Hypodermic Letters

At the time of its release Marcus Pal wrote this essay: Mats Erlandsson’s new collection of sound work, Hypodermic Letters, embodies a vast array of sonic multiplicities, seamlessly blending texturized harmonicities with harmonized texturalities. Like light magically made audible, while in continuous disintegration, oscillating between the real and the illusory, the works contained in Hypodermic Letters insistently highlights the in-between only to forcefully push us to the beyond. By challenging our conventional ways of structuring the sensory into categories, e.g. the pure and the impure, the changing and the unchanging, or the unitary and the manifold, Erlandsson’s work provides an opportunity to let go and to dwell in unstructured phenomenality. Hypodermic Letters is a shimmering interplay of the extremely remote and the radically proximate, the vast and the intimate. A sense of substantial materiality and referential stability is established momentarily only to face its immediate dissolution. Erlandsson’s use of ambiguity reveals a fundamental fragility at the core of certainty. But fear not, although elegantly masquerading as ambiguity, the dominating affective state of Erlandsson’s Hypodermic Letters is that of clarity. The instrumentation of Hypodermic Letters is a careful combination of synthesized sounds, all of which were generated by analog means, recorded acoustic sounds of stringed instruments and the employment of algorithmic processing techniques. Erlandsson’s display of the molding of multistable textures with continuities of intervallically modulating modalities ultimately lends itself to a listening experience as intense as it is pure: a non-referential melancholia, a sorrow beyond sorrow. With close attention to the most subtle facets of the sonic and a use of intonation and tuning as an integral part not only of harmony, but of the total field of sound itself, Erlandsson’s work makes us aware—that is, if we truly listen—of our capacity to enter worlds, or modes of being, and perhaps more importantly, of our capacity to leave our dysfunctional constructions behind.