© Anna Maggý
»For me, music is all that vibrates.«
Bára Gísladóttir is an Icelandic composer and double bassist based in Copenhagen. Her work is generally based on thoughts regarding the approach and concept of sound as a living being.
© Robin Skjoldborg
Danish musician, author, and artist Martin Hall has died at the age of 63. According to his family, he passed away from a heart attack at his home in Frederiksberg on Tuesday, 21 July.
Since the early 1980s, Hall left an indelible mark on Danish music and cultural life – first with Ballet Mécanique and Under For, and later through an extensive solo career that moved effortlessly between experimental music, electronic pop, poetry, performance, and literature. He leaves behind one of the most substantial discographies and bibliographies in Danish cultural history.
Even in the later years of his career, Hall continued to push the boundaries of sound. On Inkubation (2023), created in collaboration with producer Thomas Li, he delivered some of his most uncompromising work in years: a dark, experimental sound installation in which philosophical spoken-word poetry merged with analogue soundscapes and contemporary ambient music.
»Denmark has lost one of its most original and persistent artists – one who was also held in high regard internationally,« his family wrote in a statement announcing his death.
Martin Hall was 63.
© Anna-Julia Granberg/BLUNDERBUSS
»Experience with music involves contact between humans and something beyond it. With contact I believe that people are affected in a way that changes them, even though the change can be very small. You may be transformed into something you still do not know what is.«
Kristine Tjøgersen is a Norwegian composer and clarinet player living in Oslo. Her compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor and precision. Through her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other.
Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas that allows her to incorporate organic forms into the music. As Tjøgersen puts it: »By giving nature a voice in the concert hall, I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life, and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.«
Her works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, Pinquins, SWR and WDR Symphonieorchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as at festivals such as ECLAT, Ultraschall, Wien Modern, Tectonics, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Ultima.
Every Ending Is Also a New Beginning
Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Allan Gravgaard Madsen and Morten Riis: »Away«
© Alexis Rodríguez Cancino
Allan Gravgaard Madsen’s and Morten Riis’s Away is a »mixed media« orchestral work. The physical orchestra is supplemented by sound and video recordings from the basement of Aarhus Theatre (woodwind quintet), Aarhus Cathedral (brass quintet), and Marselisborghallen (string orchestra). All of these locations have, at various points over the past 90 years, housed the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra.
Away opens with the final two chords of the overture to Rossini’s William Tell (1829), which are explored throughout the orchestra. Gradually, musicians leave the ensemble, only to reappear later in smaller constellations in recordings from the aforementioned locations. Through technology, the orchestra plays across time and space in a highly successful manner.
The work explores stasis and movement, with air as a central device: the wind players often blow into their instruments without producing tones, while the string players imitate the sound of wind using plastic bags. For me, Away has three highlights. Trumpets and percussion play phrases that turn out to anticipate a video of a flutist walking through the city. The trumpets mimic the sound of a truck – »beep-bop-beep-bop« – and the percussion becomes the flutist’s stilettos. Musique concrète turned on its head! At one point, half of the string players are seen sitting in a circle, playing intensely dissonant chords, only to kill them again – the physical shock activated my ears. The third highlight comes when the entire orchestra plays together again while all three projections are running simultaneously. Here, the work can truly begin, and one clearly senses the energy rising in the room. But – unfortunately – as soon as this climax is reached, the intensity drops again.
At just under 45 minutes, Away is, unfortunately, slightly too long and static for my taste. The effect of the aforementioned ruptures might not have been as strong in a shorter format, but I would have wished for just a bit more of the intensity the work so clearly was capable of delivering. I was left with a somewhat flat feeling. The piece also ended so quietly that several people were unsure whether it had actually finished and whether we could applaud.
Fear and Heavy Curtains in Aarhus
Aarhus Festuge: Hotel Pro Forma: »Flammenwerfer«
Blixa Bargeld. © Emma Larsson
»All sounds are loud,« we hear in Flammenwerfer – Hotel Pro Forma’s account of the Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911). Everything in this universe is transparent and layered. The orange hue in Hill’s art, flickering across the stage, crackles with both a beautifully golden noise and a psychedelic quality reminiscent of 1970s ceramics. In a central scene, Blixa Bargeld half-screams into a microphone and receives looped screams hurled back into his head. The patchwork of sound also includes five vocalists from IKI and selected pieces – the only music here that comes close to pop – by Nils Frahm.
The dark circles under the eyes are constantly pronounced. As are the letters that signal a new chapter, the next dive into the mind – for instance the section titled »Paranoia«. Here, IKI expands Einstürzende Neubauten’s »Halber Mensch« into five voices, allowing the hallucinations and anxiety to grow to full human scale. Yes, the sound was loud and numbing in itself. But it is largely thanks to IKI that we feel the extremes, the brain disease, and Hill’s experience of a »misarranged world«. They sang: »Heavy curtains drawn over the mind. A thick deadening cloud that blocks the use of senses.« And that is how it sounded. Cold. Like the saddest Instagram filter imaginable – with sound.
Unfortunately, Blixa Bargeld is used too sparingly in Flammenwerfer, which is not exactly a masterpiece from Hotel Pro Forma. Still, the gala audience sat very still in very soft seats and saw both a giraffe and a former queen on the same evening. The rest of Aarhus Festuge can only be more cheerful.
© Roberto Bordiga
»Music for me is bumping, rubbing, colliding, sliding and sculpting... in space-time. AKA the gift that keeps giving <3 .«
Greta Eacott is a critically acclaimed British/Swedish composer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is primarily known for her boundary pushing experimental percussion works and her »sans-disciplinary« approach to music composition; which incorporates spatial aesthetics, design theory and physical movements as integral elements in the musical compositions. This manifests in a unique and modern musical aesthetic which is both playful and refined, agitating and welcoming, sensual and synthetic. Since 2014 she has been running the DIY record label One Take Records.