Anyone who has experienced someone close, and especially a young one, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, would be familiar with the existential and emotional rollercoaster that awaits all around those ill ones, along with the grief-filled, compassionate yet helpless years to come.
Danish keyboard player and composer Anders Filipsen, the leader of the local experimental, electroacoustic ensemble The Black Nothing, experienced Alzheimer’s disease when his father was diagnosed four years ago. He composed a ten-part suite, Midt i en Fremtid (In the Middle of a Future), about the time he spent with his father, which composed passages, free improvisation, and graphic scores. He says: “This album is the sound of a time when what once was ceased to be, and something new emerged. It is a loving song to the moments we share now – in the midst of all that has disappeared”.
The different parts of the suite function as tableaux of moments marked by gradual decline, filled with silence, relating to the inevitable time when the ill ones can not share their thoughts anymore, repetition, and intensity- a landscape where presence and memory meet in sound. The ten musicians - vocalist Qarin Wikström (who sings in Danish, but the lyrics were translated to English), trumpeter Emil Jensen, clarinetists Carolyn Goodwyn and Jeppe Højgaard (who also plays the flute), cellist Soma Allpas, double bass player and cellist Nils Bo Davidsen, electronics player Mads Emil Nielsen, percussionist Victor Dybbroe, drummer Bjørn Heebøl, and Filipsen on synths - use their idiosyncratic voices to create a unified expression in which individual playing and collective sound merge.
The introspective, reflective, and chamber spirit of this suite emphasizes the vulnerability and the often helpless feelings of attending to those suffering from Alzheimer's when “everything that’s known is gone”, as Wikström sings in the opening piece, “Synker og Stirrerr (Sinking and Staring). “Nelly” captures Filipsen’s father's last memory and gently addresses the realization that when time, with its many memories and experiences, loses its meaning, and all that is left is the present.
The power of this thoughtful, insightful suite lies in its emotional restraint, best expressed by Wikström’s fragile voice, and its kaleidoscopic individual colors, suggesting a nuanced yet abruptly shifting, unstable, and not always comprehensible new reality, faithfully representing life with Alzheimer’s disease. But Filipsen orchestrates this suite not as an expression of melancholy and loss, but as a statement of compassion and love to the most closed ones, and the opportunity to let them go, embraced by their dear ones. Or as he wrote in “I stilhed findes ord (In Silence There Are Words): “...Room for honesty, peculiarity, and unbearable sorrow / Come take my hand”.
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