Symmetry
One
NAC
Ketosis
Longevity
Plasma
Inner Nile
Delta
Overkill
Self Help Manual
A pulse without a given direction, yet one that does not hesitate. A body listening for a rhythm that has not yet decided what it is. This is where the music takes shape.
Autorhythm – Self Help Manual is a manual written from within the body. Wordlessly articulated through resistance — with hands that do not always obey, through movements that get interrupted or are delayed. Through the noise of the nervous system, a self is formed that cannot be taken for granted, but must be summoned anew, day after day. Signal and interference, control and dissolution converge in music that does not seek stability but moves along the threshold of what is possible.
This is music composed in a state of existential necessity. Every sequence bears traces of a body in transformation, where precision emerges not despite limitation, but through it. Repetition does not become a return to the same, but a movement away from the given — a rhythm searching its way forward, as though relearning itself anew.
Joakim Forsgren’s manual does not instruct, but redefines the relationship between body, technology, time, and space. What is inferred to as illness dissolves here into a kind of rhythmic organization — another temporality, another precision. Through layers of improvisation, aided by synths and bass lines that both constrain and open up, a practice emerges in which control is replaced by responsiveness, and frequencies seem to operate on a cellular level. The result is music that does not describe but unfolds the act of listening itself as a bodily experience.
For the presentation at Royal Institute of Art’s 17.4 immersive audio system, the music has been sculpted into a work that one literally steps into. The tones are distributed throughout space, moving between points, dissolving and reforming depending on where you are positioned. Within this displacement, a multiplicity of directions opens up. Sound becomes matter — an architecture of frequencies that envelops the body and changes with it. Bass lines, pulses, and synth fragments temporarily emerge as independent events within the room before being reassembled once again. The album no longer appears solely as music, but as a spatial artwork to enter. It invites movement, adjustment — to become part of the work’s ongoing transformation, and to allow oneself to be filled by it.
As the room slowly dissolves and we surrender ourselves to the music, a stubbornly persistent pulse emerges. Not as metaphor, but as a concrete experience: a life negotiating with its own conditions, refusing to be reduced. Here, making music becomes a way of reclaiming agency — not by restoring what once was, but by creating something else in the midst of what has changed. As though life itself, through sound, is slowly learning how to continue — differently, yet still as its own.
Tessa Praun
Curator and writer
The Wanderlust Institute of Art
