Denmark, b. 1942
Composer and violinist Birgitte Alsted is an experimental artist working with contemporary music. Her work as a performing musician is essential in her activities as a composer – her idiom is often dramatic, with acoustic instruments, computer and taped sounds. As a composer, her work ranges from collective improvisation and creative music teaching to theatre music, solo works and vocal- and orchestral music. www.kvinderimusik.dk/bestyrelsen/birgitte.html
England, b. 1972, living and working in Norway
A 16-channel concert installation, Trade Winds is Natasha Barrett’s contribution to the LARM festival. Trade Winds is a 52-minute electroacoustic composition inspired by the ocean's physical nature, mystery, drama, mythology and concept. Barrett unleashes the musical potential of acoustic recordings from a 100-year-old sailing ship, interviews from a retired Norwegian captain and recordings from above and within harbor, shore and open oceans around the world. The music takes the listener on a journey from culture into nature, through storm, fables, ugliness and beauty in a way unheard before. www.notam02.no/~natashab
NB! Trade Winds only shown during the festival, April 14-15 (Studio 3).
See program for more info.
Exploration Invisibilis
Artist: Natascha Barrett
Exploration Invisibilis, 2003, 28 minutes. Electroacoustic acousmatic composition spatialised in second-order ambisonics format. This photograph shows the version of Exploration Invisibilis that is decoded to a dodecahedron loudspeaker array.
The audience (in this case a maximum of four people at any one time) are elevated such that they are in the centre of a three dimensional sound field.
© Natasha Barrett.
Norway, b. 1977. Lives and works in Berlin and Oslo
Ann Kristin Bergesen will appear on stage with Tap Performance.
“I mainly work with video and performance, where the sound is an important part of my artistic expression. My main focus is on the relationship between sound and movement, where I explore the space that arises in between. I am interested in the sound in itself, its expression and function, and also our experience of sound.” Bergesen works in a simple and concentrated idiom, where she uses her body as a sound-object. In her choreography, the pre-recorded sounds are experienced as connected to the movement in an instant moment arising on stage.
Tap Performance
Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4
Artist: Ann Kristin Bergesen
Photos from Tap Performance.
Photo: Johannes Holzhauer.
Norge, b. 1969
Lisa Dillan, a sound equilibrist with the pure voice as her tool. – uses it analogue with no effects, where it results unexpectedly in a non-vocal and poetic sound. Dillan works with voice, improvisation, performance and composition. She is trained as a jazz singer at the Norwegian Music Conservatory. Besides being a solo artist, she works with the improvisation-trio Slinger as well as dancers and performance artists. Her solo album Vocal Improvisations was released in 2005. www.dillan.no/lisa
Artist: Lisa Dillan
Photo: Geir Dillan.
B. 1966/1971 in Sweden, lives and work in Oslo.
Anna Carin Hedberg and Ebba Moi made the sound project Changes in the Norwegian landscape in 2003. The work is about Norway – as a changing nation. A whispering game based on a booklet for touristic information about a Norwegian landscape, described through foreign people’s auditive interpretation of the Norwegian language. The piece starts with an incomprehensible sentence that is repeated, but each time a new voice is heard it increasingly resembles Norwegian.
A Swedish version of the performance will be made for the LARM festival.
Forandringer i det norske landskapet
Artister: Ebba Moi & Anna Carin Hedberg
Documentation of a performance of Forandringer i det norske landskapet [Changes in the Norwegian landscape]. Six individuals of different nationalities listen to a sentence read out in Norwegian. As in a kind of of whispering game, the third listens to the second listener’s version, the fourth to the third, and so on. As several of the readers do not understand the meaning of the Norwegian words, language decomposes at each stage until
it again becomes a mere series of abstract vocal units.
Foto: Line Løkken.
B. 1927 Sweden
Elisabet Hermodsson’s work encompasses a range of media and genres; writer, composer, philosopher, debater and artist. On the basis of humanist, Christian and subsequently feminist convictions she has formulated a far-reaching cultural critique to which environmental concerns are central.
During the festival April 13-15 Hermodsson shows her ”poem-drawings”, conflating poetry and pictures. In 1965 she made a film for the Sveriges Television in co-operation with Kurt Lindgren, where they composed electronic music and sound to the images. The drawings were also published in the volume Dikt-ting (Poems Objects) in 1966.
http://goto.glocalnet.net/elisabethermodsson
Assyriskt lejon
Artist: Elisabet Hermodsson
Drawn poem from the book Dikt-ting 1966, by Elisabet Hermodsson.
© Elisabet Hermodsson.
Finland, all members b. between 1975-80
Hertta Lussu Ässä are Merja Kokkonen, Jonna Karanka and Laura Naukkarinen
What musically unites the members of group is their way of producing improvised psychedelic sound with a variety of traditional and electric instruments, objects, toys and multivoiced singing. Their performances aren’t holy, serious events but rather looked at as possibilities for experiments and contact with the audience through dark humour.
Artist: Hertta Lussu Ässä
A session with Hertta Lussu Ässä.
Photo: Pirkka Hartikainen.
Sweden, all members b. between 1964-68
Hugger-Mugger are Maria Hägglund, Catarina W Källström and Elinor Ström.
They work with sound, music, performance and installations. It’s a mumbling, rumbling, tumbling in a raw huddle when Hugger-Mugger messes around and makes music. In their first public performance, Session nr.1, they gave a concert from a ordinary wardrobe equipped with a lot of loud speakers, aerodynamical effects and fireworks.
Artist: Hugger-Mugger
Hugger-Mugger takes a bath while lightning strikes. Hugger-Mugger: Catarina W. Källström, Maria Hägglund, Elinor Ström
© Hugger Mugger.
