Teddy Hultberg, Öyvind Fahlström
Oyvind Fahlstrom on the Air - Manipulating the World (Book + 2CD)
Enclosed in a 336 pages book published by Sveriges Radios Förlag (ISBN: 91-522-1817-1). It is written in Swedish and English by Teddy Hultberg. The CD's were released by Fylkingen Records only together with the book. The book itself is enclosed in a slipcover. The Swedish texts on the recordings are translated into English in the book. "Birds In Sweden" (1963) was produced by Öyvind Fahlström in collaboration with sound engineer Erik Winlöf at the Swedish Radio studios in the second half of 1962.
The work was broadcast on January 14, 1963 as part of the monthly programme "Nattövning" (Night Manoeuvres), hosted by Börje Lindell. The radio serial "The Holy Torsten Nilsson" (1966) was composed in 1965. The work consists of 34 chapters and was divided into five parts of different length, broadcast between 4.2.1966 and 4.3.1966 on Swedish Radio's programme 2, on friday evenings from 10 p.m. "The Holy Torsten Nilsson" was originally released by Sveriges Radio in 1968 on a 90-minute reel of tape with excerpts from the serial.
Under the motto: "Manipulate the world - take care of the world", Fahlström set up a variety of meeting-places in which participants were invited to take part in an interdiciplinary game of purposeful discovery. He introduced elements of popular culture into his work early on and made substantial contributions to a critical assessment of the "medialisation" of art. In this, the most extensive book about Öyvind Fahlström to date, Teddy Hultberg charts the artist´s predominant lines of creative development and shows how his cross-genre endeavours were based on a few central ideas: character forms, signs, games and life materials.
The present study focuses on two innovative and extraordinary compositions for radio: "Birds in Sweden" (1963) and "The Holy Torsten Nilsson" (1966). These works can be heard on the two accompanying CD records and are also included here in written form. Some unique and hitherto unpublished visual and textual material, the result of several years of research by Teddy Hultberg, is also included in the book.
