in brieflive
09.04.2025

Beneath the Restless Canopies

Ask Kjærgaard, Jens Albinus, Rasmus Kjær, LiveStrings: »Store træers grønne mørke«
Musikhuset Aarhus, 04.04
© PR
© PR
Rikke Hansen

An inner soundscape characterises being in love. You walk through the city with a new rhythm, a different melody. The same is true of depression, though here major gives way to minor. Yet the early phases of love, too, can contain moments of doubt and dark foreboding. In composer and guitarist Ask Kjærgaard’s musical staging of Naja Marie Aidt’s 2006 short story Store træers grønne mørke (The Green Darkness of Large Trees), released as an LP last year, this same interplay is palpable as the music moves us from gentle strokes through melancholy to a rougher sound. The recording features the trio LiveStrings – cello, violin and viola – with actor Jens Albinus as the first-person narrator.

In the concert version of Kjærgaard’s work in Aarhus, featuring Rasmus Kjær on keyboards, Albinus’s voice appeared even more exposed. The piece introduces us to a depressed man who, wandering through a park, finds moments of calm beneath the trees—and at times up in them. For when despair causes you to fall out of the system’s sky, through sickness benefits and social assistance, only to land at the roots of the trees, perhaps there is only one thing to do: climb into the treetops? But then our anti-hero meets a woman in the park, and the drama begins. Can infatuation lift him out of depression, or will it end up short-circuiting him?

At first, the music crept in quietly. Kjærgaard’s ability to support the flow of the text revealed his experience as a film composer, particularly in his blending of classical music, meditative new age, and piercing guitar. Words and music carried the narrative together. When Albinus fell silent, the music became the voice of the inner landscape. The strings, in particular, delivered the dreamlike tones of infatuation, but when the gloom returned with renewed force, it was Kjærgaard who, with a roaring guitar, sprawled across the emotional abyss. It was beautiful and brutal.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

Ask Kjærgaard
1
in brieflive
24.05.2025

The Electronic Altar

 Fascia, Soli City, Nagaver
Alice, 22.05
© PR
© PR
© Martin Funder Martin Funder

The table is a practical prop at most electronic music concerts. It has almost become a symbol of how electronic music is denied the same expressive, physical gestural language as acoustic music. This rigid symbolism was thankfully broken when the concert network Up Node hosted a showcase evening at Alice, featuring three emerging experimental electronic artists from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

The MacBook stood enthroned like an altar as Swedish artist Fascia opened the evening, holding a blinking flashlight above her head – each flash triggering brutal bursts of noise. When she placed a webcam in her mouth and projected the table’s mysterious objects onto the screen behind her, the boundary between stage and audience dissolved through simple yet cunning technology.

Next to his MIDI keyboard, Danish artist Soli City had his trademark moving-head lamp. Like a robotic head, the lamp lit up and rotated in sync with epic crescendos and computerized voices. Soli City’s music is built around field recordings and classical instrumentation – strings and piano – forming a universe that exposes the tension between human and technology. The animated lamp and dramatic light show took centre stage, while composer Harald Bjørn stood like a hidden puppeteer, gently guiding the futuristic narrative forward.

The table in front of Norwegian artist Nagaver had been laid flat on the stage floor, forming a low wall. Behind it knelt Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan, who unleashed hard-hitting, dark rhythms from a DJ mixer, enveloping Alice in a transcendent haze. The concert evolved from driving trance into a kind of karaoke performance, with Jayapalan singing over dusty tracks—and unfortunately the music felt more like a run-through than a fully realized concert.

Behind the table lie untapped potentials for auditory innovation, but practical constraints often limit performative expression. The concerts by Fascia and Soli City succeeded in breaking the boundary between mere execution and true performance, reminding us that not all music needs to be presented with the same gestures – and that sometimes all it takes is a webcam and a laser lamp to make that clear.

