wednesday 20 april – 10pm

Leif Elggren ^(S)

Swedenborg’s Organ

sound performance, italian première

Swedenborg’s Organ is a piece by Leif Elggren that begins as a talk about a man called Emanuel Swedenborg, who studied physics, mechanics and philosophy, and read and wrote poetry. He had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist, but in 1741, at age 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions that culminated in a ‘spiritual awakening’. Swedenborg insisted that conscience was an actual spiritual organ, He conceived all the organs in the human body as representatives of the scope and boundaries of specific organic functions. Without these vital organic structures, the signals coming from our brain would not be able to transform their charges into coherent action and would thus diffuse into thin air. So our vital organs serve as recipient forms to hold the brain’s influences. With Swedenborg’s Organ Leif Elggren presents a sound narrative constructed around his own extraordinary experience of encountering a music organ at Swedenborg’s former Summerhouse in Stockholm. Elggren ‘plays’ a recording of someone playing Swedenborg’s organ: the sound of creaking floorboards, squeaks and moans, thumps and rumbles, precedes a truly haunting stretch of slowly unfurling, abstract,  almost-organ music, a kind of lament reminiscent of the recordings of Gurdjieff or Nurse With Wound’s sounds. The live work has been recorded and released by The Tapeworm in All Animals Are Saints. 

Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm. Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition. His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons. Together with artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, he is a founder of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) where he enjoys the title of King.
www.leifelggren.org
www.elgaland-vargaland.org