CD – thanatosis produktion

Following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, specialists advise patients to remain active and to stimulate the joints to offset the degeneration of their physical abilities. We doubt that the making of an electronic music album based on analog synths and a video release of the work might be considered a form of recovery therapy, but this is the case for Joakim Forsgren, aka Autorhythm, and Songs for the Nervous System, a surprisingly human work despite the extensive use of machines and cybernetic influences. The very idea of disease, of any disease, especially after these last years of Covid, is a constant thing in our daily lives. It’s a systemic problem, a fixed thought for a society affected by widespread dysfunctions, one that needs, in relation to artistic creativity, to find new ways to exist in the world. Forsgren says that for this project he avoided conventional sounds and solutions due to artistic preference, relying only on his hardware, and in doing so, he has created a very personal synthesis of electronic music and experimental improvisation. The six tracks on the album offer post-human suggestions along with past references – visions of an imagined and already lost future. In short, a hauntology that deals with retro-aesthetics and the insurmountable inability to escape old social forms. The cyclical and resounding loops conquer us. Oblique melodies and alien funk, space echoes and modified presets combine in a sort of temporal and gently dystopic hallucination that meanders restlessly. The past infests the present and it’s an infinite game of references spanning ambient, electro and synth pop, hanging on the ghosts of a non-existing modernity, where everything is actual and retro at the same time. As Bill Laswell stated, ‘computers and electronic music are not the opposite of warm human music, it’s exactly the same’ – this is evidently the case in Songs for the Nervous System.

 

Autorhythm – Songs for the Nervous System