Sten Hanson







Sound clip
CD 1
1: Play Power IX (7´12´´).
Deux ballets pour Robespierre: 2: (4´00´´), 3: (4´42´´).
4: Five Stones in the River (12´11´´).
5: Kinderspiele (9´27´´).
6: Sonata for Bearpistol (2´40´´).
7: Šund so weiter (4´28´´).
8: The Health Fascists (6´09´´).
9: ChSA (2´23´´).
10: Le vol d'Icare (20´47´´).
Total time 74´40´´

CD 2
1: Play Power II (13´14´´).
2: Skinkan Variations (4´35´´).
3: Šes ist genug (5´21´´).
4: 61 67 (3´06´´).
5: Les sabots du bouc (12´16´´).
6: Citizen, sit down (4´54´´).
7: Five Musical Aphorisms (3´49´´).
8: Les noms des sept nuits (22´26´´).
9: Valse Chosande (2´30´´).
Total time 72´31´´


Subsidized by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs.


My previous CDs, with the exception of my last one Canned Porridge, have all either featured a single work or emphasised a certain genre of my work. The Canned Porridge CDs, on the other hand, try to give a complete picture of my work in its different aspects, whether you want to call it music, text-sound compositions or sound art. Besides the pure sound pieces I have also done music theatre, performance pieces, literary works, video pieces and graphic works. These sides of my artistic universe you have, of course, to look elsewhere to find. Personally I have always hated labels, so I prefer the neutral word sound art. I was always an idea-based artist and I have let the nature of the idea decide the means of realization. An artist always has many ideas moving around in his head, and he learns along the way to be patient and not turn them into works until they grab him and say: Now! He knows that a premature realization is very likely to kill the idea forever.

The works here come from four decades, which in Swedish folklore is called an "adult man´s lifetime". Four decades is a long time, even if it may seem scarily short when you look back on it. Of course the artist is not the same person at 70 as at 30. Knowing that, I have made it a principle never to go back and reverse old works, even if I'm not too happy with them. Doing that you can be almost certain to make the works worse and not better, as one can learn from countless historical examples.

In preparation for the Canned Porridge CDs I have listened through all my works, many of which I hadn´t heard for decades. I realized in the process that some of the works, which I always had thought to be less successful, revealed unexpected qualities, while others didn't seem quite as fantastic as supposed. I therefore decided not to pass any quality judgement on my works but to include all of them that were suited for CD publication and had not appeared in any of my previous personal CDs.