http://oeyvind.teks.no/

ALEPH

Super energetic improvised electronic music with references ranging from Schönberg to Stockhausen, and from Led Zeppelin to Spy vs. Spy.

Stian Westerhus has since his homecoming from England in 2004 been one of the busiest musicians on the improv scene in Trondheim. He plays, and has done projects, with amongst others Terje Isungset, Arve Henriksen, Kjetil Møster og Paal Nilssen-Love, and plays in groups like Monolithic, Bladed and Puma.
Stian Westerhus is blessed with little or no respect for the guitar as an instrument, and you’ll find inspirations ranging from poly-rhythmical extreme metal, moderen classical, noise, folk music and free jazz. All in all a personal musicality with 110% energy.

Øyvind Brandtsegg is widely known as an electro-wizard. Øyvind has been active in such groups as Krøyt and Motorpsycho, but for the time being he is busy as a PhD Research Fellow, researching compositional techniques in improvisation. He is also developing his own software based on ”compositionally enabled instruments”, and Øyvind’s live sampler ImproSculpt set a new standard for the complexity of electronic instruments.
Tonight he plays the Marimba Lumina, and a totally new version of ImproSculpt.
Marimba Lumina is a melodic percussion interface buildt by Don Buchla. There are only made about 30 - 40 of these, two of them are in Norway, Øyvind owns them both.

Pekka Stokke is a video artist/visualist specializing in live video improv.
From chaotic cut-up film absurdities with freeimprov band MisteryTor, to soft, cozy movie abstractions with Kobert, lightplay with Krøyt, old school VJ mixing with Motorpsycho and interactive, generative videopainting with The School.
For this project, he has comissioned a magical videobending machine from dutch glitchism viz Karl Klomp. The machine is built on old hardware and chinese electronics, and the night will be spent exploring and destroying television aesthetics to the soundtrack supplied by Brandtsegg/Westerhus.

http://www.notam02.no/%7efrankh/

http://www.ingarzach.com/

Ingar Zachs solo performances combines the sounds from his singing-bowls, electric propellors on gongs, drones from his sruti-boxes, and his prepared bass drum. The result is an audio expierience that has the recemblence to electronic music. The exploration of the sound itself is more important than the development of musical material in his performances. Ingar Zach wants to create music that leaves the listener(including himself) in a vacuum, unconscious about time and space, only about the sound in the space.

Men and Machines:
Klubb Tarkovsky meets Mixmaster Luguber and Khmoor!

Concert night, saturday, finishes up by presenting music from the conjunction point between the mechanical and the organic. Rock and electronic music has a common history, and you can dance while you discover it!

Klubb Tarkovsky is about music, film, party and fun; for people with open minds and machines that can’t quite be controlled. Klubb Tarkovsky aims to enlighten and entertain, with its escapades within rock, new wave, electropunk, pop, dub, avantgarde music and Nordic protest folk-songs.

Mixmaster Luguber enters the context somewhere between traditional popular music, techno and new dance music. Luguber is a master of mixing, the flow is kept steadily through both hip hop, funk, acid house, old school techno and rock – although crossing genres; ultra danceable!

The evening finishes off by Khmoor, video artist extraordinaire, with a one-of-a-kind visual show.

BLÆST, Saturday 14.10 at 23.00. Free entrance.

http://www.pierrebastien.com/

POPULAR MECHANIC

Pierre Bastien (born Paris, 1953) post-graduated in eighteenth-century French literature at University Paris-Sorbonne. In 1977 he built his first musical machinery. For the next ten years he has been composing for dance companies and playing with Pascal Comelade. In the meantime he was constantly developing his mechanical orchestra. Since 1987 he concentrates on it through solo performances, sound installations, recordings and collaborations with such artists as Pierrick Sorin, Karel Doing, Jean Weinfeld, Robert Wyatt or Issey Miyake.

“I like to combine a cello or a viola with a godje from Niger and a Javanese rabab: enthuses French musician and instrument builder Pierre Bastien. “It’s like in a city, where all the different cultures blend with one another: you get a richer palette of sounds.” Bastien enacts this interplay with his Mecanium, a Heath Robinson-like contraption which plays all kinds of instruments at one and the same time: its bows, drumsticks and plectrums can beat an African drum or Indonesian gamelan, play a thumb piano, kora and harmonium, and bow a violin, while activating an entire string quartet. The mechanism that drives it is based on simple principles: intricate constructions built from Meccano parts and powered by motors taken trom old record players activate the bows and sticks by means of gears and pulleys. Yet Bastien’s bizarre contraption is more than just a hotchpotch of seemingly incompatible instruments: despite its apparent lack of sophistication, a Mecanium performance is a complex, emotionallv charged affair. This fragile, home-made orchestra executes elaborate and strangely moving symphonies, while the miniature pulleys and levers cast giant shadows on the wall behind them, and Bastien himself sits amid his mechanised instruments accompanying them on trombone, violin or musical saw.

Bastien’s childlike constructions are there to remind us that we shouldn’t take modern-day music too seriously. The Mecanium harks back to the tradition of the one-man band - a notion that’s become redundant in today’s technological age - yet paradoxically, its hypnotic rhythms are reminiscent of modern-day sampling techniques. “Rhythmic patterns are repetitive and change very little,” Bastien says, “and that’s something that machines are very good at Many musicians don’t like to be asked to play the same melody or rhythm for ten minutes, and with the Mecanium I have 75 musicians who can play 75 loops. I always wanted to play around with loops, just like Jungle musicians do today, but when I was starting out 20 years ago you didn’t have all the electronic equipment You have nowadays. When the bow plays an arpeggio on the violin and repeats it ad infinitum, it’s as if I’m looping a violin player.”

http://www.heartchamberorchestra.org/

HEART CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

In Western culture we consider the heart to be the site of certain feelings. This is shown in language, with phrases like ‘to empty one’s heart’, ‘to lose heart’, and ‘it comes from the heart’. The heartbeat also reflects the physical state of the body. It pumps heavily if the body is under physical tension, and when it starts to gallop this can indicate fear, stress or excitement. Slow beats show a state of relaxation or sleep. Through meditation or biofeedback techniques one can manipulate these bodily states. The heart is a vital organ and for some of us it is the very place of life itself - a container of a
metaphysical soul. The Heart Chamber Orchestra -HCO- takes this into account to form a structure where music literally ‘comes from the heart’.

HCO is an audiovisual performance. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians of the Trondheim Sinfonietta and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH. Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. The musical score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. The duration of this piece in 4 movements is about one hour.
The musicians and artists are equipped with ECG(electrocardiogram) sensors. A computer monitors and analyzes the state of these 12 hearts in real time. The acquired information is used to compose a musical score with the aid of computer software. It is a living score dependent on the state of the hearts. While the musicians are playing, their heartbeats influence and change the composition and vice versa. The musicians and the electronic composition are linked via the hearts in a circular motion, a feedback structure. The emerging music evolves entirely during the performance. The resulting music is the expression of this process and of an organism forming itself from the circular interplay of the individual musicians and the machine.

The concert at Trondheim Matchmaking is the debut performance of HCO.
The project was in 2003 initiated by Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre, and the centre is producing the concert.

Crawling Craters is a collaboration between students at the
Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts and video artists from Poland. The result of a «video safari» to the area around Bogatynia and the Turov coal power plant is presented as a live performance with elements of video sampling and sound.