The Dust Would Not Settle on the Organs

These days, Organ Sound Art Festival is taking place in its familiar setting at KoncertKirken, and yesterday marked the festival’s second day. The concert opened with revivals of Mads Emil Dreyer’s Vidder 1 and 4, along with a newly composed interlude for pump organ, house organ, keys, and bass flute – all instruments amplified. In this way, Dreyer obscured the sources of the sounds and created a beautiful interplay between the acoustic, the amplified, and the played-back. Was it the flute or the organ I was hearing? And did the sound come from an instrument or a loudspeaker? The music bore the mark of drone music, with beautiful dissonances and a tonal development that occasionally peeked through. Enchanting and compelling.

In the next performance, the German duo Gamut inc. had fitted the church organ with two robots, allowing a computer to control the instrument. Unfortunately, I was left wondering whether the robots were properly calibrated, or whether the music had been composed for a church space with significantly more reverberation. In any case, it sounded »MIDI-dead« – a bit like a silly »piano roll« video of an obscure serial work.

The duo Aron Dahl & Mija Milovic concluded the evening with music whose tenderness and honesty might recall The xx – if the British indie rock group were playing on out-of-tune house organs. Still, the music became somewhat monotonous, and their setup appeared underutilized.

The slightly mixed experience of the evening’s program does not change the fact that Organ Sound Art Festival is an atmospheric and ambitious festival that dares to take chances when presenting us with new works for an instrument that many still associate with bygone days. This Copenhagen-based festival is anything but dusty.