Fönstret, the publishing arm of Stockholm's annual Edition festival, returns on the back of last year's release of Kommun’s brilliant “Ephemeralds” CD, with one of the most striking and singular LPs to have fallen into our hands so far in 2024: Lisa Ullén's Heirloom. A boundary breaking and truly singular gesture of solo piano composition - the first vinyl release to have been dedicated to the work of the South Korean born, Sweden based pianist and composer - resting at the borders of free improvisation and avant-garde classical music - it's nothing short of a virtuosic journey into the emotive potential of real-time creativity, psychology, and identity manifested in sound.

Sweden has always been a quiet, rumbling force in the context of experimental music, consistently delivering singular and distinct statements into the sonorous landscape for the better part of a century. Since its launch in Stockholm during 2016, the composer, musician, and synthesist, John Chantler’s Edition festival has gently rested within this scene, stoking out remarkable creative highs from artists from within the country and far abroad. In addition to staging ambitious live performances, Edition has also emerged as a publishing platform, via the Fönstret imprint, issuing books, films, and as of last year - with the release of the ensemble Kommun’s “Ephemeralds” - recorded music. With the festival having just completed its seventh and final realisation, Fönstret now takes the reins and carries the momentum forward with “Heirloom”, the first solo recording by the South Korean born, Stockholm based, pianist and composer, Lisa Ullén, to be released on vinyl. Comprising three visionary works for solo piano, each reworked and presented twice in different forms across the LP’s length, and tonally, texturally, and structurally singular in their balance of complexity and poetic elegance, it’s an absolute revelation that places Ullén in the consciousness as one of the most remarkable artists currently working in the contemporary landscape of experimental sound.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1964, before immigrating to the northern part of Sweden as a young child (the image on cover of “Heirloom” is a photograph of the package that contained her belongings when arriving in Sweden in 1968), Lisa Ullén is one of the most highly regarded contemporary artists currently working in Scandinavia. Following her studies at the Royal Musical Academy in Stockholm during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and continued studies in electro-acoustic music at EMS (Electro Acoustic Studio of Sweden), she has remained entirely dedicated to the practice of improvisation, largely within the idiom of free jazz, as well as numerous realisations of avant-garde, contemporary classical, and experimental music, working within numerous ensembles - Anna Högberg Attack, Festen, Friends Of Rekon, Kommun, etc. - as well as leading the Lisa Ullén Quartet, participated in numerous collaborations with artists like Johan Arrias, Angharad Davies, Joe Williamson, Erik Carlsson, Elsa Bergman, and Anna Lund, and produced a number of recorded releases for solo piano, duo, and ensemble.

During the 1960s and 70s, John Cage fiercely attacked the practice of improvisation as he set about to define the objectives and terms of what he believed experimental music to be. While this was undeniably connected to his dislike of jazz, and also carried a deeply problematic racial component, Cage advocated for experimental music that was devoid of the influences - emotions, identity, psychology, etc. - of the composer and /or musicians. In a nutshell, Lisa Ullén is everything that Cage feared. Her music is improvised and deeply bound to the many dimensions of the self.

“Heirloom”, Ullén’s first full-length to appear on vinyl, is an exploration of what it means to be ‘in between’, be it genre, method or identity. A stunning gesture of compositional structure and tonal texture, the album comprises three pieces - “Heirloom”, “Fragrance”, and “After Sun” - belonging to the same suite, that have been realised twice each in different incarnations, the first side having been recorded on the 6th of June, 2023, and the second shortly after on the 8th of June, 2023. Deploying Ullén’s deft control, patience and unconventional technique, each piece within the suite, in both of its realisations, rests beyond the easy categorisations of genre. While certainly connected to both, this music is neither jazz or avant-garde classical music. It is a language entirely Ullén’s own, illuminated in its nuances through the subtle and sometimes stark differences between the act of presenting doubled realisations that find definition and identity through consistency and disparity between their tonal and timbral patterning.

Imbued with an arching sense of spaciousness and constraint that is continuously punctuated by complex tonal and temporal punctuations - each feeling perfectly balanced and placed - both sides of “Heirloom” - through their differences, similarities, and monumentality of presence, accomplishment, and the individuality of composition, are an absolutely engrossing listen, as Ullén’s fingers dance and stagger across the keyboard and produce clusters of complex harmonics that achingly hang in the air before colliding with the next.

Absolutely astounding and truly singular in ways that are profoundly rare, Lisa Ullén’s “Heirloom” is a masterstroke in real time composition; the virtuosic manifestation of emotion, psychology, and the identity of self in sound. Even the most devoted fans of contemporary piano composition can’t help but be blown away.