The Espen Waves Sommer Eide

16 Nov 2019 — 2 Feb 2020 The Waves is a spatial music album Interview De poortkamer On the first day of recording I spent composed, recorded, mixed and Espen Sommer most of the day alone on the first floor exhibited by Espen Sommer Eide Eide in the poortkamer, the room above the gated entrance of Marres. I just ended February — October 2019 up sitting there for most of the day, trying Valentijn Byvanck out different sounds to feel how it would feat. Martin Taxt, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, The following interview is based on a series of fit that space. I also listened to a lot of conversations with the artist/composer Espen Sommer Eide during the course of several years. Sommer Eide sounds from activity in and around the Jochem Vanden Ecker came first into contact with Marres when he produced restaurant, children in the playground and his work Distribution of the Audible for the exhibition the traffic outside. Towards the end of Undertones (2014). He returned to Maastricht for a session in our Training the Senses program on the subject the day things became more quiet and of Sensing Nature in 2017. At that time we discussed the I set up my instrument. I brought a kind Recorded at Marres, Maastricht sensory life of animals, one of many of Sommer Eide’s interests. It was on a visit to Oslo in the late spring of 2018 of lap steel guitar that I had constructed that we finally settled on the idea that he would create four years earlier for a performance in the from August 2018 until August 2019 a spatial album for Marres. The recordings started in the late Summer of that same year. Sonic Acts festival. I was travelling with the philosopher Timothy Morton at that time, and he named it ‘the exploded lap steel.’ Text assemblage from works by A lap steel guitar is a beautiful musical instrument, often used for country Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and music, and Indian music too. You sit down with it and use a metal or glass piece Alfred North Whitehead to slide across a series of strings. The main goal for me in the construction of this instrument is that it has no frets and I can freely alter the tuning systems and Read by Elina Bry scales. I wanted to see if I could make something interesting­ with it for Marres. While playing it, I was tuning into the atmosphere of the place. We used a Vinyl release on SOFA Music, 2019 photo from this session for the cover of the vinyl album. Many of the instruments I build are not only musical but also philosophical instruments. To be more precise: they are both, in the sense that they investi­ gate a subject. When I make them I am investigating­ something beyond the itself. It’s not like that, it’s more like finding one position.­ This development is very instrument itself. They pose ques­tions to An album and a portal, tuning into a space, finding the interesting to me. If we go further down a place, instead of recording it. A few right wavelength.­ The sounds of children the biological route, all movement has years ago I made a harmonica instrument a building playing outside, the light and sounds rhythmicity. The Norwegian neurologist that plays the endangered language I like the idea of an album for a building from windows and doors, the traffic and musician Geir Olve Skeie observes of the Skolt Sami people who live in or, more exactly, an album and a building movements,­ the restaurant opening and how the body has the tendency to the northern parts of Norway, Finland as a series of parallel histories. It would closing. They occur each at specific synchronize to collective rhythms. When and Russia. The goal was to make an be wrong to think of the project as a moments during the day. You only realize we walk we adapt to the rhythm of the instrument that would be integrated into transla­tion of architecture into sound, that and can feel the character of a place people we walk with. That might be one the cultural universe of this people, a as if there could be a signature sound when you experience this rhythm. It feels interesting function of music, that music philosophical tool to archive something of Marres. Instead, we should see it as natural to talk about space in the musical and rhythms can attune human bodies, that is disappearing — but­ at the same a series of parallel movements. People terms of getting attuned to and picking bring them closer to each other and time making the language into music. naturally feel the sound of architecture in up on the rhythms of a space. even make them coalesce. To adapt to For the project at Marres I imagined a big church because it’s so overwhelm­ The Waves allows us to challenge each other’s rhythm is a community-sense that each instrument would evoke a ing, but they might not have the same conceptions of sound and music, and buried deep in our biology. Per­haps we differ­ent historical layer. So I brought a conscious acous­tic experience with furnish­ a way to philosophize about the are musical beings for this reason. modified hurdy-gurdy, a medieval string regular architecture. Yet, every house work. Sometimes you rush to finish an instrument, a hand crank-turned wheel has