Finland, b. 1978
Warm, home-baked psychedelic sounds with loops and weirdly tuned acoustic instruments, Kuupuu’s magic lies in the dreamily cracked song schemes and haunted toy box melodies. Kuupuu is a solo project of Jonna Karanka, who is also involved in such psych folk groups as Hertta Lussu Ässä, Kukkiva Poliisi and The Anaksimandros. Jonna Karanka also works as a visual artist concentrating on film and video, photography, drawing and painting.
http://mixoftheweek.com/kuupuu/kuupuu.html
Teckning/målning av Piirustuskerhoo
Iceland, b. 1977
Kira Kira is Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir’s as a solo artist. She will enter the stage accompanied by Samuli Kosminen, Finnish percussionist and trumpet player Alex Somers, US.
For the past 10 years she has tinkered with noises in bands such as Spúnk, Big band brutal and Stórsveit Sigrídar Níelsdóttur. She is a founding member of Icelandic art collective Kitchen Motors. Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir has composed music for theatre, dance and movies. As musician and artist she has performed and exhibited in various odd places in the world – on shelves, in church towers and parking lots. this.is/kirakira, www.kitchenmotors.com
Artist: Kira Kira
Kira Kira concert at klinK & banK, an abandoned net factory turned artist run space in Reykjavík.
© Gudmundur Oddur.
Denmark
Both Astrid Lomholt and Tanja Schlander are visual artists as well as sound tinkers. Their latest material collects itself around field-recordings, beats and poetry readings.
Astrid Lomholt’s work reveals a fascination with sounds and sound qualities. She is making invisible social attitudes visible through the use of concrete elements, often phrased in words and images with references to music and movies. Tanja Stasia Schlander; “I am a collector of specific types of sound from trains, traffic, dinner tables, dogs, discotheques... It is noise, the sound of every day life and the texture of my surroundings that is my primary material.”
http://magica.menneske.dk/tanja/soundart, www.soundart.dk
Cover by Astrid Lomholt.
Artist: Astrid Lomholt
Pippi 2006.
Artist: Tanja Schlander
Stills from the project "Pippi 2006" by Tanja Schlander and Rona Yefman.
Photo: Rona Yefman.
Japan b.1973, lives in Finland and Japan
Maeda works in two different fields, as a harpist in orchestras and as an experimental musician. Maeda’s approach to her works could be an “all in one a harpist - electro acoustic musician”- crossover between Japanese digital noise and classical harp. She has also investigated the possibilities in other instruments such as the kantele, a traditional Finnish harp-like instrument.
http://webusers.siba.fi/~emaeda/
Artist: Emi Maeda
Emi Maeda and Austrian artist Lia (live visuals) performing at the Generator X concert tour 19-29 April, 2006.
Photo: Marius Waltz.
Sweden
Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson have peformed as a duo since the beginning of the 1970’s. Their repertoire is mainly directed to contemporary music, with four-handed piano and prepared piano, as their speciality. During 1972-1980s they were members of the avant-garde group Harpans Kraft. Engaged in the Swedish contemporary art and music venue Fylkingen, Stockholm.
Iceland, b. 1969
In her work Ilmur Stefánsdóttir focuses on the connections and interaction between people and objects. She changes everyday objects into something extra-ordinary, adding new functions. At the surface her works seems rather capricious and quite naïve, however, her ideas are more deeply rooted. She comments with playful humor and poignancy on issues as; the worship of objects in our time, attitudes concerning femininity and the ideas of progress.
http://english.umm.is/UMMenglish/Artists/Abouttheartist/14
Playtime
Artist: Ilmur Stefánsdóttir
Photo: Carsten Lehmann.
B. 1940, Iceland, lives in the US
Steina has collaborated with Woody Vasulka, an engineer with a background in film, since 1964. They began with a series of video works whose imagery arose primarily through the manipulation of the video signal at the level of the electron beam itself. Although her main thrust is in creating videos and installations, she is also involved in interactive performance in public places, playing a digitally adapted violin to move video images displayed as large video projections. Steina is one of the founders of legendary The Kitchen in New York. www.vasulka.org
Artist: Steina
Still from early tapes of the piece Violin Power, 1969-78.
© Steina.
Norway, b. 1974
Hild Sofie Tafjord is an improvisation and noise musician who collaborates with noise duo Fe-mail, the improvisations ensemble SPUNK, and the performance trio Agrare. She also works in ensembles as Crimetime Orchestra, Spaghetti Edition and Norwegian Noise Orchestra. Tafjord is renowned as a versatile musician playing in genres like pop, rock and jazz. She also concerts as a soloist and is a schooled French horn player. www.groove.no/html/person/88398289.html
www.femailmusic.com/index1.html
Artist: Hild Sofie Tafjord
© Hild Sofie Tafjord.
Finland
Päivi Takala, (b. 1953) is working as a composer, classical violinist, pedagogue and cross-disciplinary artist in installations, films and exhibitions. In her sound-work the key is the aesthetics of “everyday” sounds, as in Kodinkonetanssi / Household Machinedance, installation / performance for vacuumcleaners, sewing machines, hair dryers, coffee brewers and dancers. It was first performed in 1991 and was for the first time since, re-made for the LARM festival. Ulla Koivisto (b. 1950) is a pioneer in the field of contemporary dance in Finland. She has made an imprint as a choreographer, dancer and teacher. Her choreographies are characterized by humour and a clear composition and she argues for openness between art forms. In her work inventiveness, the absurd and the abstract makes art out of every-day life. Kiti Loustarinen is a filmdirector and documentary filmmaker. She contributed with the image material for the performance.