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Om Seismograf

© Marcel Cobussen
kritik

Do you like the sound of apples?

»Engaging with Everyday Sounds« is either totally bonkers or completely inspired – either way, it will have you listening differently to the world around you.

Af
  • Andrew Mellor
21. april 2023

Turn that »music« off! Marcel Cobussen wants us all to re-orient ourselves within the houses, communities, cities, countries and civilizations in which we exist and to do so by concentrating on the sound of that vacuum cleaner your neighbor is pushing around. He gently suggests, in this madcap-but-persuasive, homespun-but-rigorous book, that we can do so by listening more intently to the world around us – to the residual noises of industry, nature and the most banal of human activities. 

To paraphrase John Cage: when we ignore everyday sounds they irritate, but when we listen they fascinate. »Can Cage’s legacy be held, continued and extended?« asks the Dutch sound philosopher and Professor of Auditory Culture at Leiden University in Engaging with Everyday Sounds – a manifesto for a new way of interpreting and interacting with the notion of Sonic Materialism. Sure it can. But in the ways suggested here? I’m not quite ready to hitch my ears unequivocally to Cobussen’s way of hearing the world…yet.

Læs videre
© PR
kritik

In Northern Norway, they have a festival that cracks the iron curtain

Even when the bridges burn, we must make an effort to cross borders, was the message at the Barents Spektakel in Kirkenes, 400 km north of the Arctic Circle. Here – in the biting cold – Russian shame, claustrophobic magnetic fields and censored sound art became the starting point for a very difficult conversation.

Af
  • Jakob Gustav Winckler
9. Marts 2023
© PR
audio essay

In and Out of Sync with Jenny

This video essay is a love letter to Jenny Hval and her music. Music can connect me, and you, to a community where sound resonates between bodies.

Af
  • Aurora Ala-Hakula ,
  • Minna-Kaisa Kallinen
25. Februar 2023

Kortkritik

© PR

Roger Reynolds: Still worth its chops? 

»Is that aesthetic still worth its chops? Reynolds claims nobody can appreciate his music in one hearing. I certainly need more convincing.«

Kortkritik

©  Benjamin Tarp

Rococo blue desire

»Across ten tracks, 'Terroirs' breathes steadily in and out, aching with every exhalation. Martin’s clean countertenor voice is right in your ear.« 

© Shutterstock

Sounding Women's Work II

»You look like 50% of the world's population, but are professionalised as a minority« – peer reviewed academic articles and audio papers on gender, technology and infrastructure in Nordic sound art and experimental music.

Peer

© Login/Shutterstock.com

Sounds of Science

6 April 2021 – Our new peer-reviewed special edition on composition, recording and listening as laboratory practice. Ten audio papers, two in-depth articles and an introduction by editors Henrik Frisk and Sanne Krogh Groth.

‘Every time we listen to music or make music, we are at the same time creating social relations or socialities’

Gender and social relations in New Music: Tackling the octopus
A conversation with Georgina Born

Collection

Marcela Lucatelli. © Marcela Lucatelli

Meet the composers

Some of them are just getting started. Others are well-established names on the international scene. But what are their thoughts on the music they create and the world they live in? Read a selection of our most interesting pieces on composers and composing.

About

Seismograf

Welcome to Seismograf

Seismograf is an independent Danish web magazine focusing on the newest developments within the arts of sound. On this page you will find our most recent English-language content as well as collections on selected topics. Want to know more about Seismograf? Then go on and scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Fokus

Bølgegrafik

Sounding Women's Work I (ENGLISH)

»You look like 50% of the world's population, but are professionalised as a minority« – 12 essays about gender, technology and infrastructure in Nordic sound art and experimental music.

‘When faced with the attacks of September 11, music’s normal modes of commemoration and memorial fractured’

Memorials of grief: Music after 9/11
An essay by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Collection

Trond Reinholdtsen: ‘Ø – Episode 6’. © Grzegorz Mart

Around the world with Seismograf

Seismograf may be located in Denmark, but brilliant music is performed all over the world. Which means we often cover events in places far, far away, as illustrated by this selection of articles.

