Scorpionizer, a CD by the Danish sound artist and writer Tobias R. Kirstein and the Swedish writer and performance artist Pär Thörn is a mixture of paranoid drone music, industrial loops, perverted field recordings and occult transmissions. With the use of found sounds, sinewaves and lo-fi samples the two artists construct an obscure repetitive stuttering narrative; a dark splintered novel about people in the shadow struggling to save themselves from an endagering situation. An intense soundworld with references to true crime, teleevangelism and HP Lovecraft.
“This is a most curious release of some extreme excursions in the world of tonality. Tobias Kirstein is called a sound artist and writer and acts here also as a label boss, and he teams up with Pär Thörn, who had before a couple of releases on Firework Edition, Kning Disk, Diskret Förlag and such. There are no instruments mentioned on the cover or the website here, but it is easy to say this all deals with electronic sounds. We have high-pitched frequencies, sub-low bass, hissy textures and the lowest of low-resolution samples. Voices play a role too, but I have no idea if these are from either of the two composers or perhaps lifted from other sources. With some distortion going on, I could easily (and maybe wrongly) think these voices come from short wave radio. The final piece, of eight in total, is ‘No Radio Is Innocent’, lasting almost thirty-eight minutes and perhaps that title got me thinking. In ‘They Came In’, the channels are strictly separated; one side has the voice/narration, which seems like ‘scene of the crime’ sort of thing and a dirty mid-range rumble in the other channel. It is altogether quite grim this music. The extreme frequencies occasionally used versus the spoken word, even when it is hard to decipher what it is all about, made this a very pleasant yet very dark ride. It is like watching a horror film of which you are not sure is a horror film. It might all be very creepy and it very well might be something entirely different. This is one of those things that leaves everything wide open. (FdW)”
Den svenske konceptkunstner, digter og musiker Pär Thörn skriver: “Den yttersta dagen är ute nu. Det är mitt nya fanzine. I det första numret finns en lång intervju med den danska ljudkonstnären Tobias Kirstein, en mycket kort drömd intervju med den tjeckiska prosaisten Franz Kafka, en novell, två nya dikter och en rapport från en spelning på Teatr Kantor. Tidningen har limmad rygg och är 56 sidor tjock. Upplagan är begränsad till 133 exemplar. Numret är slutsålt!”
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