 Fascia
1
Soli City
2
Nagaver
1
in briefrelease
21.05.2025

Emergent Music

Lauri Supponen: »Dwell«
Äänitetuotanto OSK, 01.05
© Tuomas Tenkanen
© Tuomas Tenkanen
Jakob Kullberg

As an abstract micro manifesto Lauri Supponen describes his interest in »music that inhabits a second space and lingers there«, an invitation for us to dwell in the moment and discover music in its quiet emergence. 

»Gaz aux étages«, the first composition on Supponen’s breathtaking album, seems to test this idea as it unfolds with whispered bow strokes devoid of pitch. It is as if the piece itself is an entity wondering if it will prove to be music as it tentatively investigates its own constituent components. A subtle opening to an album that answers this question with clarity in its eponymous second work »Dwell« (tracks 2–5), exploring a fascinating microtonal realm. In virtuoso performances of astonishing accuracy, guitarist Petri Kumela and vocalist Tuuli Lindeberg bring Supponen’s demanding four-movement duo to life. The guitar writing in Dwell recalls Norwegian composer Martin Rane Bauck’s Fretted with Golden Fire with its drone-like microtonal strumming – a connection substantiated by the album notes, which reveal both composers know each other and have collaborated with bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone. 

The dwelling-space Supponen offers in »Eau & gaz à tous les étages« and »Opus Nen«, return the listener to a more remote sonic space, reminiscent of the album’s opening albeit with tighter compositional sense. Performed with intensity by Madison Greenstone and baritone saxophonist Sikri Lehko, they consolidate the pervasive feeling that Dwell is a uniquely inspired collaboration.

Lauri Supponen
1
playlist
09.05.2025

My name is Sven Helbig – would you like to see my playlist?

© PR

»Every moment is nothing but the uttermost end of the past. Music makes this edge wide and beautiful.«

Sven Helbig is a German composer and producer known for combining orchestral and choral music with electronic elements and a strong poetic sensibility. A self-taught musician raised in Eisenhüttenstadt, he released his debut album Pocket Symphonies on Deutsche Grammophon to critical acclaim for its emotional depth and formal precision. Helbig has collaborated with ensembles such as the BBC Singers, Fauré Quartett, and Staatskapelle Dresden, as well as with artists like Rammstein and the Pet Shop Boys. He just released REQUIEM A on Deutsche Grammophon. It is a deeply personal and reflective composition, intertwining classical Latin liturgical texts with new ones written by Helbig himself. The work revolves around themes of loss, memory, and the possibility of renewal – with the »A« in the title symbolizing Anfang (beginning) and the belief in a new start after devastation.

playlist
25.04.2025

My name is Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek – would you like to see my playlist?

© Kåre Viemose

»Recently, I discovered that when a couple of thousand people clap their thick gloves in minus 30 degrees, it sounds like the softest techno – a freezing space where the cold air turns into a wave of warmth, and we, in a moment of collective devotion, become one with the rhythm, one with the invisible bond that connects us in the warmth of silence. Music is not just sounds, but a vain attempt to capture the infinite, which has always been and always will be.«

Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek has been the editor-in-chief of Seismograf since 2021. He is also a music critic and cultural journalist at Kristeligt Dagblad and Århus Stiftstidende/Avisen Danmark and has over the years written to publications such as Kunsten.nu, Glissando (Poland), Neural (Italy), Raw Vision (UK), Nutida Musik (Sweden), Kunstkritikk (DK/Sweden), Iscene.dk, B.T., and Jazz Special. He is the author (together with Lars Muhl) of the book HVA' SAA! En guidet rutsjebanetur gennem Aarhus – før, nu og i fremtiden (2024) and has also contributed to the anthology on music criticism Man skal høre meget (ed. Thomas Michelsen and Claus Røllum-Larsen, 2024). He is a founder and partner in the Polish-Danish cultural organization Kultur(a), and wherever there is a piano, he will be there, eager to coax a melody from it.