Spunk - Still eating ginger bread for breakfast

A few years back Maja Ratkje (a member of Spunk experimental quartet along with Lene Grenager, Hild Sofie Tajford and Kristin Andersen), when asked why she was making 'Noise', she replied “ in order to forget all the noise of everyday life”. Maybe I’m a bit paraphrasing here, but you get the picture.

My first impression, when I read that, was not exactly understanding. Time has passed and I’ve come to terms with what, at least in my opinion, this anathema was. Music – art in general – has numerous functions. Personal, social and political. Music has powers. It really, as Ratkje clearly stated, has the power to make us forget, to eliminate the vulgarities of everyday life, to provide a safe zone from the evils of the world. Since you are reading these lines, I guess you are pretty aware that there are a lot of them.

The democratic procedures of Spunk’s music (as presented also in a live setting) oppose, again, the functions of a society of hierarchy, sexism , patriarchy and racism. Before you comment on all this, just think of how many women are there in the music world of Noise, of experimental music? Of the avant-garde as a whole? Not many I’d say. Here we have a quartet of women trying to find their way in a male dominated but so called free thinking genre. It must be pointed out.

Spunk’s music has always been, at least in my perception, about process. I guess the collective way of thinking and reacting is transferred to the ways they present their material too. This also applies to their live recordings. This CD is a live recording too, a 20th anniversary concert held in Oslo in December 2015. The two tracks that comprise the bulk of this release are built layer-by-layer and follow a gradual process. Both tracks certainly fall into the category experimental, one which by now, of course, includes a trillion different sounds…

Their main sound generators (I do not say 'instruments' on purpose) are a cello, a trumpet, a French horn, a theremin, various electronics and the voice. Ratkje’s voice, following her solo experiments with her voice, seems to take a bigger part in the recordings that previous Spunk’s albums. I do not hear any preconceived ideas, just a general plan of how they react to each other attempts. They are freely improvising in real time. After so long of playing and most importantly, interacting together, they manage perfectly to combine their unique musical voices into a collective improvisation.

The gradual procedures they follow build up as time passes by into a less complex but more loud and noisy trajectory that, at times, become more and more chaotic. Do not think you have it figured out though… Although on the second track the climax reaches an apex when it’s time to end, on the first track things are different. Like a snake trying to devour it’s own tail, every time you think it’s coming to end by a catharsis of free noise, it comes back to haunt you with another audible gesture of four individual instrumental voices. They follow parallel lines conjuring something new and unexpected every time. I strongly believe that this is the core of Spunk’s collective improvisation.

@koultouranafigo