TOBIAS WIKLUND - INNER FLIGHT MUSIC

LINER NOTES - By Isabella Lundgren

It’s Friday night at a crowded jazz club. At the bar, I’m fighting for space amongst intoxicated breaths and loud conversations. I’m feeling out of place this evening, considering if it’s time to go home. But just as this thought crosses my mind, applause erupts, and the band enters the stage.

Suddenly,

there is silence. 

One, two, three seconds,

music fills the room.

A man with a long beard stands at the front of the stage. I don’t know him, but from the moment he pushes the breath out of his lungs and into his cornet, it feels like I do. The note that comes out of him doesn’t hesitate; I am captivated, whether it blasts and howls like a warning siren or whispers with the trembling trepidation of a bird without its wings — not simply because of what he plays but also how he plays. The bearded man’s name is Tobias Wiklund. From the moment he heard his first Louis Armstrong record, Tobias knew that something peculiarly wonderful happens in music. He was only a little boy, but the language of music spoke to him. As he describes this foundational moment to me, he lights up like a child on Christmas Eve: “When I heard that music, just as when I started to play it myself, I felt like I became a part of it — that I was no longer separate but connected. Connected to every being and thing around me.”

 INNER FLIGHT MUSIC is an album that tells the story of this connectedness. It tells the story of Tobias’s personal experience of music, which serves as a link between the human and the divine. The ten original songs explore and describe man's relationship to God and the Universe, both concretely, in the arranged compositions, and abstractly, through collective improvisation. But more than this, Tobias's music relays a utopian dream and vision of a societal spiritual awakening. The transformative nature of music and its capacity to give voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and longings is not just hippie-gibberish but a well-researched field of study. According to neurology, no stimuli awaken or affect as many parts of the brain as music. In the book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Psychologist Dacher Keltner writes: “When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration… Music breaks down the boundaries between self and others and can unite us in feelings of awe… We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times — or what we might call the sacred.”

In the opening track, Looking for Hope? (Awakening), Johan Graden strikes a single note on the piano that cyclicly remains throughout, like a heartbeat. The playful and esoteric rhythms of Jon Fält’s drums, the grounding depth of Kansan Zetterberg's bass, and the urgent calls from Tobias’s cornet and Nils Berg’s bass clarinet paint the picture of a boundless open sky — a sky to marvel at. The dizzying vastness of our universe and the questions about our place in it is the call that begins the journey of awakening. Humans long to know. To make sense of things. To gain knowledge. The Western world is characterized by the Faustian desire to reveal secrets, explain mysteries, and conquer and control nature's fickle forces. But we often forget that the prerequisite of all knowledge first requires admitting what we don’t know. In that way, it is a sign of weakness to marvel at something, a condition one must suffer. In the practice of science, art, and the spiritual, learning to endure this weakness is an art in itself. And with it, one can ask questions and arrive at real knowledge. As the group merges into a synchronized whole, we are invited to wonder and be enraptured alongside them.

In Earth & Dust, a dark and heavy beat resounds, and a shuffle digs deep into the earth's soil. This is the sound of material life, the toil of our physical bodies and their limitations.

In Time and the Forthcoming of Space, we hear the material dissolve. The music flows in and out and to and fro, interjected by silence. It is true that to transcend our bodies and physical form, we must first form a knowledge of and a relationship with them.  “Know thyself” are the words chiseled into the forecourt upon the temple of Apollo. This philosophical maxim captures the Western idea of identity and personhood. We have a defined true self, one that is singular and knowable. Contemporary self-help books continuously echo this, urging us to spend our lives defining and polishing this true self. And though this pursuit is commendable, it also poses questions. How does one know if or when they have found their true self? And who amongst us has remained singular and definable for an entire lifetime? In the standardized practice of the Abrahamic Religions, the concept of God is a similarly definable entity above all else. God is perfect; we are broken. We may reach our union with God once we have deciphered ourselves with our conceptual minds by confessing our sins and following the rules. There is an evident duality and conflict between the spiritual and the material, the human and the divine. 

Don’t Speak the Name of Truth playfully wrestles with the limitations of language as a means to define and express the inner turmoil of self. In the diverse Eastern spiritual traditions, we encounter different concepts of the self and God. Zen Buddhism, for example, claims that one cannot attain true understanding and enlightenment through language alone — this is known as “direct transmission outside the scriptures.” Similar approaches are conveyed in the vast body of Zen literature called the Sutras, as in the Taoist Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu or the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: the interdependence of all beings, the illusory nature of appearances and the concept of nonduality, that our understanding of existence is incomplete if one views the world according to rigid dichotomies. That God is not something above or beyond — but inside. God's Kingdom is not in the afterlife or the heavens above but here on this earth (a sentiment echoed in both the Old and New Testaments and the Quran). Henceforth, we reach peace by surrendering to the inexplicable and ever-changing — by following the rhythm of life, which is in constant flux and metamorphosis. Ssssh serenely rests in this surrender as Tobias’s cornet wails with vulnerable humanity, urging us to remember not to worry, that this, too, shall change. When the divine is no longer bound to concepts, religions, or places, every encounter and experience becomes an encounter with it. Subway Smiles is an ode to finding wonder in the seemingly mundane.

The grounding sound of Nils Berg’s bass clarinet returns on Solens Strålar Ger Mitt Hjärta Vingar. The song tells the tale of love no longer bound by transactional laws or romantic relationships. The realization that love is a force residing in every organism on this earth. And as Tobias said, once you know this to be true, “Even gazing up at the sky becomes a reminder of how loved you are.” The title track, Inner Flight Music, moves like a holy celebration of acquiring a new sense of knowing. Up We Go prepares us for the final climax. Its rhythmic and melodic pattern resembles a countdown. Child of Eternal Suns is the album’s final track, where Jonas Lindeborg and the Swedish Wind Orchestra join the group. The music appears to neither end nor begin; its cycles and patterns weave a universe that expands, shrinks, howls, and whispers. This is the dance of realization: your sense of being separate dissolves, and you find your way back into the totality of which you are not only a part but of which you are. This is what it means to awaken. Who knows if this awakening will ever occur in our collective consciousness, but thank God we have artists, revolutionaries, and mad men and women who dare keep the vision of this dream alive — the dream of a world where we work with each other, not against each other, where we lead with compassion, not with judgment, and where we see the divine in every being we encounter. 

 But please, don’t listen to me, listen to the music. Uniquely among the arts, it holds and honors the inexplicable beauty and suffering of human existence.

And whether it makes sense to you or not, allow Tobias and his music to announce your place in the great family of things.