Seven Year Silence CD. Released by Fang Bomb.

Trained artist and non-musician Ronnie Sundin was once heralded “Sweden’s most silent man” by now defunct fanzine Fat Bankroll. At the time, more than half a decade ago, Sundin's recordings bordered on the levels of audible – quiet compositions and intricate structures, as if intended to challenge the listeners’ perceptions of hearing/not hearing.

By releasing “Seven Year Silence” Sundin announces his departure from the realms of silence, and from a shorter hiatus, with an intelligent noise freak-out of massive proportions. This brand new recording impresses with an innovative take on noise, an immensely deep and detailed interpretation that, just possibly, could help redefine parts of the genre. The recordings on "Seven Year Silence" are assembled from piles of rediscovered mini-discs from 2001-2007, thereby also proving that there has been activities of a harsher nature ongoing throughout the quiet years.

A Swedish music journalist remarked that the music on Sundin's "Morphei", released by Häpna in 2002, was barely communicating at all, that it was staying inside its own little bubble. Well... that was then. This is the sound of the bubble bursting baby, so hold on to your hat and enjoy the ride!

REVIEWS:

The Sound Projector (online), Ed Pinsent:

Swedish creator Ronnie Sundin is back with another music-and-book package. Seven Year Silence (FANG BOMB FB011) is a full-length CD of his own music, packed in a slim booklet of monochrome drawings printed in dazzling, sharp blacks. All the sonic material was assembled over a seven-year period and subsequently compressed into two aural wodges of hissing, slithering and clattering noise in Ronnie’s Malmö studio. These are two of the densest, most dynamic and near-impenetrable blasters I’ve yet heard to be issued in the name of electro-acoustic noise; they are packed with content and import, even if the meaning is hard to decipher; and an overall sense of doom, defeat and futility (which fits this label’s identity) is never very far away. Meanwhile the booklet is filled with fragmented images of skulls, pyramids and disjointed lettering rendered in Indian ink, sometimes obscured with heavy ink blots and grey ink-wash clouds. Great! A gorgeous release fit to accompany anxieties and emotions of the jet-black variety.

Cyclic Defrost:

Two Part album by Swedish non-musician (trained visual artist) Ronnie Sundin rips apart his previous mostly silent, oft hardly apparent sound persona. Consisting of assemblages of ‘rediscovered mini-discs from 2001-2007’, it could read as treatments of noise in multitudes of guises, modes and strategies of attack. Part one has a long enter and build static and disrupted patterned noise into auditory assault culminating and frequency manipulation and variation. The latter stage of part one could be construed as the reward for the long entrance if not for the ‘intelligent noise’ manipulation method of Sundin rendering this quotient as a virtual non statement and ending with dental drill accuracy precision and sonic pleasantry.

Part 2 opens more ominously, atmosphere building, then into an intricate melange of tones statics, frequencies and variations of manipulations . It’s all ‘high end’ sound, mincing the upper spectrum to pulp, in a ‘freak-out’ attack of sonic mayhem. If it were not so controlled and determined in sonic abrasiveness it could be pulled apart with ease, but the deep sonic bleakness and convulsive experimentation can be equated to the idea that black is a combination of all apparent parts color spectrum at once. Suddenly it seems for the post quiet Sundin that everything happens at once and can be described as such (or at least documented), the signal is opened wide, tune in to Seven Year Silence at the risk of dissolving all concepts of sound previously held. Although you may want to hold on to your hat.

Norman Records:

The only thing I can recall hearing by Ronnie Sundin was a spilt 7" with Dead Letters Spell Out Dead words that came out a bit ago on Fang Bomb. I really liked that record so after a couple of hours filing records away in our stock room it's a treat to find a new CD by him also on Fang Bomb in my review pile. Brian has just brought me a cup of tea and I'm getting into 'Seven Year Silence'. The album begins with some spacious and sparse electronic hums and then lots of detailed squiggles of sound (possibly granular synthesis) making me imagine tiny micro oganisms, then the noise builds in intensity like layers of shattered glass fragments colliding. There's various drones and pulses once the intensity decreases but then they become so repetitive that it still feels intense but in a more subtle way. Some of the sounds are disorientating and remind me of some of Hecker's stuff. Two long pieces comprise this excellent 'Seven Year Silence' CD housed in smart A5 booklet with drawings by the Swedish artist himself. A mighty fine release.

