(((O))) : Jakob Lindhagen – Memory Reconstructions

Sometime last year (2022) Swedish composer Jakob Lindhagen came up with an excellent genre-bending album Memory Constructions.

On that album, Lindhagen combined his evocative piano work with unexpected instrumentation, sound experiments, and attention to musical detail.

A year on, Lindhagen has invited a number of his favourite artists working in a number of genres – from post-modern classical and ambient to experimental genres to rework the compositions from that album under the aptly titled Memory Reconstructions. That wide range of artists includes Tangerine Dream member Hoshiko Yamane and award-winning film composer Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres.

While all the artists included here bring on not only their musical background and different musical concepts and visions of Lindhagen’s music, there seems to be quite a unifying thread going through all the performances here, which could squarely be attributed to Lindhagen’s original vision and concept in his original exploration of the unreliability of memories.

There is also a unifying level of high-quality of musical visions and performances, with none of the nine guest artists coming up with something that goes outside the perimeters Lindhagen set initially with the music that is, simply put, beautifully reconstructed here.