Spruce Spray and Shadings is a vinyl record consisting of two tracks of bass drone and a text in four chapters, retelling events which have or possibly could take place.They contain traces and stolen chunks from Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos and William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, discovered by having followed the words ‘spruce’ and ‘shadings’ in the original texts. The narration begins by venturing down the stairs and deeper into the bushes and ends up with a pile of spruce needles after dancing with discarded christmas trees.
Spruce Spray and Shadings continues to contemplate on the uncanniness of togetherness and coziness as an other iteration of Freja Bäckman’s body of work I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer. The body of work has taken various forms and examines the proximities and intertwining of belonging, care, vulnerabilities and violence. By pointing to the shared origins of ‘hugga’ (to chop in Swedish) and ‘hug’ (to embrace someone or something in English) as well as ‘hygge’ (a harvested forest area in Swedish and a cozy togetherness in Danish) they describe how these tensions and contradictions are present in language. Bass is another reoccurring element in this body of work, which also moves between pleasure and discomfort (or even violence) bass frequencies can produce.
The bass tracks on Spruce Spray and Shadings are played by Tari Doris and Freja Bäckman in a improv drone session.
Text and voice: Freja Bäckman
Sound design: Tari Doris
Textual help: E.L. Karhu
frejabackman.wordpress.com 