Mosaik by Ekkoflok

Somewhere between the aleatoric, improvisation and tight compositional choice is Mosaik. A patchwork of sound produced with home-built machines, by home-knitted software and on prepared acoustic instruments. A recurring theme is the notion that electronic music is indistinguishable from the machine it is produced on: without the machines there would be no sound.
Ekkoflok is inspired by the meeting of machine and man, and he pays attention to what the machine has to say. The same analogy can be made regarding our digital tools – they ultimately dictate the options available to us as composers and how we should work with and relate to sound – therefore it is important for Ekkoflok to make his own programs as well as control wellknown software in novel ways. This opens up for new possibilities, new insights and not least for novel results, where the creation of the instrument becomes a central part of the compositional process. Two works on the album represent the extreme ends of this: on the one end, Prepared for Spring is a work that originated from an improvisation on a prepared guitar and tape echo, whereas on the other Poly_Blip is a work that has come about through several stages of reinterpretation: sounds were synthesized on home-built, analog machines, then recorded but only to be cut up and algorithmically reassembled, before a new layer of improvisation was added, to finalise the composition.
Ekkoflok has moved into a new and very different direction with Mosaik, after his previous album Lydlandskaber from 2017 which was made exclusively of first takes.
Multiple layers of old and new recordings have been combined, from home-made and analog synthesizers to field recordings and sound generated with digital algorithms. It is a mosaic in sustained time, i.e. each little piece of stone in the mosaic may be relatively big but its movement is mostly very fluid – a sound fades in, then out, over and under other sounds without necessarily taking center stage.
The B-side holds four smaller compositions merged into one long journey of sound. Ekkoflok creates transitions that give the listener a feeling of suddenly being in a new place, without having discovered how she got there. Ekkoflok’s inspiration for this process is Éliane Radigue's work "Trilogie de la Mort", as it impressed him with precisely this sensation."

The Denmark-based clang label and booking agency was initiated January 2013. Its most important purpose is take adventurous music to a wider community.

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