Sonic Wunderkammer – Day 1
Sentralen/Marmorsalen
20/9, 19.00 + 20.30
250/150 NOK
Two day dome pass: 350/200 NOK
Sonic Wunderkammer – Day 2: 21/9, 14:00 + 15.30
Sit back and enjoy two concerts in a unique architectural audio chamber with a selection of sparkling new and vintage electronic music, with refreshment breaks in between.
Concert 1:
Natasha Barrett & Marc Downie: Innermost (2019, WP)
Edgard Varèse : Pòeme électronique (1958)
Trond Lossius: Edgelands (2019, WP)
Concert 2:
Bernard Parmegiani: De Natura Sonorum (1975, selected parts)
Biosphere: Substrata (1997, selected parts)
Ewa Jacobsson: Hearbaricum Fields (2019, WP)
Some of the key historical moments of electronic music have taken place within architectural structures built specifically for listening. Our Sonic Wunderkammer at Sentralen continues the tradition, providing the ultimate listening conditions for a curated series of radical and spatial soundworks, taking advantage of the 3D effects and surround sound qualities of the multi speaker system. Sitting beneath an inverted cone of rings of speakers, sounds will shower down on the audience from above and move around the space.
Over two days and four concerts, a selection of 20th century electronic music, 21st century ambient classics and 3D electroacoustic soundscapes newly commissioned by Ultima and Notam, will be swirling around this chamber of sonic wonders. The perfect way to celebrate 25 years of Notam – Norway’s most innovative centre for progressive electronic music – in 2019!
19.00:
Natasha Barrett & Marc Downie: Innermost (2019, WP)
Edgard Varèse : Pòeme électronique (1958)
Trond Lossius: Edgelands (2019, WP)
Oslo based British composer Natasha Barrett’s Innermost is a collaboration with US digital artist Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup). Following their previous collaboration at the Pompidou Centre, Paris last year, Innermost fuses ambisonics, 3D sound and stereoscopic projection. Points of light and sound are animated around the sound system in patterns that each possess their own characteristic ‘gait’ – a unique way of moving and behaving. This state of the art audiovisual creation is a co-commission between Ultima and EMPAC, New York state.
Edgard Varèse’s Pòeme électronique originally debuted in Le Corbusier’s pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. 60 years later this amazing, abstract and disorienting creation still sounds like an alien broadcast.
Trond Lossius is one of Norway’s most prolific sound artists, and in Edgelands he has combined his field recordings of suburbs and city limits, those liminal zones where human activity fades away and nature takes over. An engaging and surprising soundscape merging human infrastructure with the wild.
20.30:
Bernard Parmegiani: De Natura Sonorum (1975, selected parts)
Biosphere: Substrata (1997, selected parts)
Ewa Jacobsson: Heabaricum Fields (2019, WP)
The second session features works based on features of the natural world. One of the most prominent of the radical French electronic composers, Bernard Parmegiani composed his electronic masterpiece De Natura Sonorum at the GRM centre in Paris. Its rigorous structure was intended to investigate the nature of sound by placing artificial and natural sounds in contrast to each other, with spellbinding results.
Norwegian electronic musician Biosphere (aka Geir Jenssen) took the Arctic landscape as its source material in Substrata, a work of pure Nordic ambience. A scintillating surface of ice, mountainous atmospheres and melting water, this textural feast approaches the sublime.
Ewa Jacobsson works as both a visual artist, photographer and composer, and her new commission Heabaricum Fields is part concert, part installation.
In collaboration with Notam and 3DA.
(Photo: Fernando Lopez-Lezcano)
Innermost is co-commissioned by Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival and EMPAC/ Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ultima has commissioned the music by Natasha Barrett with support from the Norwegian Arts Council. EMPAC has commissioned the video by Marc Downie and supported the production with residencies of the artists at EMPAC.
