sound as a medium for doubt, inquiry, and stark contemplation rather than technological triumph.
Heard within the broader landscape of Scandinavian postwar experimentation, Bäck’s foray into electronics aligns him with a cohort that sought to extend compositional thought into every available medium. His work in this area remains less internationally visible than his string quartets, concertos, or choral pieces, yet it forms an essential part of his output, demonstrating how a composer rooted in performance practice and historical styles could adapt to a medium that erases the performer entirely. Electronic Music thus functions both as a document of a specific technological moment and as a key to Bäck’s aesthetic: it exposes the underlying mechanics of his thinking, stripped of instrumental habit, leaving only form, timbre, and an unflinching sense of inward scrutiny etched directly into tape.
