Daniel M Karlsson is a long standing fixture of Stockholm’s experimental electronic music scene. He’s been an important part of its key infrastructure including Fylkingen, Norberg Festival and the fabled Elektronmusikstudion EMS where he now teaches various courses.

A well known evangelist for the open source music coding platform SuperCollider, its rare for someone to spend more than five minutes in his company without getting a run down on how you, too can get SuperClean installed on your computer and be making your own computer music in a matter of minutes.

As a composer, he works extensively with algorithmic composition to organise sound in a way that brings texture and timbre to the fore. This LP — his first solo release on vinyl — contains the work he was commissioned to make for the seventh edition festival for other music. That festival was a collaboration with INA GRM who trucked their Acousmonium multi-channel speaker orchestra to Stockholm for the occasion. Side A is a stereo rendering of Karlsson’s performance on the opening night. Side B includes a second version recorded a month later. A new longer version and the complete source code for the piece are bundled together with the digital download giving you the potential to have it playing at home forever.

The cover of the LP shows the 3 character codes for each of the 64 instruments and objects that Karlsson recorded himself performing for the piece. These recordings are then set in motion and living relation to each other inside the computer.

Daniel M Karlsson on Towards a Music for Large Ensemble:

The aim or hope is to have a music that could be thought of as an ensemble — where the members are listening to each other and interacting and responding to musical events that happen within the group. The mental image of an ensemble member nodding to another ensemble member is something that has stuck with me for many years. I love that kind of thing where there is no conductor. Different people within the group are helping to organize the sound while it's being played. There is no longer anyone in charge. People sit together in a room, make the music together, and find the cues within the music they play. It's not a music with different sounds just happening in parallel, but rather a communal sensing and creating all at once — by individual agents with autonomy. That's the dream at least! But all of this is happening inside of a computer — so that's the tricky part.

We're all involved in a strange kind of musical Turing test where we are trying to figure out how something was made. Listening to music happens on an emotional or mental wavelength, but there is also an analytical side to listening to music which is a kind of technical listening.
 It's difficult for me personally to shut off my thinking about the mechanics of how a piece of music was constructed. But I want to play with this zone where different types of listening overlap, collide or contradict each other. I want to make music which offers different readings or different types of listening. Music that contains a cognitive dissonance of some kind — where you are second guessing your own ability to discern what is real. With Towards a Music for Large Ensemble the ‘realness’ is the quality of the delicate communication between distinct parts of the ensemble. Are there some sort of emergent properties at work or are these just the random swervings that are colliding in every part of everything in the world anyway? I want this to become a confusing, enveloping mesh of possibilities that puts you in a state of uncertainty. What is it that you are listening to?