January 5, 2020
If you are in the Bay Area next weekend, you might want to check out the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. A work of mine is part of the late evening concert Saturday 11.
A lot of the material for my piece originates from the Atmospherics collaboration with Je Welshtwo. Here are the program notes for my piece “Listening understood as inhabiting”.
I and my friend Jeremy Welsh often travels suburbs and rural areas in Western Norway. He brings a video camera, and I take along recording equipment. We use the resulting material in a series of audio-visual installations. The impression that these places leave often differs between sound and image. The eye experience scenic fiords. Nature and weather dominate, in spite of power lines, roads and buildings along the fiord. The field recordings testify to how these places are now domesticated. Human activities, machines, traffic, electricity, helicopters and passing airlines dominate the soundscapes.
This work starts from a series of field recordings from Western Norway and beyond. Some recordings are further processed and abstracted, and other layers added. The result is a psychogeographic reading of these places. In this composition, I want to create a sequence of places, fields and textures that we can listen to and inhabit. I hope this active listening will continue after the concert, as we re-enter our everyday lives and surroundings.
I will not be present, but Joseph Anderson is responsible for the diffusion, so I know that it is in the best of hands.
January 15, 2020
BAD – Beyond Art Disciplines
Coming Monday I take part in a seminar at Uniarts in Stockholm. The seminar comes out of a two year Erasmus+ partnership between Stockholm University of the Arts, SKH (Performing Arts and Opera), the Iceland University of the Arts (Music and Performing Arts) and the Hanze University of Groningen (Music and Fine Arts). The aim is to create a cross-cutting transdisciplinary arts module, wherein artists will expand, improve and enhance their community of practice, professional development and employability.
January 22, 2020
http://sounds.trondlossius.no/posts/2020-01-15-Straume-pedestrian-tunnel/
Here is a new field recording blog post, from the first field recording excursion of the year. I am currently reading a PhD thesis by Ondine Park on the suburban imaginary, and it gives ample food for thought with respect to my own recording and listening practice.
January 23, 2020
Next weekend an exhibition by Gunhild Mathea Olaussen opens at Galleri F15. The three works in the exhibition are the outcomes of her artistic research fellowship at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. I have had the great pleasure of following her work over several years os one of three superviosrs, alongside Karen Kipphoff and Christian Blom.
Galleri F 15
1. Feb – 15.Mar
The Sounding Matter exhibition comprises three sculptural sound installations which approach the subject of ‘us and our surroundings’ in various ways. The title refers to sounds that occur in encounters between rooms and materials, as well as to the viewer’s active search and ability to listen using the body. Listening is key to Olaussen’s artistic exploration, and in this exhibition, she works with the staging of rooms through sound, minimalist sculpture and dramaturgical structures. Sounding Matter is an extensive exhibition filling both floors of the gallery and forms part of Gunhild Mathea Olaussen’s PhD project at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. She will be defending her doctoral dissertation in March 2020.
The exhibition is supported by Arts Council Norway, the Audio-Visual Fund of Norway and NBK – Norwegian Visual Artists.
Curator: Maria C. Havstam
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gunhild Mathea Olaussen (b.1983) works with installation, composition and performance. She explores soundscapes where space, materials, the body and time are treated as equal components. She is driven by an interest for the tactile, sensual perception and social dramaturgy. Olaussen is currently an artistic research fellow at the Norwegian Theatre Academy.
EXHIBITION CONCERTS
Saturday, 14 March
at 12 noon and 3 pm
Interference, a musical work by Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, will be performed within the exhibition.
Sunday, 15 March
at 12.30-12.50 pm, 1.30-1.50 pm, 2.30-2.50 pm and 3.30-3.50 pm
Musicians Bernt Isak Wærstad, Kristine Tjøgersen, Jan Martin Smørdal and dancer Magnus Myhr will be performing within the work called Resonance. Visitors can come and go as they please.
