Browse by Artist: NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Man From Deep River
Label:	EDITIONS MEGO (AUSTRIA)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	DEMEGO 007CD

A collaborative release between Icelandic experimental duo Stilluppsteypa (Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson) and Sweden-born BJNilsen. Based on a found tape from 1975 which served as guidance for the compositions, Man From Deep River opens up a new development in these artists' sound. Melodic passages with sweeping electronics and analog synthesizers mix with field recordings and disturbed voices, creating a multifaceted piece. BJNilsen defines his work as "focused upon the sound of nature and its effects on humans, and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound." He has numerous recordings on Touch and has collaborated with the likes of Chris Watson, Christian Fennesz, and Z'ev. Stilluppsteypa's electronic abstractions engage absurd theatrics that mar the pristine surface of minimalism. These lovable Nordic heroes are back with more intense listening and shining, isolationist compositions. Man From Deep River quickly develops between two lonely, desperate individuals, and the savage natives around him who turn against their own mountain god. This "illness" is caused by several deeply depressing circumstances and by the intense difficulty of other sickening situations. The musical expression of this story is described by Stilluppsteypa as "an environment of high tension, but also with moments of temporary insanity and auditory hallucinations."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Vikinga Brennivin
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 004CD

2nd edition (no longer available in copper sleeve). "Brennivin is an Icelandic liquor vulcanized from the humble potato and flavored with cumin, although you'd be hard pressed to taste much beyond the astringent burn that it leaves in your mouth. Bottled in matte black glass and stamped with ominously simple labels, brennivin appears less like something to imbibe and more like poison; and in that creeping slow death kind of way, it is. For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit Stilluppsteypa, brennivin has soaked into every fiber of their being; and as a result, oozes out of their terminal drones, sputtered rhythms, and atomic fractures. As much brennivin (and mind-altering chemicals in general have been a muse for Stilluppsteypa, they are also a curse; Stilluppsteypa's oblique Dada expressionism and devilish black humour erupt with megalomaniacal invincibility that comes with a few too many drinks; but at the same time, Stilluppsteypa has developed a parallel ethos of clinical minimalism the reflects the introspection, headaches, and melancholia of the morning after. In their poetically abject celebration of brennivin, Stilluppsteypa (comprised of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson) accepted the invitation from Swedish composer BJ Nilsen to collaborate upon an album related to alcohol and its mind-numbing effects. Nilsen has been working in various constellations of experimental music, best known for his recordings as Hazard published through Touch and Ash International. Focusing the perception of natural sounds through a reconstruction of time and space, Nilsen has rendered the commonplace sounds of wind, rain, and snow as stealthily seductive and quietly menacing drifts of frozen sound. Their resultant collaboration is an existentialist allegory in which the three drunkenly stumble out in a Scandinavian winter night and spiral toward the inevitable point in which they blackout. Lest this be construed as a derelict piece of method acting, the craft that Nilsen, Sigmarsson, and Thorsson brought to Vikinga Brennivin is impeccable, as the extended soundfields breath with the majesty of distant fog horns and sparkle with the delicate light of countless stars cast down from the black heavens onto the frozen tundra below. Frightening and barren, yet hauntingly compelling, Vikinga Brennivin is an isolationist masterpiece."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	HMS 008CD

"In recent years, Nilsen has turned to his Icelandic neighbors Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson (collectively known as Stilluppsteypa) in existential sympathy over the problems of their collective lust for alcohol. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna marks the second collaborative document of abject minimalism that these three have composed; and like its predecessor Vikinga Brennivin, this album is spiked with drunken thought. Any alcohol induced euphoria has been tempered by perturbing blackouts, moments of cruelty, and an all-consuming nihilism. Beyond their shared Scandinavian heritage, their expressionist urge for the frigid drone, and their penchant for drink, BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa intend this recording as an open ended experience, wandering through their sound without the burden of any exegetical text that may get in the way. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna resolves itself as a grim kaleidoscope, where the bleakness of the wintry Scandinavian landscape and the langour of a drunken escapade constantly mutate through the highly refined sensibility of dronescaping. Sonar pings announce the beginning of this album, with its echoes returning as an amorphous fog and locating little but a gloomy pall upon the event horizon. Clattering electronics scurry across the barren sounds like death-watch beetles upon the tundra; and creaking doors offer something much more foreboding than what Pierre Henry envisioned for musique concrete. Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna adheres to the psychological disquiet through sound design that Alan Splet provided for Eraserhead or that Nurse With Wound achieved on Salt Marie Celeste."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Passing Out
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	HMS 013CD