Textura:

Sundin's own musical project comes in an oversized booklet too, with skull-heavy drawings presented in a handsome design by Nullvoid. Listening to the two-part Seven Year Silence, it's almost dumbfounding to think that Sundin was once called “Sweden 's most silent man” because his recordings verged on the near-inaudible. The new material, by comparison, is a noise-fest of cranium-shattering design (in fact, it's not altogether new as it was assembled from an assortment of rediscovered mini-discs containing material produced between 2001 and 2007). Things appear to have come full circle for Sundin, as the trained visual artist initiated his musical travels with the solo noise project Bad Kharma and collaborations with Lasse Marhaug before turning the volume down to pursue his interest in the “hypnagogic” state (the state of intermediate consciousness preceding sleep).

Part one starts unthreateningly enough with a quietly rippling motor-like hum but the doors soon blow open, as tearing noises and squeals fight for domination. A cacophonous splatterfest ensues that gives new meaning to the word convulsive, with sonic abuse of the most violent kind perpetrated upon the bewildered listener. Mercifully, things cool down after eleven minutes with the onset of elephantine blurts declaiming amidst feedback whistles and needle-sharp churn. A relatively skeletal field of high-pitched tones follows, which is in turn supplanted by a writhing and combustible mass. The second part is as frenetic, and feels at times like every nightmare you've ever had re-occurring simultaneously as a deranged noise symphony. Compress a month's worth of recorded dental drill squeals, rabid Rottweiler growls, and construction site detonations into two twenty-minute slabs and you might have something sonically kin to Seven Year Silence.

Göteborgs-Posten, PM Jönsson:

Tidigare i år släppte Ronnie Sundin en serietidning + vinylsingel och även den här utgåvan är ovanligt visuell, skivan ligger i en liten häftad bok, med svartgråvita teckningar. Det jag har hört förut med Ronnie Sundin (en skiva på Häpna, från 2002) var tyst och inåtvänd elektronisk musik. Nu har han återvänt till noiserötterna, två långa, expressiva stycken, ungefär som att sticka in antennerna i en metallskulptur som sakta krossas sönder. Blipp och blopp vrids omkring, olika lager pressas fram, samtidigt kantigt och organiskt.

Bagatellen, Paul Baran:

Based in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo, trained artist and DIY noisenik, Ronnie Sundin, was given the sobriquet of “Sweden’s most silent man” on the basis of his two previous releases – Morphei on the label Hapna in 2002, and later Hägring on the experimental noise label, Antifrost. In each of these releases, Sundin was keen to invoke bleak, minimal sound-scapes by exploiting the quietest of low subsonic frequencies.

But this approach takes a back seat on his new release for Fangbomb, Seven Year Silence. And there is nothing silent about it. Presented in a cover of fractured mountains and gloomy skulls, nothing can really prepare you for the maelstrom contained within; jettisoning the delicate field recordings of the previous work for a sound that is ear shreddingly immediate and brutal.

One can only assume that his frequent collaborations with Norwegian noise extremist, Lasse Marhaug, have had some baring on this feedback outpouring of Mr. Sundin’s inner ID on this latest cd, with his mixer providing enough variations of serrated feedback to cauterize the craniums of even the most jaded of listeners.

Beginning with an an ominous digital growl from the mixing desk: Part 1 of the two-track set is perhaps the most texturally interesting and subtle; churlish snowballs of pink and white noise begin to fizz in the listener’s ears, before layering into a wall of dense sensory overload and interference jamming that resembles the sound of Todd Dockstader turning dials, whilst suffering an anxiety attack.

After 10 minutes, the listener is offered a temporary respite, but the sinister atmosphere doesn’t let up, with processed brass and radiophonic workshop bleeps and whistles; barely, keeping the lid on a horrorshow sine drone that indeed threatens to resume its shredding sonorities by the piece’s end.

Part 2 repeats the same trick, but is even more explicitly assaultive, as frequencies jostle and ping pong their way out of your speakers. Indeed, near the end, I could discern a growl of some unspecified creature – whether it was a recording of Cerberus the three headed dog, or the ‘composer’ imitating this mythical creature could be anyone’s guess, in a recording that has no purpose other than to outdo Russell Haswell in warping peoples olfactory prejudices.

But with this release, Ronnie Sundin has successfully re-invented himself with from “Sweden’s most silent man” to one of the loudest motherf…ers of the fjords.