Erik Nyström

Morphogenèse is the first album by Erik Nyström, five works composed between 2008 and 2012, mostly in the Electroacoustic Studio of City University London. Four of them, Catabolisms, Latitudes, Lucent Voids and Cataract, were conceived for eight-channel concert projection; the stereo versions here were made by Nyström for home listening, and he also mastered the disc. His idea is a music that produces its own forms by weaving a spatial fabric: sounds gather into textures that stretch, orbit and stratify like clouds at different heights of the spectrum.

Catabolisms takes its title from Rudolf Arnheim’s essay Entropy and Art and treats destruction as a source of form, as lumpy, powdery and porous particles are milled down and strung back into spectral clouds and cascades; it received a mention at the Métamorphoses competition in 2014. Latitudes grows from a single opening drone into masses that suggest cosmic scales, while Lucent Voids, the longest piece at almost 21 minutes, warps the listener’s sense of near and far, inner and outer, past and future.

In Cataract, deluges of particles, washes of noise and glissandi form a structural thread, and the title also points to the eye condition: textures cloud and clear the way a lens might. Far-from-equilibrium, the earliest piece, starts from Ilya Prigogine’s view that unstable, irreversible processes are creative principles of nature, and lets its sound states fork in many directions.

Born in Luleå in 1978, Nyström studied computer music composition with Gerard Pape at CCMIX in Paris and completed a PhD at City University London in 2013 with Denis Smalley, on the topology of spatial texture in acousmatic music. He won the Public Prize at Métamorphoses 2010.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 14129, 2014.