#1 — 28 October 2022: Victoria Shen (USA) + John Chantler & Johannes Lund (SE/DK)
Victoria Shen (USA)
Evicshen (Victoria Shen) is an experimental music performer, sound artist, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco, USA.
Shen’s work features analog modular synthesizers (Flower Electronics), amplified objects, and other self-built electronics. The resulting music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones.
https://evicshen.com
John Chantler & Johannes Lund (SE/DK)
John Chantler is a musician and organiser living in Stockholm, Sweden. He mostly works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge held chords, saturated in harmonic distortion. In 2019 he started building a system for performance consisting of multiple battery powered synthesizer/speaker things that can be variably suspended, swung, spun and set in locations without depending on the typical concert/club infrastructure and classical modes of performer/audience interaction.
Johannes Lund is a Danish artist focussing on sound and performance. In 2001 he started yoyooyoy, a music collective, with fellow musicians Andreas Führer, Anders Meldgaard and Toke Mortensen. yoyooyoy turned out to be the centre of Lund’s career the following years and within the collective he played in the groupes Fjernsyn Fjernsyn, Slütspürt, Yoke & Yohs, G.E.K., Forkert and Sumo Freunds.
Lund’s solo releases go against the normal assumptions of how a saxophone sounds. Having worked with guitar players Lund’s developed a characteristic sound, using intensity, persistence and endurance as main effects.
Along with performing Lund has always been involved with arranging shows in the Copenhagen underground scene. In 2010 he started a venue for experimental and extreme music together with Sune Nielsen, Tobias Kirstein and Maria Bertel, called Mayhem. Mayhem gained a high international reputation and became a centre for the experimental music scene in Denmark.
#2 — 11 November 2022: Tom Mudd (UK) & Elisabeth Klinck (BE)
Tom Mudd (UK)
Tom Mudd enjoys making music with computers. Recent work revolves around physical models: digital synthesis processes based on physical simulations of acoustic objects and instruments. Brass Cultures (Fancyyyyy0 uses massed brass synthesis: digital models of physically improbable brass instruments being played by algorithms. Guitar Cultures is due to be released in 2022. Previous work released on the Entr’acte label explored similar territory with his own synthesis processes. He currently lectures in sound and music at Edinburgh College of Art.
http://tommudd.co.ukhttps://tommudd.bandcamp.com/album/gutter-synthesis
“In Tom Mudd’s work, the conceptual and technological processes are paramount. For this particular release, both are embedded in the Gutter Synthesis algorithm and software which was created for and used in all six tracks. An inevitable consequence of this way of working is that masses of material can be created, which then requires both selection and editing. Once these decisions have taken place a strange, apparently contradictory, perceptual shift takes place towards the material.
The listener is confronted with complex, intense and emotionally charged musical events. This was not Tom Mudd’s intention as he’s not overtly concerned with personal expression. A deep interest in algorithmic computer processes is his guiding principal. Yet from this apparently cold approach to making music comes vivid, dramatic, sound art, packed with rich emotional layers that never operate at the level of the trite and illustrative. There is also a strong formal and structural quality to his pieces that allows, in the best possible sense, the listener to ‘immerse’ themselves in this challenging sound world.”
John Wall on ‘Gutter Synthesis’ (2017)
Elisabeth Klinck (BE)
Elisabeth Klinck is a contemporary violinist, composer and performer based in Ghent, Belgium. With a background in electroacoustic composition and theatre she navigates through emotional landscapes using intimate sound textures and atmospheric tones. She studied at the Lemmensinstuut, The Royal Conservatory of Brussels and at Academy for Music & Drama in Gothenburg, where she acquired a masters in Orchestral Performance.
Klinck’s work can be an overwhelming force, but fragile at the same time. Her debut album ‘Picture a Frame’ will be released on Hallow Ground (Kali Malone, FujiIIIIIIIIIIta,…) in April and is a beautiful collage that functions as a sonic diary for the time she spent in the Spanish Pyrenees with longtime collaborator Oscar Claus.
As a performer of composed and improvised music she often collaborates with different artists and organisations. This sense of community is as important in her music as it is in her day-to-day life. Previous collaborations include: Miet Warlop (One Song), Ben Bertrand, Lieselot Siddiki, Jarne Van Loon, OffOff Film, Kopergieterij, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Nils Vermeulen and many more.
#3 — 25 November 2022:
Maria W. Horn & Mats Erlandsson + Amina Hocine
Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson present HIMLAGLÖD (commissioned by INA GRM) and other works.
In October 2019 Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson traveled to Vardö¸, a municipality in Finnmark county in the northeastern part of Norway, close to the Russian border. They used field recording as a way of processing their sliver of time in the area as it unfolded to them. A hailstorm heard through the window of an emptied bowling hall, the sound of walking through pieces of shattered rock inside an abandoned bunker, the ever-burning gas-lit fire of a memorial monument commemorating the victims of witchcraft trials in 1621. All the recordings show recurring interference patterns in the recordings themselves likely caused by the presence of the radar station present on the island.
The processed field recordings form a synthetic ever-changing room that still remains the same. These sonic imprints with all of their particular characteristics, heard through the ears of two transient visitors, served as an aural setting in which the synthesized parts of the piece could manifest as the pair immersed themselves in modular synthesizers at the GRM in August 2021. The work done at the GRM focused on developing a shared tonal language based on near-stable harmonic timbres drawn up by a combination of the analog instruments at the studio and digital algorithmic techniques for sound generation.
Maria W Horn
Maria W Horn’s work uses synthetic sound, electroacoustic and acoustic instruments and audiovisual components, often devicing generative and algorithmic processes to control timbre, tuning and texture. She employs a varied instrumentation ranging from analog synthesizers to choir, string instruments, pipe organ and various chamber music formats. Acoustic instruments are often paired with digital synthesis techniques, in order to extend the instruments timbral capacities. Often based on minimalist structures, her music explores the inherent spectral properties of sound and their ability to transcend time and space, reality and dream.
Mats Erlandsson
As a composer, musician and sound artist, Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly reemerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound.
Amina Hocine
Amina Hocine is a Swedish-Algerian musician. Born 1991 in Gothenburg. From an early age she was trained in classical piano and violin. She wrote her first song at the age of four. As a teenager she began writing poetry and published a poetry collection at the age of fifteen. After studies at the music program at Hvitfeldtska high school, she moved out to Tjörn to continue studying music. She is currently studying at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm where she started to develop new strategies for live performance using a DIY assemblage of pipes and compressed air apparatus.
https://aminahocine.com