numerous histories and stories that album because you need to start touring that functions a bit like a violin bow resonate through it. When you enter it, it with it. When you start performing it live, rubbing against the strings. I modified its stirs an imagination of all kinds of human you realize­ that it has much more poten­ principles to be able, as with the steel and material stories. The psychologist tial, and you can develop the sounds guitar, to flexibly tune it while playing. C.G. Jung once described a house as further and further into something entirely The hurdy-gurdy evokes the imagination a mental map. From top to bottom, he new. In The Waves we can experience of a history that took place long before listed a first floor from the 19th century this double potential at once. A year the house was built. Like a wandering built on top of a ground floor from the of recording was followed by months musician who travels through the area 16th century, which was reconstructed of mixing and sampling, during which I and has made a camp in the garden from a 11th century dwelling-tower allowed all the materials to be shaped room. Also the crank has a circular motion and rested on Roman foundation walls and reshaped. Then, while the album is and makes the Marres building come in the cellar, underneath which Stone being printed on vinyl, I am freed up to alive like a machine. Another instrument­ is Age tools and remnants of glacial fauna think about a new version of the materials the harpsichord, which might evoke the could be unearthed. I believe music can for the rooms of Marres. imagination of a ghost coming in and out, channel such layers, with the help of the One thing that struck me when like in the Victorian age. And of course acoustic properties of the house and the preparing the rooms for the installation Martin Taxt’s special microtonal tuba that immaterial qualities of sound. is that the album tracks need to be can sound like anything, from Stone Age The album begins by posing a reconfigured­ as to enable the music horns in a vast forest to the modern-day question. I am not just sitting down and to be floating in mid-air, thus enabling brass bands of Maastricht. registering, nor am I copying the sounds visitors to walk through and around the of the place or recording the space sound, rather than listening to it from artworks with multiple layers and Marres. We walked around with the tuba The Waves centers contribute to a more open and Microtones and to discover echo traces in the house and Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves was generous culture, away from the ever- tried to make pendulums of sound. Or an important source of inspiration. The stronger normalizing tendencies in reverberation we sent a tone into the space and while Bloomsbury group, inspired by philoso­ our world: opening doors rather than (Martin Taxt) we picked up its returning vibration we phers like Bertrand Russell and Alfred shutting them. Martin Taxt plays a microtonal tuba. This played simultaneously other tones, cre­ North Whitehead, were interested tuba has extra valves that allow the musi­ ating a cluster of notes at different pitches. in exploring the question what the cian to add multiple additional pitches in Together we made makeshift rules, and world would be without­ humans, that is, between each note and it is very hard to while playing we always ended up without anybody seeing­ or hearing it. master. The instrument allows the player breaking them. These experiments were Stream of conscious­ ness­ is important for to tune in to fine pitches that would fascinating. I imagined sitting in a room me, as a belief in multiple simultaneous resonate in particular rooms, so that we while the sound is going out the door, perspectives, parallel stories and inner can almost scientifically identify the so- up the stairs, a little bit back and forth, and outer monologues. In the circle called room tone. It also allows us to play rummaging around like a mad dog in the around Woolf you find the immense microtone music, in which you explore attic, and then it reverbs back again in influence of the new electromagnetic different tuning systems. In standardized the shape of this weird cluster. A mash wave theories, that suggest that the instruments­ with discrete pitch intervals, of sound, very different from the sounds world is one enormous entanglement the instrument tends to instruct the player that you played before, where even the of events and people. It was also a time in how it is to be played. Microtonal pitches seem bent by the architecture of where scientific experiments were instruments free the player from this the house. inseparable from performative art works. material memory. The recording sessions also consti­ Woolf grew up in a time in which huge Microtonal music has quite a history. tuted a kind of performance. When crowds would come to witness the One composer I admire is Harry Partch Taxt was moving or walking back and scientist Hermann von Helmholtz do an (1901–1974), a contemporary­ of John Cage forth playing, or when he sat down on acoustic experiment with tuning forks and, in a way, his complete opposite. a chair in the center of the Wintertuin transmitting sympa­thetic resonance. He was an alternative­ composer­ with a (Winter­garden). like a human lighthouse,­ In The Waves, you don’t exactly know unique outsider universe of sound. He turning the tuba around while seated, where the voices are coming from or researched and built intricate scales as we imagined invisible tracks in the house who is speaking. It is very refreshing well as lots of instruments.