Deadly Serious Play at Louisiana

New Sounds at Louisiana is an initiative in which the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has invited the record label Dacapo and the music publisher Edition S to curate concerts featuring living composers. Simon Steen-Andersen was the first composer in the series, and he seized the opportunity to assemble a programme that was not only overwhelming and exhilarating, but also deeply unsettling. Lasting an hour, the concert unfolded as a continuous sequence in which each work flowed seamlessly into the next, forming a single extended statement of at least part of the composer’s artistic practice and philosophy.

Combining video and live performance, the concert served as a manifestation of several of Steen-Andersen’s key artistic strategies. Central among them are techniques of estrangement and defamiliarisation, exemplified by Asthma (2017) for accordion, air pumps, and video, a work that explores and interrogates human breathing in all its positive and negative dimensions. Amid the many grotesque and humorous scenes – accompanied by Håkon Stene’s brilliant Foley-style soundtrack of air noises, sound effects, and spoken commentary – a brief clip of brutal police violence suddenly appears. In it, an officer methodically sprays pepper spray into the faces of handcuffed demonstrators. In that instant, everything else no longer seems quite so funny, and the crooked smile freezes.

The concert was a veritable sensory bombardment. Presenting all the works attacca undoubtedly created a powerful sense of flow, but it also left the audience almost saturated with impressions. Even so, the subsequent conversation between Simon Steen-Andersen and music critic and author Thomas Michelsen felt far too brief. Yet the composer succeeded in making his point: everything he does, he said, is a form of »deadly serious play.« Exactly.