Artist: rsundin Title: "sleepwalk" Catalog #: GF014 Series: I Total Time: 42'48" Release Date: March, 2001

Track 1-44 sleepwalk .......... 42'48"

"Sleepwalk is a frustrating journey, like walking blindfolded through a room constantly bumping into unknown objects scattered across the floor. Improvisations with guitar and toy instruments, fieldrecordings of the wildlife of an urban river in the north of Sweden, some stolen sounds from records, MDs and CDs, controlled feedback, *silence* and noise makes up the sources of this album, all fragmented and processed on the hard-drive of Ronnie Sundin (electronic sound artist from Sweden who started working with music/sound more than ten years ago but surfaced on disc for the first time only four years ago) to create small soundevents surrounded with liberal use of *silence*. Sleepwalk is a soundtrack to a dream, or rather the dreamlike state in between wake and dreaming. All good music defies categorisation but points of reference might be composers like RLW or Bernhard Guenter who takes great care of detail, structure and restraint an does not impose things on the listener, instead slowly dragging them in.
This album was recorded during 1999 and 2000 at the Academies of art in Trondheim, Norway and in Umea, Sweden."

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

rsundin dreamsketch CDR 1999 Bake Records, nl
rsundin lorez plaza / limp 2CD 1999 bonbon records, se
rsundin internalreference CD 2000 bonbon records, se
rsundin invalidObject [default] 3"CD 2001 Fallt Publishing, ir (due spring 2001)
bad kharma seltin CD 1998 bonbon records, se
bad kharma/l.marhaug/grunt scandinavian noise manifesto CD 1998 bonbon/jazzassin/freak animal se,no,fi
bad kharma karisma 3CDR 1998 bonbon records, se
bad kharma kosmos 6xCDR-set 2000 staalplaat open circuit, nl

• "I was hoping, after the fifteen minutes of quietude that comprise Default, Sleepwalk would have something to offer that would keep me awake at work. Well, I forgot to turn the volume down on the speakers, and was rewarded with the first track, which nearly blew me out of my shorts. Either cut-up or random percussion, hard to tell when it's got you backed up against the wall and slapping you around. From there, the disc runs through forty-two more very quick tracks (ranging from five seconds to just over three minutes), which have a very chaotic feel to them; like RoboChanMan's Remote Control Militia, but with ambient/cut-up, instead. Things jump out at you all over the first forty-three tracks of Sleepwalk. Didn't someone once say that if you were awakened while sleepwalking you'd die? Ronnie Sundin obviously has it in for the somnambulist set, then. When things aren't jumping out at you, the disc gets quiet, but never for the long stretches of Default (amusing, since Default is only a third the length of Sleepwalk). Looped keyboard riffs at very low volume, field recordings, blips and bloops. Bits of static (it's usually during these that things jump out at you-- be warned and keep a hand on the volume control).

  Tracks seven through twenty-six comprise the bulk of the really, really shot pieces (two of them are a minute long, the rest substantially less). Tuning radio,s pots and pans banging, a few more blips. Track 10 may only be forty seconds long, but were it expanded it'd be a John Duncan track ("Flare," maybe). For some reason, despite the plethora of different noises and the sparseness of their arrangement, this doesn't have the same chaotic feel as a few of the other discs I've reviewed this week; there's all an odd structure to it, really. Track 13: John Watermann on steriods. Track 14: the same John Watermann on steriods track sped up to 78RPM. Really, this is actually starting to sound like a noise album, rather than rsundin's usual glitchpunk leanings. It has a lot in common with Ground Fault's Crawl Unit release from a few years back; if you played this through a huge stack of Marshalls live, you'd be perfectly in character opening up for Merzbow, but put it on a disc and mix it real low and it starts sounding like ambient, albeit really disturbing ambient.

  Tracks 19-22: detune radio. sample. repeat for five seconds.

  The last four short tracks build up to track 44, the album's fifteen-minute finale, a relatively high-pitched and loud drone that occasionally takes on harmonizing tones. For the first five minutes, that is. Then everything gets weird, and the drone comes back at a higher pitch. From there, things break down even farther...

  Superior to Default simply because it's more interesting" - Robert Beveridge