Hampus Lindwall Brace for Impact

Hampus Lindwall is a musical artist active in many fields ranging from contemporary music to experimental and electronic sound / music. He has released many albums, as a soloist and in collaboration and is the titular organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, since 2005.

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As 2024 came to a close, in New York and Paris chords rang out from thirty-two-foot pipes for the first time in half a decade. Following twin fires in 2019, the grand organs at the cathedrals of St John the Divine and Notre-Dame, amongst the largest instruments in their respective countries, had finally been restored. The news was justly celebrated in the international press, but the incidents were far from isolated. In England, the city of Norwich hailed the return of its cathedral’s five manual organ in 2023 and just two years earlier York Minster heralded a “once-in-a-century” refurbishment of its own 5,000-plus pipe instrument. Meanwhile, further organ restoration projects are ongoing at churches in Liverpool, Bradford, Bristol, Winchester, and Washington DC. Significant as they are to their respective communities, they’re also emblematic of a wider rebirth for one of humanity’s oldest musical instruments.
The organ is having a moment. Over the last few years , albums by the likes of Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, Anna von Hausswolff, FUJI|||||||||||TA, and Áine O’Dwyer, as well as projects in the visual arts by Sollmann Sprenger, Cory Arcangel, Massimo Bartolini and many other talented artists, have given a new prominence to the old ecclesiastical stalwart. The pipe organ bears historical traces which stretch back to the third century BC. But that doesn't mean it can't speak to a contemporary moment haunted by algorithms and networked culture. Hampus Lindwall’s Brace for Impact is an album of organ music for today.

Things nearly turned out very differently for Lindwall. Were it not for a simple twist of fate, the guy now occupying the organist’s chair at the church of Saint-Esprit in Paris, occasional collaborator with Phill Niblock, Leif Elggren and Susana Santos Silva among many others, might well have wound up in the world of pop music. In the 1990s, as the Stockholm club scene started taking off, Lindwall found himself moving in the same circles as the electronic music artists connected to the city’s legendary Cheiron studios. The aesthetics of 90s rave remains an important part of his musical DNA to this day. Born in the Swedish capital in 1976, Lindwall learned his chops copying the solos on Steve Vai records. It was only later, towards the end of his teens, that he even started playing keyboard instruments. When seeking to enter Stockholm’s prestigious Royal College of Music, Lindwall tendered two applications: to the jazz department, as a guitarist, and to the classical music department, as an organist. He was sure he would be accepted with the guitar. In the end, he was rejected from the jazz department for spurious reasons, inadvertently setting Lindwall on a path to becoming a classical organist.

Brace for Impact sees Lindwall returning to the scene of his adolescent obsessions. It’s an album of five recent contemporary classical compositions, all performed by the composer himself on the seventy-eight stop organ at St. Antonius church in Düsseldorf. It’s also a highly visceral forty-five minutes of music with undeniable elemental power.

The title track proposes a historical counterfactual equal and opposite to its author’s own youthful fortuity: what if fate had somehow barred Iannis Xenakis from becoming the pioneering architect and composer remembered by history and instead led him to join a metal band? Inspired by the searing glissando that opens the Greek musician’s seminal (1953–4) work Metastaseis, the piece pairs a series of rip-roaring slides on a highly saturated and distorted electric guitar (performed by collaborator and SUNN O))) founding member, Stephen O’Malley) with the halting attempt of Lindwall’s instrument to follow it, in spite of the discrete nature of the individual keys on its manuals. It’s an electrifying piece of music, slapping the listener round the face straight out of the gate at the start of the record. But it’s also a deft study on the uneasy relation between analogue curves and digital steps.

Brace for Impact might just be the first album of post-internet organ music. Like a performance by Dutch artists JODI, it is a record weaned on networked processes and algorithmic thinking, a suite of tracks which build their own systems then push them to the point of collapse. Lindwall is not a programmer, but he will wield whatever technology is ready to hand much as Chopin made use of the richer, fuller sound of an Erard piano. From the software subtly weirding the interior textures of ‘Swerve’ and ‘Piping’ to the juddering, kernel panic of ‘AFK’ and ‘À bruit secret’, these are works of music unthinkable without the ubiquitous experience of life lived online. Imparting that hypermodern aesthetic sensibility through the austere sound of a baroque organ only heightens the anachronistic sense of temporal disjuncture characteristic of days spent rabbit-holing through ever-multiplying stacks of browser windows. The vernacular of Web 2.0 is here re-transcribed in the ornate script of a medieval illuminated manuscript.

Artist and blogger Brad Troemel (aka The Jogging) once compared the practices of his own cohort of digital natives to the non-retinal strategies of Marcel Duchamp a century earlier. “Duchamp’s readymade came at a time of transition when consumers were first buying mass-produced goods,” he notes. “During Duchamp’s era, the word ‘readymade’ referred to the objects in one’s home that were not handmade. And for the generation of artists coming of age today, it is the high-volume, fast-paced endeavour of social media’s attention economy that mimics the digital economy of stock-trading, a market increasingly dominated by computer-automated algorithmic trades.” Lindwall, equally, regards the elements comprising the material for his music like so many pre-given readymades ripe to be appropriated. ‘À bruit secret’ feeds the whole fifty-six note run of the organ keyboard into a random number generator before being variously manipulated like a Schoenbergian tone row built from the standardised limits of the instrument. The use of commercial software even spurred Lindwall to name the track after Duchamp’s (1916) sculpture with an unknown rattling object inside. Starting the album with the jagged crunch of an E major guitar chord followed by an interval leap of a minor sixth up to C felt, to Lindwall, like a sort of citation – whether from Chopin or Yngwie Mamlsteen (possibly both).

As a conservatoire student, Lindwall felt he had to leave his passion for guitar behind, as if there were no room for those ideas within the formality of the music establishment. Only later did he come to see it as a resource he could draw on, a deep well of subcultural knowledge to be mined, just as Bartók once excavated the folk songs of his native Hungary. Lindwall cites Jeff Koons, who once claimed he only found his voice as an artist when he started looking to the kitschy objects sold in his father’s antique shop while he was growing up. In this sense, at least, Brace for Impact may represent the organist’s oeuvre at its most arch and conceptual – but it also finds him at his most personal. This is an album borne of obsessions, with an obsessive’s attention to the details of sound and structure. It is also an absolute blast: a record of ferocious immediacy with one foot in the distant past and eyes firmly fixed upon the future.



-Robert Barry, February 2025