Album Notes

These compositions were originally prose poems and other texts, manipulated on the computer, in Macintosh Hypercard. They were filtered (e.g. four character words or words with double consonants were extracted) and permuted (words were re-positioned according to a mathematical pattern). The texts were then fed into the Mac text-speech generator with various settings of parameters such as speed, pitch, or emphasis.

Most of the sound part of these compositions were made during an intense session the night of September 20th, 2003. Many texts had been written during the spring that year. In 2006 and 2007 a few software instruments were added to some tracks.

Already in the 1960’s, Karl-Erik Tallmo was fascinated by the so-called text/sound compositions of the time, collages of more or less semantically poignant linguistic fragments, such as the sound art made by people like Bengt-Emil Johnsson and Åke Hodell or Henri Chopin and Charles Amirkhanian.

Tallmo composed a few pieces around 1969–70, but maybe computer technology was the missing – and crucial – puzzle piece that could be added three decades later.

Karl-Erik Tallmo was born in 1953 in Sweden, where he still lives. He has published six books, among them Sweden’s first hypertext novel, in 1992. He has been involved with music in various contexts since 1969.