Swedish composer, visual artist and recording artist Leif Elggren has been active since the late 1970s and has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer & composer, he has many albums to his credits, both solo and with the Sons of God. This particular release was inspired by a Christmas past, when he was 12 years old (1962), and spent Christmas day at his family's country house, where there was a lot of snow. The immediate environment was only partially influential in this work; it was really brought about by his first viewing of the 1937 Frank Capra movie, "Lost Horizon" which obviously made a deep impression on Leif. Due to family worries about the weather that day their stay was cut short, and Leif did not see the whole movie until 24 years later (1986). Since then he says he has seen the film countless times, obviously making a making a big impression on him.
Both my one-sheet from No Part Of It and the text on the website for the album contain Leif's story in full, but I will not recount it all here, as it is extremely lengthy. If you are not familiar with the movie, it involves a revolutionary uprising which drives terrified Westerners to the airport in Baskul, China. The evacuation is organized by writer, soldier, and diplomat Robert Conway, before he is to return to the United Kingdom and become Foreign Secretary. He flies out with the last four evacuees, bound for Shanghai but the plane crashes deep i the Himalayas. The under-dressed (for the weather and terrain) Western survivors are rescued from death by fur-clad natives, and taken to a protected valley, a virginal place where the sun always shines and everything is all right. The enraptured Westerners, feeling happy and safe, look down over the wonderful place, a place called Shangri-La, a paradise. There's more to the story than that, but is at least some frame of reference. Leif claims there is a connection between a certain scene in the film and a certain occurrence in his personal history, a parallelism, a threshold value. There is also, in the film, a dream as old as humanity, realized for the screen in a gigantic cold-storage space outside Los Angeles. The dream of a place, a condition, in which good is made manifest and offers security, shelter and solace amid the existential angst of the everyday. What remains as the crucial moment in the film is of course when the small group of people crosses the threshold to Shangri-La, when the windblown life on the other side is exchanged for the calm and warmth that envelops them when they have crossed over, passed the rocky outcrop. It is, of course, the most important moment in the film, the most important moment in life. The crossing, when the transformation happens.
That one brief scene is the basis for this album of one single track of nearly 42 minutes. This is just about as minimal as a soundscape can get. The sound is submerged in bass rumble and drones, sounding either extremely distant, or like being underwater or made partially deaf. I actually had to use the (secret) download code link to verify what I was hearing was the actual album and not a defective CD. There are points in the piece where other unidentifiable sounds are present, but you may not hear them distinctly unless you turn the volume way, way up. This is a very particular type of minimal ambient with rumbling low frequency sonics that may have limited appeal, but is nonetheless intriguing.