Rolf Enstrom is a Swede in his late thirties. The list of selected works given in the Caprice insert notes is entirely of electro-acoustic music, and it is not surprising to read that, apart from his teaching activities in Gothenburg and Stockholm, he has collaborated extensively on multi-media projects.
Enstrom's music, to judge from this superbly recorded disc, does not fight shy of the psycho-pathological imagery which the electro-acoustic medium so readily evokes. Directions, a seven-minute study from 1979, starts with little frissons of horror and some hyper-active purposelessness, then as it were drops stones into the listener's brain and watches the ripples, before eventually petering out rather disappointingly. Tjidtjag and Tjidtjaggaise again sets up an impressive sense of space, sending its sounds echoing down the tunnels of the mind. And this time the structure is more impressively sustained—through an attack by something like an orchestra of dustbin-lids (around 5'30''), quasi-religious chimes (around 6'00''), a central withdrawal (around 10'00'') which seems to take an age, and an eventual return of subdued vocal fragments (around 20'00'') which is uncannily haunting. Tjidtjag is a mountainous region in Northern Sweden and the piece is intended as a ''fantasy on a shaman's voyage'' based in part on a fragment of semi-nonsense folk-intonation recorded in that region. I found myself willingly submitting to its spell, and the Prix Italia it received in 1987 seems a just reflection both of its inner intensity and of its artistic control. If there were more pieces like this and, say, Pierre Henry's Messe de Liverpool, or Jonathan Harvey's Bahkti, electro-acoustic music might be less of a minority interest.
As yet Final Curses, a ''profane requiem'', has not made as deep an impression, and at 34'30'' it seems dangerously extended. But there is no shortage of impressively apocalyptic ideas, and the piece explores with equal sincerity the interface between spirituality and technology. An analogy with the Swedish art-film comes to mind. To an outsider it can seem comically tedious, but once the right mental gate has opened you gladly walk down its bleak pathways towards selfknowledge.'