Et tekstbaseret choose your own adventure-spil udspillede sig på det sorte biograflærred – ét bogstav ad gangen. De hvide pixels i Tobias Sejersdahls Becoming Glass tog os gennem tryllebindende, skæve scenarier i et forbløffende velskrevet sprog. Spillet, vi læste, var i sig selv en genial udforskning af forestillet lyd, der undervejs fik lydudtryk fra en anden verden til at udspille sig i mit hoved. Jeg læste – og hørte for mit indre øre – »A soft and tender sound of someone slurping soup«. Men umenneskeligt hurtige marimbatoner vibrerede samtidig i smukt foruroligende kombinationer i den lydkomposition, der fyldte salen til denne spilsekvens. De to kontrasterende lydudtryk eksisterede simultant i mit hoved, hvor lydeksperimentet udfoldede sig – til min store begejstring.
I Almost droning (for two harpsichords) blev jeg igen blæst bagover. Af to cembaloer. To performere hamrede så mange moltoner i minuttet som muligt ud af cembaloerne. Længe, så ørerne kunne gå på opdagelse i de sære klange. De stoppede brat. Rungende stilhed. Så gjorde de det igen. Og igen. Det udviklede sig til alt andet end stilhed: På skift klimprede de larmende solistiske stykker eller hamrede konstante kæmpeakkorder i et vidunderligt intenst virvar af cembaloernes 8-bit-agtige toner. Det lød som en computer, der er gået i hak på den bedst tænkelige måde. Og jeg forlod debutkoncerten forbløffet og høj på lydkunst.
Let’s be honest: when you think of composed music for solo instruments, the snare drum is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. It may be the noisiest member of the percussion family and has been setting the volume level in everything from classical music to pop for decades. That’s why I pricked up my ears when the Canadian percussionist Ryan Scott announced an entire album of works for snare drum – written by 14 different composers. A full hour and a half of music, no less. And yes, that sounds like a lot for a record that mainly consists of a single drum. But there is definitely something to discover here.
The opening, Andrew Staniland's »ANTIGRAVITYDRUM«, blends free jazz with inspired use of percussive vibraphone, while Beka Shapps’ »Skinscape IV« sends the drum strokes through ring modulation and extensive sound processing, bringing us close to musique concrète. Christina Volpini’s »only ghost« slips into horror territory with march-drum-inspired bursts and ghostly use of the snare drum’s high register, while Amy Brandon’s »Time and Effort« almost becomes a demonstration of the instrument’s technical possibilities.
Fourteen works over ninety minutes is a substantial mouthful. The snare drum’s limited tonal vocabulary means that you occasionally lose focus, even after several listens, and the contrast between drum strokes and silence is repeated a little too often. That said, Ryan Scott and the composers get just about as much out of what is essentially a glorified marching drum as one could hope for. I was both entertained and intrigued along the way. As an experiment, the idea is strong – but in the long run also a bit too insistent for me to return to often. Still, one should not underestimate the versatility of a good old-fashioned snare drum.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
»Music for us is a way to create a connection and community with other people.«
Although Schæfer has only released three singles so far, the band has already made a mark on the Danish music scene. The duo and their friends, Anna Skov (vocals) and Emil Mors (keyboards), write socially relevant, subtle and humorous songs that point fingers at both the outside world and themselves.
We sat in slow decay for an evening in the vestibule of Hell. It was during an ambitious, multisensory interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857) – Helvedesblomsterne (The Flowers of Evil). Director Anna Schulin-Zeuthen and composer Mikkel B. Grevsen brought together mezzo-soprano Sophie Haagen and actor Thure Lindhardt with the six string players of Ensemble Hermes, adding electronic music to the mix. This Frankenstein-like staging transported modernist poetry into 2026, where the motifs stretching between beauty and decay still – despite many scientific advances – remain a fundamental condition.
In Musikhuset Aarhus, the stage was decorated with lush and withered flowers as vanitas symbols. Lindhardt opened with a recitation that shattered the fourth wall: with both humour and intensity he addressed us directly in the audience – hypocrites and future corpses.
In contrast to the almost seamless sonic unity of Haagen’s dark voice, the string players’ sustained textures and the ghostly distortions of the electronics, Lindhardt’s reading appeared as a strange but necessary disturbance. He prowled about with a folder tucked under his arm like an awkward outsider – the poet as eternal observer.
For my part, I dutifully tried to follow the printed programme sheet, but soon gave up and instead – quite in the spirit of the work – allowed myself, hypocritically, to be intoxicated and seduced. Helvedesblomsterne succeeds as a bold and grand project. Yet the performance also balances a little too cautiously between harmonic beauty and the nineteenth-century uncanniness that in Baudelaire crawls with death all the way into the bones.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
»For me, music is both the beat that gets me through my run, sets the mood for everyday life, but not least my personal soundtrack that evokes past events and moods throughout my life.«
Lasse Andersson is the museum director of Kunsten Museum of Modern Art and Utzon Center, as well as the chairman of the board of Krabbesholm Højskole and the Packness Foundation. Before museums took up all his time, he wrote his PhD thesis The City and the Creative Entrepreneurs, co-founded the art and technology house Platform4, and was behind both the LasseVegas office and the technology project Nulkommafem. He has also headed the Urban Design department at Aalborg University. Today, he works purposefully to develop cultural institutions as modern spaces for learning: places where people meet and connect through aesthetic experiences that move, challenge, and open new perspectives on the society we share. For Lasse Andersson, art and architecture are not just mirrors of the world – they help shape it. With that ambition, he has curated exhibitions such as Fatamorgana – Utzon møder Jorn (2016) I Arkitektens Verden – Reiulf Ramstad (2019), Pierre Huyghe – Offspring (2022), Tal R & Mamma Andersson – omkring Hill (2023) og Michael Kvium – Knudepunkt (2025).
It has become common to describe a strain of ambient music as »cinematic«, thereby – perhaps unintentionally – dismissing it as mood-setting functional music rather than an art form in its own right. Yet the exploration of static sound fields and atmospheric drone structures long predates their use as a cinematic device. Within this tradition, stretching from Morton Feldman to Éliane Radigue and Phill Niblock, the Italian composer Guido Zen has, for the past fifteen years or so, inscribed himself under the pseudonym Abul Mogard. In the late 1990s he moved through London’s electronic underground with the duo Gamers In Exile and has since collaborated with, among others, the Danish composer Goodiepal.
At the concert at Alice, Mogard’s broad synth textures emerged like banks of fog. Behind a table densely packed with drum machines, mixers and patch cables – tendrils of wires curling between the machines – the black-clad Mogard stood illuminated by small clip lamps attached to the edges of his equipment. The tones were elongated, almost motionless. Time was not measured in bars but in intensity: bass resonating in the chest; a subtle adjustment of atmospheric pressure. Undramatic, yet unstoppable. The textures shifted so gradually that one often registered the changes only after they had passed. Harmonic modulations rarely felt like traditional chord changes, but rather like shadows moving across a surface.
Synth layers slid into one another with near-geological slowness, settling like accumulated sediment – gentle and colossal at once. Mogard lingered on the single tone long enough for it to begin revealing its inner life: tiny trembling vibrations, almost microscopic irregularities in the crust of sound. The sound pulsed from within, crossed by undulating patterns of interference.
English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek
