STINA STJERN - Vivid Peace Restored

Composer and performer Stina Stjern havs for over 25 years been a steady presence in the Norwegian music scene – starting out as a vocalist in the rock band Supervixen while studying jazz in Trondheim, Stjern’s road has been anything but predictable, and has over the years shown a will to experiment and explore new areas in her music making. Her new album Vivid Peace Restored is perhaps her most radical musical statement yet, as the entire album is made using cassette tape.

The sound sources vary from found sounds, various instruments and Stjern’s own voice, but there is no hierarchy, the different elements are given equal importance, and through considerate looping, layering, cut-ups, re-arranging the bits and pieces it forms a rich tapestry of sound. This blurring is intentional, Stjern wants us to get lost in her sound world, a place where nothing is forced or overstated. Tape hiss, subtle melody lines, distant location recordings, gentle waves of noise, and voices melt together creating lush soundscapes.

Stjern says that the hands-on approach of working solely with cassette tape gave a intimate quality to her music that felt like coming home, a process similar to the tangible act of hand-writing, and that Vivid Peace Restored functions as a meditation, a state of mind, a sonic healing in a world that she says often feels too brutal and unforgiving.

Musically Vivid Peace Restored clearly has sonic references to the experimental tape music of the 1960s and 70s, but it has just as much in common with the early wave of post-punk bedroom experimentation of the early 1980s, when multitrack tape recording became available for domestic use. Imagine if Delia Derbyshire didn’t work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but instead made music on second-hand portable tape recorders in her basement.

There is also a sequential quality to the music. The album consists of 12 tracks, short refined miniatures, and despite the drone and soundscape-like nature of the music the pieces never outstays their welcome, nothing extends to side-long excursions. Stjern gently makes her point and moves on. Vivid Peace Restored feels like a labyrinth or a puzzle box, small mysteries you want to return to, and indeed repeated listening rewards the attentive listener with new layers and hidden details.

Vivid Peace Restored will be available on limited edition vinyl and digitally. If we are lucky, there will be a small edition of tapes too.