** 2025 Stock. Original 1978 Copies that may show some signs of long storage wear. **Released in 1978 on Fylkingen Records, Text-Sound Compositions is the first solo LP by Swedish artist Sten Hanson, one of the central figures of the Stockholm text-sound movement that emerged around Fylkingen and Swedish Radio at the end of the 1960s. The album arrives after nearly a decade of festivals, broadcasts and group anthologies devoted to “text-sound compositions” - a term coined in Stockholm to describe works that treat language as sound material rather than a vehicle for stable meaning. Hanson had been at the core of that scene as composer, performer and organiser, and this record finally presents his own work in concentrated form, foregrounding both his Trilogy of Vocal Energy and a pair of shorter, sharp-edged pieces.​

The LP’s tracklist reads like a small manifesto. Side A collects “Fnarp(e)” (1970) and “Oips” (1971), two compact works in which Hanson explodes isolated phonemes and syllables into dense, rhythmic clusters. In “Fnarp(e),” the title’s nonsense syllable becomes a pivot around which coughs, gasps, laughs and consonant bursts rotate, chopped and layered on tape until they form a kind of minimal, vocal percussion piece. “Oips” pushes further into fragmentation, splicing together shouts, stutters and sustained vowels so quickly that the border between speech, glossolalia and electronic texture collapses. Both pieces showcase Hanson’s ability to turn the most basic units of language into material for montage, with a timing as sharp as any drummer’s.​ Side B moves into more ambitious terrain with what Fylkingen describes as his “main work in the text-sound field” - the Trilogy of Vocal Energy. Here Hanson is less interested in linear text than in the physiology and politics of the voice itself: how force, intensity and exhaustion can be sculpted over time. Long, incantatory passages of spoken, shouted and whispered material are subjected to tape manipulation, echo and spatial play, but the human source never disappears; instead it becomes a kind of unstable, multi-headed persona, constantly shifting between intimacy and attack. The trilogy’s structure reflects Hanson’s broader concerns with media and power: voices that seem to speak from radios, public-address systems or inner monologue interfere with each other, creating a dense, sometimes claustrophobic field where message and noise are inseparable.​

What sets Text-Sound Compositions apart from many contemporaneous sound poetry documents is its balance of conceptual rigour and sheer sonic pleasure. Hanson’s background in electroacoustic music and his long collaboration with engineers at Swedish Radio are evident in the precision of the editing and the spatial depth of the mix; these are not rough performance tapes, but carefully constructed studio pieces that take full advantage of multi-track, tape speed and filtering. At the same time, the works retain the raw physicality of live voice: you hear saliva, breath, strain, laughter, the body at work. That tension - between laboratory control and bodily excess - gives the album its enduring charge.​ Historically, the record also anchors Hanson’s position within a wider international network. Fylkingen’s text-sound festivals brought to Stockholm artists like Bob Cobbing, Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck, and Hanson’s work is often mentioned alongside theirs as a key contribution to late-20th‑century sound poetry. Yet listening to Text-Sound Compositions today, what stands out is how specifically Nordic and media-aware it feels: the cool clarity of the recording, the underlying critique of broadcast language, the sense that every sentence is also a signal subject to interruption and distortion. Later compilations such as Text-Sound Gems & Trinkets would expand the picture of his oeuvre, but this LP remains the most concentrated single-artist statement from Hanson’s classic period.​​