"The first chapter found the drink. The second came after a night of intoxicated shouting. The third chapter is inevitable: Passing Out. The Nordic sound artists BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa have authored the last component to a trilogy of isolationist compositions for barren field recordings and lumbering electric drones, thematically linked in the psychotropic effects of alcohol. In doing so, they have issued a brief statement in defense of their research: 'It's been four years and three studies, Passing Out being the final. Even in its most general, colloquial usage, Passing Out indicates the occurrence of a state that is incompatible with active behavior. It is possible that the individual could experience both consciousness and unconsciousness at the same time while encountering Passing Out.' Yes, Passing Out is a crepuscular recording, with the flickering of twilight further dimmed by the distant arctic sun in wintertime and the blackened numbness of too much drink. With one singular track that spans 60 minutes, a nearly constant thrum and rumble of monochromatic low frequencies casts a grim pall upon the precisely dialed-in modulations and vibrations. Spectral guitars, maudlin tunes from haunted radios, angrily growling voices, and field recordings of wind-whipped snow and ice bury themselves deep amidst these subharmonic drones. All of these tease at the edge of perception, sculpting the narrative of the drone into a vehicle for unhinged expressionism of varying degrees of horror, melancholy, beauty, and oblivion. The Swedish born BJ Nilsen defines his work as 'focused upon the sound of nature and its effects on humans, and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound.' He has numerous recordings on Touch and has collaborated with the likes of Chris Watson, Christian Fennesz, and Z'ev. The Icelandic citizens Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson are Stilluppsteypa, whose electronic abstractions engage absurd theatrics that mar the pristine surface of minimalism. Passing Out features letterpress and silkscreen artwork in an edition of 1000."

Artist:	NILSEN & STILLUPPSTEYPA, BJ
Title:	Big Shadow Montana
Label:	HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY
Format:	LP
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	HMS 020LP

"After producing their frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen have ventured into more absurdist territories through fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. It is in this context that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa present the apparitional Big Shadow Montana, an album of slow-motion delirium manifested in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Amidst the near constant wash of bleary-eyed etherealism, Big Shadow Montana cycles through several sonic themes and leitmotifs, displayed in varying states of clarity. In these transitions between half-remembered phrases and bleary-eyed thrumming, the album emerges as if it were the aftermath from a protracted bout of metaphysical channel surfing. Flickered impressions flash in conjunction with Breton's manifesto of Surrealism in the form of the memories from happily drunk escapades in the heart of winter, the sidereal spells cast by the innerspace travelers Klaus Schulze and Coil, and the nagging questions of existential portent: 'Was that bassline from Goblin, or was it German Oak? Maybe something from Faust IV?' The trio of Nilsen, Sigmarsson, and Thorsson elegantly twist and bend these fleeting images into a spiraling symphony of bubbling electronics and spectral drones that mutate on both sides of the record into lugubrious yet carnivalesque waltzes. When this first appears, it is the echoing undercarriage of a simple melody, bobbing amidst rattling chains and cascading cymbal crashes only to dissolve into sequences of cold-war era tone beacons and empathic swaths of maudlin sound design. At the second occurrence, the melody washes ashore on the Iceland beach, where nude Viking men and women try in vain to get a tan when the sun is just barely going to rise above the horizon in the winter months. It is a pyrrhic jubilation of calliope harmonies set down by organs and synths turning a pale-blue hue in the wake of all that white skin shivering underneath the arctic sky."

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