It’s been a while since I last heard about Elgaland/Vargaland and I kinda hoped it would all been have passed by now, the kingdom was overthrown by The People’s Republic Of Elga/Varga, but here the ministry of not knowing what to be a ministry of, also known as Marc Behrens, offers a piece that was composed for the opening of yet another gallery, sorry consulate in Karben, Germany. The good thing is that it uses the (female) voice of Yoko Higashi, so we may have a Queendom here. Which ties it nicely to the much longer first piece here, ‘Maybe Rise’, which deals entirely with recordings from Tropical North Queensland. Queendom, queensland, kingdom, you get the royal flush , right? Marc Behrens is a man, not unlike Yiorgis Sakellariou (reviewed elsewhere), who uses a lot of field recordings to compose his work, but unlike Sakellariou, he may use all sorts of computer techniques (read: plug ins) to alter his sounds – but perhaps I am all wrong. In ‘Maybe Rise’ however I think I am not wrong, and there is some form of sound manipulation going on. It’s a very minimal piece of music, with long parts of similar sounds, heavily layered and sounding great. From the tropical moves of the opening ten minutes via some highly processed part in the middle to the percussive bits and then the more tropical sounds again at the end, it gives us the sense of a journey, and one hell of a trip it has been. Nowhere does the sound ‘sink’ away in sheer silence, but it makes effective use of dynamics. ‘Queendom’ is much shorter and uses Higashi’s voice as source material, stretched a bit, humming and ultimately very much a piece of musique concrete. Quite nice, but not his best and sounds perhaps as a disc filler, whereas the previous piece of forty-one minutes already showed us, we didn’t need a piece filling this up. Unless of course it’s placed here out of conceptual reasoning, in which case I didn’t say anything. (FdW)