­ He also made as if it were a carefully choreographed­ to relax your own aesthetic sense and his own records. In documentaries you piece. mode of creativity, challenge yourself see him packing records to ship them off Martin Taxt would also tune in to by collaborating with other artists and to customers, doing everything himself. the hurdy-gurdy and we recorded open up to the multiple perspectives I really like his do-it-yourself practice, one of his parts over the hurdy-gurdy of your surroundings. I believe this as well as his openness to all kinds of track, so that was like a typical studio sensitivity and indeed outlook on life is sounds, and all sides of life. session in which he could hear what very important today, as a counterpoint We did some experiments with the I had done before. I had this mobile to the many polarized positions and tuba to see what would happen with recording system set up, so that we echo chambers. I believe experimental the long echoes on the ground floor of could move around and create room The barking of a thousand dogs, at night Time passes At the limit of earshot there rose that half-heard melody Distant, disembodied sounds the tremor of cut grass At the edges of the private world in the evening, The external signs of other worlds one after another the sounds die out, Night flowing down and the harmony falters, A rotating lighthouse and silence falls The city seen through a mist for the sleepers in the house Distant and peaceful and strange as the curtains of dark wrapped themselves over the house The sheep coughed so that they lay with several folds of blackness on their eyes One flower bent slightly towards another the mantle of silence wove into itself the falling cries of birds, Car wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, Leaves sighed overhead and folded them round the house in silence Voices came to her very strangely, the interval of sleep floating like flowers on water, until the chorus beginning, cut off from all a bird sings, like a faint scent a faint green quickens, a violin next door like a turning leaf, Emanating from other worlds, in the hollow of a wave the voices of unseen speakers, atoms raining down the music of unseen musicians a collection of events Someone was practicing scales some insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone a door opened and shut snow flopped from a branch, otherwise all was silent

The failing light Downpouring of immense darkness turns objects into so many moons wash away the mass and edge Some wave of white went over the window pane Swallowed up a jug and basin The real flower on the window sill, Like a mist rising was attended by the phantom flower quiet rose Looked at again and again half consciously, The vast clouds of an indifferent world by a mind thinking of something else The furniture of the world The years passed one after another across the sky its tables heaped with fruit, Each spread the same ripple wears the wavering, like signals from sunken islands unreal appearance of a place where one waits The being grows rings, like a tree expecting something to happen an eye, an ear, a window A countable series Drop upon drop silence falls Thick strokes moving Burning on the rim of the dark one after another Rippled it so strangely beneath the surface Wavered and vanished, waterly following each other What lacks form is what creates form pursuing each other The house, the hive and the dinner table perpetually

There at perception’s limits, The little airs that invade the house beat the waves scarcely disturbed the peace, Resounding like gigantic tuning-forks the indifference, The waves of light and sound the air of pure integrity, one, two, one, two in which loveliness and stillness clasped hands The ring after ring of sound The leaden circles dissolved in the air This smoke, this fine early morning air The dust dance Breath, smoke, clouds Seen but not touched amorphous formlessness manifests itself in a random wandering Dancing gnats for more sessions and extra recordings. never met the voice in person, not even I find it very interesting that the pre­ Text and song seen a picture, so for me Elina Bry is only Live, mixed & parations for this project have spread (Mari Kvien Brunvoll) this disembodied radio voice. A perfect out across a whole year. You can create Mari Kvien Brunvoll often talks about her match for The Waves. sampled a deliberately slow process in which wish to listen to herself from the outside. I should mention here the new I’ve always been interested in live everything is delayed and you can And to be surprised by herself, by what instrument or group of instruments called recording, but always for the purpose add things later. The musicians are rarely