Essays

© PR

Death and Masochism

Efterskrift enjoy the discomfort of pleasure postponed or expressed through the pain of the feeling of something missing. At the new festival MINU, the Aarhus-based ensemble will perform a concert with a simple message: everything good is allowed to die.
Macon Holt 4. november 2022
© PR

Actual Friends, Making New Maps from the Future

How do you make sense in a world filled with tragedy, grief and institutional control? In their work for MINU festival composer Conor McLean and performer Nikolaus von Bemberg turn to Charlie Kaufman’s film, »Synechdoche, New York« for answers.
Macon Holt 4. november 2022
Cover til The Sounds of Earth Record. ©  Wikimedia Commons

Alien Frequencies

The mixtape has always been a format with which to swagger and seduce, meant to project both front and vulnerability. How, though, might we interpret a sampler from another star system; what might its effect on us be? A journey with Ziggy Stardust, Yuri Gagarin, afrofuturists and intellectuals from Mars.
Ben Carver 27. Oktober 2022
© Laura Toxværd

»My pregnant body changed things – composing with the process«

Sounding Women's Work | In a situation where the gender balance is skewed in favor of men, it takes action to change the balance so no one has a special advantage, says composer, saxophonist and author Laura Toxværd. 
Laura Toxværd 25. Maj 2022
© Eget værelse

On stage we are four bodies

Sounding Women's Work | Meshes is a performance groupe with drummers and dancers. They work with the relation between body and sound and investigates how the movement of the body can be translated into a score for a drum set, and how the sound of a drum set can be translated into a score for movement.
Meshes 10. Februar 2022
© Soffi Chanchira Larsen

»Had I run around with the others, would I have become a composer at all?«

Sounding Women's Work | Mette Nielsen is occupied finding ways to create space for the small and fragile sounds in the music. She works with both completely traditional scores and more open notations and easy staging of sound.
Mette Nielsen 10. Februar 2022
© Lou Mouw

Gender, climate and class

Sounding Women's Work | Artist couple Ragnhild May and Kristoffer Raasted conceive their common practices flexibly – it is of importance to them that well-established individual practices provide the starting point for the collaborative endeavor. 
Ragnhild May & Kristoffer Raasted 10. Februar 2022
© Måske bare musik

Maybe Just Music

Sounding Women's Work – AUDIO ESSAY | »We find it problematic to articulate the feminist elements in our work directly,« say Sara Willemoes Thomsen and Kim Sandra Rask from the band Måske bare musik (Maybe Just Music), who make sound drawings with kids instruments and tools.
Måske bare musik 10. Februar 2022
© Sara Laub

»What do you mean when you say feminine?«

Sounding Women's Work | »The terms feminine and masculine are used as if we all understand what they represent,« says Anja Jacobsen from the band Selvhenter and member of rehearsal place Mayhem.
Anja Jacobsen 10. Februar 2022

Reviews

© Marcel Cobussen

Do you like the sound of apples?

»Engaging with Everyday Sounds« is either totally bonkers or completely inspired – either way, it will have you listening differently to the world around you.
Andrew Mellor 21. april 2023
© PR

In Northern Norway, they have a festival that cracks the iron curtain

Even when the bridges burn, we must make an effort to cross borders, was the message at the Barents Spektakel in Kirkenes, 400 km north of the Arctic Circle. Here – in the biting cold – Russian shame, claustrophobic magnetic fields and censored sound art became the starting point for a very difficult conversation.
Jakob Gustav Winckler 9. Marts 2023
© Frankie Casillo

It is impressed in the body

After a long hiatus due to the covid-19 pandemic, Berlin Atonal has opened the gates of Kraftwerk to the public for the first time. As limitations to collective events endure, the new project Metabolic Rift includes, in addition to the live performances, an exhibition aiming to elicit individual experience with intense stimuli. The exposition presents a convincing curatorial approach to sound, exalting its sensorial qualities and proposing an inspiring model to work with the aural and its (im-)materiality in the context of art exhibitions.
Giada Dalla Bontà 11. december 2021
Sofie Birch and My Lambertsen. © Peter Følsgaard

Beyond the ASMR phenomenon

At the Academy for Open Listening, Sofie Birch and My Lambertsen set out a new direction for the ASMR genre.
Alifiyah Imani 8. december 2020
Mathias Monrad Møller. © Gerald Geerink

