in brieflive

The Kids Are Alright

Ligeti Quartet: »Workshop concert«

Ligeti Quartet. © Louise Mason

Sune Anderberg. © Alexander Banck-Petersen

I know, I know. A workshop concert at the conservatory: yawn. And no, hardly anyone showed up – apart from Bent Sørensen. Fair enough. But yes, you missed out. Especially on young Albert Laubel, who did exactly what you hope someone will do at this kind of concert: suddenly step forward, make a mark, and promise something for the future.

It was the English Ligeti Quartet visiting the Royal Danish Academy of Music for the seventh time to work with the students. And they did so with both commitment and precision. (Someone should really give them a prize one day – say, someone sitting on a fortune they clearly don’t know what to do with.)

Lucas Fagervik’s Bells & Canons set up stark oppositions, as composers tend to do in exercises of style: a bright, slightly fractured minor chord set against gentle baroque pastiche in increasingly rapid alternations. Then a movement with brutal – almost banal – glissandi, another with heavy bow strokes, and a final one in which the strings took turns trying to keep a single tone alive. A beautiful, constructive, and Jürg Frey–porous landing.

A different kind of circus instinct drove Yifan Shao’s ultra-short Dreams Evaporated Too Soon, which sounded like abused sounds dragged across a floor. The ending was ultra-theatrical: the quartet froze mid-air for a moment before scraping the last traces of life out of the strings.

»I can make this even more mannered,« Jonas Wiinblad must have thought, opening his String Trio with Viola – not a quartet, of course! – with silent playing. But cliché turned into quiet poetry as small, innocent intervals slowly emerged in tight patterns. When the viola was finally allowed to join, it went against the grain: a virtuosic solo cadenza with falling bow strokes, shimmering overtones, and temperament. Boom! A striking contrast. Less convincing was the piece’s apparent need for a final, unnecessary layer of electronic distortion. Still, points for mannerism.

What remained was Albert Laubel’s String Quartet as the most fully realized work of the concert. Not overthought, just a seamless movement between dynamic extremes. Distinctive trills were elegantly disarmed by inserted snaps, glissandi sounded like part of an internal logic rather than mere effect, and the sound world shifted with calm dramatic overview. Substance and maturity in 2026 – well, well.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

playlist

01.07

My name is Marie Arleth Skov – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music for me is medicine, comfort and a kick in the ass. Community, joy, a vent. Poetic political compass. And over the years, music has also become a kind of life chapter, linked to specific places, times and people.«

Marie Arleth Skov is a Danish art historian who has lived in Berlin since 1999. She works at the intersection of art, sexuality and music, with a primary historical focus on surrealism and the punk movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Her book Punk Art History was published by Intellect Books (UK) in 2023. Most recently, she has curated the exhibition UNRULY. The Body in Punk, which can be seen at Aros Kunstmuseum in Aarhus in the autumn of 2026. The catalogue for the exhibition is published by Marrow Press.

news

22.06

Free Improvisation Moves in Among Dim Sum and Hot Pots

自由即兴创作比性爱更好! – »Free improvisation is better than sex.« According to drummer Kresten Osgood, the saying is attributed to Confucius. Whether the ancient Chinese philosopher ever uttered those words is doubtful. But the quote perfectly captures the spirit of one of the most unusual events at this year's Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

From 7–11 July, pianist Søren Kjærgaard and drummer Kresten Osgood will take over CC Taste on Amagerbrogade, performing daily from 2–4 pm among diners, dim sum and steaming hot pots.

in briefrelease

19.06

When the Machine Starts Singing

Soli City: »Poetics of a New Estate«

15 Love, 28.05

Martin Funder

With Soli City, the boundary between the organic and the synthetic is almost impossible to discern. What first appears to be an ordinary piano suddenly slips into a dizzying glissando. Soli City resembles a cyborg – half cello, half computer – fusing strings and voices into a seamless digital synthesis. The result is a science-fiction dream interrupted by surreal monologues and abruptly punctuated by the shrill click of a camera shutter.

That percussive camera-flash motif runs throughout both PARADOXE (2024) and the new album Poetics of a New Estate. Here, Harald Bjørn, the composer behind Soli City, further develops the sonic language introduced on its predecessor. Whereas PARADOXE staged the encounter between acoustic and digital sounds as an explicit confrontation, the two worlds now feel far more deeply integrated. Even the album's abrupt shifts seem entirely natural, as on »Rooms & Walls«, where a slurred vocoder and delicate string textures give way to an insistent drum groove.

Soli City's music embodies a distinctive form of self-reflection. As acoustic sounds bend, fracture and are interrupted by those recurring electronic flashes, we are reminded of Bjørn's remarkable ability to compose genuinely innovative music. Just as the most visionary science fiction remains rooted in the realities of its own time, every musical breakthrough carries echoes of the past. Soli City embraces these nostalgic resonances only to twist them into unfamiliar shapes.

With deceptively simple means, Poetics of a New Estate dissolves the boundary between nostalgia and contemporaneity. Like a true cyborg, Soli City reveals the divide between the digital and the acoustic to be less a fundamental opposition than an oddly arbitrary construction.

playlist

18.06

We are Selvhenter – would you like to see our playlist?

»Music, for us, is a fusion of different consciousnesses into a single shared focal point.«

The band Selvhenter was founded in 2010 by trombonist Maria Bertel, saxophonist Sonja LaBianca, violinist Maria Diekmann, and drummers Jaleh Negari and Anja Jacobsen. In 2017, Maria Diekmann left the group, and Selvhenter continued as a quartet.

Selvhenter’s sound is driven by a deep fascination with sonic textures, rhythmic displacements and polyrhythms, acoustic and electronic melodies, hard-hitting compositional choices, improvised beauty, and a sheer joy of creating and performing music. Selvhenter has played concerts both in Denmark and internationally. The group is also the nucleus of the artist collective Eget Værelse, which houses the members’ solo projects as well as collaborations such as Valby Vokalgruppe, SOLW, Nina Garcia & Maria Bertel, and G.E.K.

playlist

09.06

My name is Håkon Guttormsen – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music for me remembers.«

Håkon Guttormsen is a Norwegian composer and trumpeter living in Copenhagen. He is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Royal Academy of Rhythmic Music. He primarily composes scores for ensembles as well as music drama and opera. He is currently working on a work for solo violin and electronics for ILK Music’s concert series during CPH Jazz 2026 and on his first symphonic work, which will premiere at the academy in 2027. He is a member of nyMusik’s composer group in Norway and a board member of UNM Denmark.