she sounds like. I believe this searching the Sonants, that Mari Kvien Brunvoll of sampling it. That is how I got into playing in the same room, so it’s not an for moments of otherness is at the core and I worked with in the attic. They are electronic music in the 90s, with improvisation or group session. Instead, of our improvisation with voice and made specifically to encourage spatial sample-based bedroom­ electronic you are adding things piece by piece voice-like sounds. Kvien Brunvoll has a improvisation, and have a looped, music where you sit for hours and so that the entire recording process is wide range of vocal techniques that repetitive time structure. A central light hours through the night to edit and expanded in time and space. bend and shape words in new ways, circles and triggers the speakers when it alter sounds. You would sample a live moving effortlessly between reciting, hits a light sensor, and each responds by recording and then start cutting and talking, singing, sometimes breathtakingly playing its individual sound sampled by pasting. After releasing a couple of beautiful, at other times almost inhuman the performer. The performers can also albums the record company wanted me and machinelike. Abrupt changes create start moving the Sonants around in the to perform live, so I was kind of dragged small shocks in the listener, what she calls room or even into other rooms and we onto a stage. After a while, I learned to ‘short­cuts to the heart’. spent many nights in this way exploring deal with it. I started to build instruments The text collage with quotes, mostly the space in darkness. For me the and develop ways of making live music. from Woolf, and a few words from most interesting sensory experiences I enjoyed that very much since it allowed Whitehead and Russell, is not meant occur when sonic and visual impulses me to improvise with other people. Yet to convey a particular message, but interweave in unexpected ways. I still feel that everything began with to be the raw material for our improvi­ the recording and I still lean towards sations and permutations. The sound of making recordings or albums very much words constitutes a layer of meaning as a craft in itself, separate from the live that surrounds us all the time. It creates element. Of course the recordings stem small misunderstandings or ‘mis-hearings’ from a live situation, but not necessarily and propels our conversations forward, from a recorded acoustic instrument. often without us being aware of it. This They can also be manipulations of field soundscape of language is to me like recordings or any other kind of audible very old music. material that you cut and paste and make When I was looking for a voice to new worlds out of. On top of the tracks recite the text more specifically for one we recorded, this album for instance of the tracks, I contacted the Glasgow contains all kinds of sounds that are in Radiophrenia festival of radio art. The and around Marres. For example, the last time I performed there I heard a photographer Jochem vanden Ecker wonderful voice announcing the bands found ten old balls in the big garden of on the radio. The funny thing is that I have Marres. The balls stem from the abutting schoolyard and were apparently not yet in Maastricht you will find all kinds of impenetrable and weird. The mystery collected or not found by the school Music and sound extra tones and melodies inside their could only be solved through repeated children. We proceeded to record an For The Waves I started with the idea that apparent single-toned ringing. The use listening. Unlike live concerts, where all indoor multi-ball dribble match with the the work would be about music rather of digital effects on the sounds, like the melodies, rhythms, narratives and Marres kitchen staff. A lot of fun, and the than sound art. Normally it’s easier to talk filtering out frequencies and changing emotions have to be grasped at once, source of some interesting rhythms too. about sound than music in an exhibition the speed of a recording, open up with records repetition is a central part of The art world provides the oppor­ format. If you talk about music in an these hidden sounds so they can be the listening process. You don’t have to tunity­ and time to do projects that exhibition,­ people assume you will play more easily abstracted and melted into get everything the first time you hear it. include research. At some point I was live music at an opening or something others. It is all about connections and Perhaps I am trying to win back a touring with Alog, a group of four or like that. To integrate music into a project correspondences. It is sometimes like a place of concentration for music and five people on stage with an enormous like this is a real challenge. Instead puzzle that needs solving. At other times not only for sound. I think the idea of the amount of home-built instruments. It of calling the final installation sound they are like secret worlds, microscopic album is good because it has this aspect took forever to put up a show. It was sculptures, perhaps I should call them ecosystems with their own inner logic. of being part of people’s