Af Alexander Julin Mortensen – foto: Emil Hornstrup Jakobsen SØS Gunver Ryberg har markeret sig i adskillige kunstneriske kontekster over de seneste år. Hun har skrevet musik til bl.a. computerspil, film, forestillinger og performancekunst. Og så har hun udgivet EP’er og et album, der med god grund er nået langt ud over de danske grænser. Sidste år spillede hun bl.a. til et arrangement i Manchester kurateret ...

Af Mikkel Arre – foto: Christian Friedländer Undervejs på københavnske Whistlers debutalbum bliver der sunget et spørgsmål, der indkapsler et af pladens grundtemaer: ”Hope’s a bust / love’s a must / how does it all add up?”

In December 2019, the cultural theorist and P/A contributing editor, Macon Holt, published his first book, “Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction to Capitalist Realism”, from Bloomsbury Academic. In this essay Holt explains key points of the book and tries to answer the question, What is a Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism? – drawing on the writings by Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek, afrofuturist artefacts by Sun Ra and Drexciya, as well as pop music as manifest by Jessie J and Beyoncé.

Essay by Macon Holt. Illustration by Joakim Drescher. Photo by Nick Lowe (creative commons). Læs resten

Essay by Wieland Rambke Look at a lava lamp. You always see the same thing while the shapes within keep changing. In presenting you with a visual stimulus that is in perpetual motion, it is as predictable as it is surprising. Everything that happens inside the lava lamp merely confirms the limited range of what it does. There is something hypnotic and soothing about staring at ...

A few years back, when covering the first Hyperreality festival, I spent an afternoon at Vienna’s mumok, a contemporary arts museum. At the time, there were two major exhibitions, “Woman”, dedicated to feminist avant-garde artists of the 1970s, and “Oh…”, which focused on one Austrian artist’s bizarre take on mumok’s own collection of modernist and contemporary art.

“Woman” displayed an extensive collection of stunning and challenging works by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Valie Export and many others. Crammed together and categorized around topics typically associated with women such as the household and sexuality, the works were stripped of the historical, social and geographical contexts that made each of them important and exciting in the first place.

“Oh…”, on the other hand, exhibited Jakob Lena Knebl’s peculiar intervention in the collection of well-known works: a painting by Picasso only visible as a reflection in a blurry mirror, a statue by Giacometti dressed in a shiny red dress and installed on a revolving turntable, among others. By arranging these masterworks in unexpected situations or even reducing them to a decorative function, she facilitated a confrontational – and fun! – take on a part of the art history canon, which is rarely challenged outside the realm of critical and academic writing.

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I denne mail-korrespondance interviewer musiker/komponist Claus Haxholm den Oslo-baserede musiker/komponist Mads Kjeldgaard, og sammen dykker de ned i Kjeldgaards lyd og praksis.

Claus Haxholm: Jeg tænker, vi starter ved din nye udgivelse “Discussion With Geographical Entities”, der på mange måder opsummerer flere af de kvaliteter, jeg synes, dit arbejde har.

Først og fremmest arbejder kompositionen både med det digitale, og vist nok, til dels, det ‘generative’ (et ord, jeg stadig er lidt i tvivl om, hvor præcist jeg kan bruge; vi kunne også sige det ‘systemiske’ med selvstyrende kompositionsdele) samt et sted, i det her tilfælde en stue (lyder det som).

Min viden er nok ret begrænset på det her område, men jeg synes, at når man har med generativ/systemisk musik at gøre, så er det tit meget “rent” og digitalt, hvor der her bliver blandet med, hvad der nu sker det sted, hvor mikrofonen er placeret.

Vil du uddybe lidt, hvad du tænker om klanguniverset (f.eks. det digitale >< det akustiske, hvis det overhovedet er vigtigt for dig), men måske også lidt på konceptet bag ‘the Vortex’ (programmet brugt til den her udgivelse)?

Mads Kjeldgaard: “Discussions With Geographical Entities” blev optaget i ét take ved hjælp af et af mine selvkomponerede performancesystemer, som hedder The Vortex. Det blev optaget på mit værelse i Oslo Sentrum under Covid-19-krisen, hvor jeg som så mange andre var i karantæne. Her havde jeg sat et hjemmestudio op på et strygebræt, hvor jeg kunne have mine mikrofoner og controllere (jeg fik ganske ekstreme smerter i både skuldre, nakke og knæ af at sidde sådan, det kan virkelig ikke anbefales). Reglerne for karantæne ændrede sig hele tiden på det tidspunkt, så jeg forlod meget sjældent mit rum eller min lejlighed. Når jeg satte mikrofonen til min computer, kunne jeg vælge mellem at pege den mod gaden og optage støjen og larmen derfra og det liv, som fortsatte tilsyneladende ufortrødent derude, eller ind mod rummet, hvor jeg sad og improviserede med at gnide sten mod hinanden, rasle nøgler og bruge min egen vokal i ren og skær kedsomhed. Læs resten

Af Emil GrarupJeg vil begynde dette interview ved at lægge mig fladt ned og indrømme, at Natal Zaks’ (Central, Palta, Mitro, Maizena m.fl.) seneste udgivelse som Alle, ”Alletiders”, er et af de bedste albums, jeg har lyttet til i år.

Review by Macon Holt Pythia’s Journals is an online art festival conceived, organized and curated by artists Tobias R. Kirstein and Signe Vad, through Vad’s organizations, Office of Emergency and The Syndicate of Creatures. The festival takes its name from the mythical Greek priestess who both channelled and interpreted the utterances of the god Apollo and transduced them into cryptic prophecies stored in a ...

Essay by Giuseppe Pisano The outburst of Covid-19 is having disastrous consequences for everyone but, personally as one that works within the arts, I wanted to direct attention towards some elements that are pertinent in my field to understand how artistic communication – especially music which is mostly a live art based on performance – has tuned in this emergency and what are the countermeasures artists ...