Mats Lindström Low Fidelity

‘Low Fidelity’ brings us up to speed with Lindström’s actions of the past dozen years in a range of seven works spanning live recordings and studio commissions, all sharing a certain bloody-minded, uncompromising focus on atonality and arrhythmic structures. Definitely one for harder-nosed noise and avant garde fiends, the set fits very neatly within iDEAL’s roster of brutalists, with whom Lindström shares a taste for sounds, spaces, and rationales that test the limits of his kit. It all offers an insight to the mind and working practice of a figure who, through directorship of EMS, and via technical credits for the likes of Ákos Rózmann and Fire! Orchestra, has crucially given artistic license and studio time to some of the contemporary fringe’s keenest and weirdest operators. Like an ice bath for the ears, we’re plunged into his world with the elemental electro-acoustic sorcery of opener ‘Low Fidelity I’, which lends the set its title and is harshly characteristic of what to expect. The disruptive pressure continues thru the spark-spitting noise and buckled bass of an ‘Invocation I’ abstracted from his “giant electronic feedback set-up” in Malmö, 2017, and farther experiments with structural stress testing feedback in ‘The True Laptop Quartet’, depicting the artist overdubbing players performing on instruments built on electromagnetic feedback principles. Deeper in a ‘Light Vessel 21’, realised in collaboration with Anna Koch for and A/V install on a floating art space moored off the Kent coast, yokes back the gnarl to fathom more haunted spectral space akin the isolationist electronics of Helge Sten, and that feel for richly resonant tone, and proprioception-baiting spatialisation is most impressive on ‘Shadow of the Dutchman, an overture to the Wagner opera for trio of pianos and live electronics that quivers the timbers to the core