PA011: Jens Paldam – Chiba EP (digital)

Jens Paldam has been a part of Pattern Abuse from the very begining, as he designed the cover art for the first five releases, establishing the label’s visual identity.

But Jens is of course not only a designer (and an accomplisshed artist and painter). He brings the same aesthetic sensibilityes and perfectionism into his music!

Jens had been featured on the Nordic Ambient Compilation, and after a trip to Japan playling live, he composed three tracks dedicated to and drawing from the city of Chiba.

Release text:

Chiba is a small collection of soundspace-based work. Expressing the artist Jens Paldam’s extreme attention to detail – a quality few poses. The release has a Japanese theme, due to it being rooted in a trip to Japan. But more than this, it seems there is a kinship between Jens Paldam and the Japanese tradition of arts and crafts: Bringing out elegance and the true beauty of a thing through a simplicity only reached with mastery of craftmanship. 

Jens Paldam tells about the background:

After having played a modular concert at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen, I was approached by a group of three, who right there invited me to play a concert in Japan as part of their art installation. They came from the collective/team [mé] and the installation they mentioned was their “Obviously no one can make heads nor tails” to be held in the 7th and 8th floors of the Chiba City Museum of Art. Three months later, I arrived in the Chiba airport with my modular synth. The concert was in ten days, and the time leading up to it would be spent primarily in Chiba together with [mé]an experience that changed my life. The audio recordings collected became part of the concert and were used in this EP.

“Sirens at Night”
During my stay, I lived in a small guest house, an establishment that had never before housed a westerner. One night I was woken up by the sound of a strange siren. I got up and quickly turned on my sound recorder. The complete sound recording of the siren howling in the otherwise quiet night, can be heard in this track. It also includes the sound of a solitary moped that passed under the window of the guest house.

“The Invisible birds”
Tomoyo Mizuya and I were walking through the center of Chiba when we came across a group of tall trees from where the sound of a flock of birds could be heard. We looked up at length but could not see as much as a single bird. I would come back to this group of trees and record the birds several times during my stay, but never once did I catch a glimpse of a bird.

Another type of invisible birds that can be heard on the recordings are the sounds of electric birds that can be heard at traffic lights all over Japan. They are installed to help the visually impaired to know when it is safe to cross the road. The sound of a cuckoo informs when there is a red light and a chirping chick sound can be heard when the light is green.

“Plastic”
The sound recording used in the beginning of this track is recorded on the 7th floor (or was it the 8th?) of the art installation in the Chiba City Museum of Art. The reason why it is hard to remember which, is that the two floors are almost identical and gives the visitor an experience of stepping into the same river twice. Though the installation appears to give the viewer two identical versions of the same reality, being in the interim between the two floors is like being in a strong force field suspended in time. Something that profoundly impacted my imagination, resulting in this track that intends to put into music, an experience difficult to articulate with words.

The cover art is a photo I took of the Chiba monorail. With its 15,2km, it is the world’s longest suspended monorail and an absolutely stunning example of late eighties Japanese architecture.

About Jens Paldam:
Jens Paldam is a sound and visual artist, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Characteristic for his work is a fine balance between an intuitive approach and a meticulous attention to detail.

Trained as a designer and artist, Jens Paldam’s style is based in organic forms, crafted into complete and meaningful structures. Similarly in music, there is a basis in the complex soundscapes of the real world, rather than “simple” ideas like musical notation. Given musical intent through his instrument of choice, the modular synthesizer.

When listening to the result, it becomes clear that Jens Paldam is rooted in the visual arts, with works expressing some of the same qualities of Brian Eno’s “sound paintings”. Though whereas Eno’s style is mainly “coloring the environment”, Jens Paldam’s style in both music and drawing is more formative and storytelling.

Release date: April 28, 2021