One man, one mission

Mathias Monrad Møller showed us an exciting creative vision at his official debut concert as singer and composer – a vision overshadowing dull questions of mere skill.
Andrew Mellor 26. Oktober 2020
Neko3 in front of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at Pulsar Festival 2020. © Britt Lindemann

The system needs to change

Pulsar Festival 2020 took place under the shadow of Marcela Lucatelli’s ‘RGBW’. It’s time for a critical look at the systems of power.
James Black 31. Marts 2020
© Agsandrew/Shutterstock.com

A difficult beast to tame

With ‘Víddir’, a 60-minute composition of light and darkness, the Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir demonstrated the breadth of her imagination.
Andrew Mellor 25. Februar 2020
Marcela Lucatelli. © Caroline Bittencourt

Chaos reigns

Madness and humour coexisted on stage as Marcela Lucatelli completed her composition studies in Copenhagen.
Andrew Mellor 4. december 2019
2019 festival poster graphics. © Angela Bulloch/SWR

Future on repeat

For a festival that prides itself on its all-premieres programming, the 2019 Donaueschinger Musiktage felt more than a little stale.
James Black 27. november 2019

Interviews

© PR

»I love freedom and I know why«

For months Ukrainian born composer and sound artist Katarina Gryvul didn't force herself to write, as she didn't want to associate war with music. It all changed: »An artist cannot be out of politics now«.
Marta Konieczna 1. december 2022
Hania Rani. © Martyna Galla

»I can’t kill anybody with my profession« 

It took Hania Rani many years to acknowledge that she feels much more comfortable in a music other than classical music. However, it lives – like a heavy rucksack – in the Polish artist's piano music, which is allowed to be called poppy. Now she is visiting Copenhagen and the new borderless music festival Resonator in Odense.
Mathias Monrad Møller 3. november 2022
© Malin Annie Jansson

»I would very much like to survive, thanks in advance«

Two years ago, James Black began writing an article series on religion in the Danish composer scene. Getting more and more angry, Black finally had to give up. Why?
Sune Anderberg 27. august 2022
© Tom Ingvardsen

Oil, Opera and the history that haunts us

Niels Rønsholdt's new work, »The Last Rites«, is a pessimistic satire on human nature. The opera takes place in Østerbro Ice Skating Rink, so the audience can feel the cold mechanics of desire and the growing chaos on our planet. Do we really need winter all year round?
Macon Holt 23. august 2022
Katarina Gryvul. © Nika Gargol

Three Artists. One Hope

Three snapshots from three different lives: Kateryna Zavoloka, Katarina Gryvul and Boris Filanovsky. All work with music, their countries are at war, and they condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They have not met each other and the article consists of three unique interviews with Seismograf. None of them see themselves as political artists, but they do believe that it is a human duty to speak out and fight back when the leader of one's homeland orders war against the other two's homelands. 
Julie Hugsted 9. Marts 2022
© Museum of Portable Sound

»I want to examine sound's relationship with as much of the world as possible«

The sound of Freud’s toilet in Wienna, Andy Warhol in the supermarket, and the first pirated mp3 ever – Museum of Portable Sound collects and exhibits sound as cultural objects. And the sounds in the collections are only accessible from curator John Kannenberg’s iPhone 4S.
Julie Hugsted 24. Januar 2022
© Willa Wathne

All Tomorrow's Music

One of Europe’s oldest contemporary music festivals comes to Aarhus. We profile Ung Nordisk Musik, which is as ageless as Madonna and contains Icelandic vulgarities from 1612.
James Black 6. august 2021
Mikkel Schou. © Zuhal Kocan

‘We don’t have the same aspirations at all’

Guitarist Mikkel Schou prefers the brand-new music composed today; his upcoming Debut Concert is a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to institutional forces of habit.
Andrew Mellor 8. Marts 2021
Christian Winther Christensen. © Mette Kramer Kristensen

‘I wanted to be radical’

Instruments struggle to voice themselves in the music of Christian Winther Christensen. His focus on small sounds and deep concentration is a perfect match for a time of silenced soundscapes.
Andrew Mellor 2. Juni 2020

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Seismograf is supported by
The Danish Arts Foundation, The Danish Composers’ Society/Koda Culture and The Independent Research Fund Denmark.