Per Nørgård

The folks over at The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology have been blowing our minds for the last couple of years. There output is slow and careful, quickly become one of our favourite catalogs emerging today. First they brought us the incredible reissue of Knud Viktor’s two LPs from the early 1970s, Ambiances / Images, then a short while back we were graced by the conception breaking Danish Tape Amateurs. Now they return with another marvel from the forgotten realms of Danish underground music, the composer Per Nørgård’s forgotten gem, Expanding Space. A subtle shift, equal in power and importance to everything the label has graced our ears with thus far.

By the time his album, Expanding Space, appeared in 1987 as a double cassette, Per Nørgård had covered a great deal of ground. He had emerged as a prominent voice within the Danish arm of postwar classical music, finding his works - filled with tension and the era’s existential bend, issued alongside other luminaries in the field like Edgard Varèse, Alfred Janson, Mauricio Kagel, Arne Nordheim, Henning Christiansen, and a great many others. For those familiar with the bulk of his output, Expanding Space - a truly uncelebrated masterwork, will offer inevitable surprise. It is an almost two hours effort in experimental, cosmic electronic meditation music - a free-flowing and improvised, radical body of a experimental synthesizer music - created primarily on a Roland Jupiter 8, drawing on the composer’s algorithmic composition principle – the ‘infinity series’ – as well as field recordings of the surf of the Pacific Ocean.