Morkganga is a narrow gorge somewhere in the Ringerike area in eastern Norway. I have never set foot there, but it is exactly the kind of place that Jon Oivind finds and cherishes when on his interminable hikes through the eastern Norwegian scrub, forest and fields. For as long as I have known him, and it is closing in on a quarter of a century now, he has kind of existed in parallel dimensions composer and forest hiker, city-slicker and nature romantic, drinking buddy and ski devotee. Somewhere lurking in between these dichotomies you’ll find Jon Oivind, sometimes here, soon enough there. Anyone who has had the pleasure of being eaten alive by mosquitos somewhere up in Solemskogen while listening to an in-depth analysis of obscure post-punk knows exactly what I'm referring to.
But can this be heard? The moment you give a work a title which is more specific than, say, “symphony” or “sonata”, then the listener has inevitably been nourished with some kind of guidelines. It is no coincidence that the title Morkganga is taken from the forests around Oslo. Jon Oivind does this repeatedly Gimilen, Skamrek and the incomparably titled Bury my heart at Katnosa are all examples. The forest is his stimulus, providing a framework around his existence, and if the listener can't directly hear it if indeed that’s possible then they would suspect the composer of having felt it, at least subconsciously.
I myself hear the forest and the gorges in Morkganga, partly because I know that Jon Oivind is like a Tolkien-esque ent, and partly because the title, in all its eeriness, evokes a sudden drop in temperature, evil spirits and darkness in broad daylight. Added to that there is the resonance of association the orchestration has something undefinably elemental about it that brings to mind one of the other ents of Nordic music, namely Jean Sibelius. And also, it is a microtonal forest we are dealing with here, with sounds so saturated that the listeners literally feel like they are inside the tree, inside the stone. This is quite the departure from Jon Oivind's works from 15 and 25 years back, when his compositions were more likely to contain topical commentary, diary entries, jokes or pop-culture references. This makes the element of surprise all the stronger when in the middle of the piece (18:30), he dishes out something that invokes Baba O’Riley filtered through a microtonal haze. He’s clearly not lost his facetious side, but is he really being tongue in cheek here? Recorded in Olavshallen Concert Hall, Trondheim, 10 14 August 2020.
