Despite being primarily a chamber music festival, the concerts at this year’s World New Music Days in the Faroe Islands devoted significant time to works involving electronics. Five of these were installations, of which two were noteworthy. One was Ringar í Vatni [Rings in Water] by Faroese musician Heðin Ziska Davidsen, a six-channel piece located in Viðarlundin í Havn, a large park close to the centre of Tórshavn. Melding together clinking chains and the omnipresent sound (though with continually changing intensity) of the sea, its position, at the base of a large monument commemorating drowned sailors, lent what might otherwise have been a passive work a distinctly ominous quality. WIthin its new sonic atmosphere, the monument took on an altogether more emphatic shape, thrusting defiantly upward into the sky as notions of waves and anchors circled threateningly around it. Nearby, on our way to the second installation, we experienced a live electroacoustic performance in the park by Faroese musicians Johan Hentze (trumpet) and Andras Olsen (trombone). Titled Tað skeiva stykkið í Pisu, the duo’s performance was remarkable, establishing an evocative, even hauntological environment in which melody emerged as if being dredged from either our communal memory or that of the park itself.
A different elemental force was channeled by Belgian artist Stéphanie Laforce in ÉOLIEN-SONORE, where recordings of the wind were fed into an electric aeolian harp, the output of which emerged from a collection of handmade wooden speakers. The result was a rather beautiful ambient soundscape, a steady state being continually reshaped and recoloured by random fluctuations. It also demonstrated an interesting balance between violence and gentleness, the raw power of the wind (further illustrated on a TV screen showing a billowing net structure on a beach) channelled and sublimated into delicate, sustained tones.
Most works involving electronics included a live acoustic component. Among the most striking was Out of breath for violin, cello and electronics by Estonian Marianna Liik (curiously included in a concert with no other electroacoustic works). Performed by Jón Festirstein and Andreas Restorff, they established a tense relationship with the electronics, to the extent that they had the quality of tightly-wound coils, sustained through palpable tautness. Only allowed respite when the electronics fell away, the work gave the impression of a nonchalant display of immense power, leaving a question hanging over the strings with regard to what extent they were part of that power, or merely subject to it. Just as intense was Hair’s breadth by Canadian James O’Callaghan, a highly engaging exploration of dynamic and physical opposites. It was brilliantly performed by Torleik Mortensen (one of several dazzling performances he gave during WNMD), who leaned fully into the work’s theatrical elements, brandishing his bow like a sword – in the process triggering a plethora of sounds and effects in response from the electronics – at all times utterly focused, to the extent that his actions became almost ritualistic.
Belgian Annelies Van Parys was no less in thrall to the cello in her piece Shades of Light (which i previously encountered in Huddersfield two years ago), in which the electronics expanded the instrument’s sounds and gestures. This climaxed in the most electrifying sequence, building to a massive noise wall, toggled on and off via Bartók pizzicatos, all the while morphing and reducing into its opposite, seamlessly becoming a gentle ambient space. Reverberant tones from Andreas Restorff’s cello resonated out into what now felt like an imaginary cosmos all around us. Another semi-imaginary space was conjured up in In the Midst of the Cave by Faroese composer-trumper Ernst Remmel, who duetted with a recording of himself made in one of the innumerable coastal sea caves. Sometimes the Remmel in front of us led the way, sometimes his virtual self took charge, in each case one echoing and elaborating on and around the stark projected tones of the other. Folk music was woven into this duet, Remmel interpolating a song into the music’s fabric, synchronising perfectly with the cave trumpet at the work’s evocative conclusion.
Several of the live electronic performances were especially outstanding. Swiss composer Annie Aries performed It’s Not Quiet In The Void for custom modular synthesizer, a piece that grew from shifting pulsations. Mesmerisingly, these pulses initially appeared to be subdivisions of a longer beat, in turn becoming smaller subdivisions of an even longer beat … until eventually all notion of beats and divisions was lost completely. Aries presented a fantastic sense of aural perspective and depth, vertically arranging bands of timbre and frequency to form deep, throbbing strata. Though it pummelled us with waves of intensity, it nonetheless had something of an ambient sensibility in the care and restraint that she showed. Even more all-enclosing – the most powerful immersion we experienced at this year’s WNMD – came from US musician Libby Fabricatore, in a pop-up concert in the Tutl record shop. Despite only having a single working loudspeaker to play with, she nonetheless flooded the space with levels of saturation worthy, and redolent, of Zbigniew Karkowski. Here too was a formidable sense of perspective, pitting tangible and abstract sounds against each other, with birdsong serving as a dependable point of reference while the soundscape seemed to open up ever more cavernously below us. Fabricatore shaped her palette of sounds into multi-layered textures such that, though it seemed implausible, all details were audible. It was thrilling to be submerged in such carefully-controlled levels of sonic enormity.
Having impressed us separately, cellist Andreas Restorff and double bassist Torleik Mortensen took things to a whole new level together in their duo work Unity of Opposites. From a fascinating stream of consciousness, like being in a dream, their performance was transformed when a cable accidentally came loose from Mortensen’s instrument. Capitalising on the sharp, random buzzes emanating from it, he put down his bass and began to focus on the cable. Restorff instantly responded, putting aside his cello, the two of them shifting course into a breathtaking cavalcade of rapid-fire glitching rhythms. Perhaps the brightest of these highlights was Scottish composer-performer Lauren Sarah Hayes‘ latest electronic escapade, The Accusations That Are Confessions. The visceral intensity of her performance was undeniable, where just as engrossing as the evolution of her soundworld was the way Hayes interacted with her menagerie of customised gizmos, seemingly collaborating with them and figuring out a way forward in real time. Wild panoplies of fractured beats, delicate falling patterns of pitch, fuzzy feathered filtrations of Hayes’ voice, all of these given added momentum by her movements, half graceful, half convulsive, shaping herself and the music into a composite, human-computer sound object. Impossibly becoming a kind of avant-song later, each fragment peppered with a million blips, thuds, squelches and half-echoes of itself, just as one was wondering how on earth a performance like this could end (while wanting it not to), Hayes fizzled it out of existence via a croaking network of digital vocal fry. Utterly exhilararing from start to end.
Many of this year’s WNMD concerts were recorded and are available to stream; to view specific pieces mentioned above, see below:
Johan Hentze & Andras Olsen – Tað skeiva stykkið í Pisu [starts at 21:57]
Marianna Liik – Out of breath [15:30]
James O’Callaghan – Hair’s breadth [25:15], Andreas Restorff & Torleik Mortensen – Unity of Opposites [51:25]
I really enjoyed Shades of Light by Annelies Van Parys – for me that piece was a highlight of the whole festival. The entire cello / double bass concert was really fantastic, James O’Callaghan and Boris Jakopović’s pieces especially.
And as you say, the duo of Andreas and Torleik was a great finish to that concert, I loved the references to Trash TV Trance in it – although I didn’t realize they were unintended!