daily life and becoming increasingly hard to do this spatial loop sculptures or something A track is finished when it has become they can put it on repeat, they can listen touring and we never had enough time with a link to more musical structures. such a world, and then it is put in a con­ to it many times in different settings. This is to really develop a project in depth and The loop, or the repetition, is central to stellation­ of other tracks to form an album. liberating. Listening to an album at home explore some­thing over time. The art what I try to do here, and marks first and Records were of paramount impor­ or on headphones somewhere, you can practice also allowed me to return to my foremost a musical structure. Even the tance to me when I was growing up choose your amount of concentrated philosophy background. I started with vinyl record itself has this circular motion, in the small town of Tromsø in northern attention. This is the unique strength of the music because I wanted to get away and one experiment has been to cut Norway. I had few opportunities­ to recording, and of the album as a format. from philosophy but then I started to miss beats into it with a knife, to create what experience alternative music live. The It creates a kind of diffuse listening that philosophy again and wanted to sort is called locked grooves. It is like what transformative experiences had to opens up many parallel experiences, of integrate it into the music and reflect you hear at five in the morning after you come from obscure records and copies because it extends beyond the work upon sound and music and space, the had fallen asleep, when the record has of cassettes and mixtapes I obtained itself and is mixed with the listeners’ daily social aspects of music, and instruments.­ come to an end with only the innermost through an underground network of activities and personal memories. And how all of this relates to life and a groove on endless repeat, including its music. It could be anything from introvert The installation at Marres will be local or situated experience. The art clicks and pops. shoegazer rock, to Detroit ambient some­what in between a live perfor­ world provides that opportunity. I make music based on the qualities techno, to New Zealand noise bands or mance and a record. It does not force of the sounds. Sample-based, or dark romantic bands like Tuxedomoon you to take in everything at once, nor is it musique concrète, or whatever you or Dead Can Dance. I was always something that you can play and replay want to call it. The method is usually to hunting for new music that would be in the same way to reach the depth of go back and forth between discovering exciting and fresh to me. My fellow the piece. Rather, the spatial album ena­ and making interesting sounds, and composer David Grubbs writes in his bles visitors to experience the musical composing them into musical structures. essay Records Ruin the Landscape that piece from all kinds of perspectives, as All sounds have melodic structures there was often a shroud of mystery if it were a sculpture group you can walk hidden in their frequency spectrum, or around these recordings — often one around, appreciating it from all angles, repeating rhythms hiding in their noise. wondered how someone could while also being able to stand in the If you listen carefully to the church bells actually have released something so middle of it. Tarkovsky famously said that how I see music, whathow music, musicisto Isee me. become thisproject TheWaves for meis talking aboutalready! that has Everything and concrete. We allknow what we’re mysticism, whileitisreally quite natural becomes aclichéordescends into itquicklytalk because aboutmusicitself to separate from emotions. to Itisdifficult interior of time, sense atimethat ishard the timeof external reality, butsome making hismovies. Musicisnot sculpting a cluster of livingfacts, whenhewas he was sculpting time by cuttinginto Brown to Blue(2013). A skydog’s place (2015) andFrom books suchasAskydog’s time. Ecker hasreleased astring of artists architectures and situations. Vanden often indialoguewith other artists, a hybrid documentary method work isprocess the last few years. Vanden Ecker’s andhaslivedGenk inAntwerp Academy, andDesign Media studied photography at the Jochem Vanden Ecker (1976) Instrument.Building Brunvoll of part thetrio isalso Recordings andHubro. MariKvien albums onlabelslike Jazzland and festivals andreleased twisted ofsome Europe’s best jazzclubs performed andingroups solo at Academy inBergen, Brunvoll has instru­ andvariousin song eclectic of Norway’s leadingimprovisers Mari Kvien Brunvoll isone (1984), Verdensteatret. the award- Since of apart 2013hehasbeen as Koboku andMicrotub. Senjû and touring withgroups such scene. Heisreleasing albums international experi­ inthehe hasestablished himself CNSMDP inParis in2006. Since then Academy of Music inOsloand Norway, hisstudies finished at the TaxtMartin (1981), borninTrondheim, Grammofon, FatCat andHubro. releases onthelabelssuchasRune Alog andPhonophani,astring of from Norway, withmainprojects of experimental electronic music aprominentbeen representative tion andperformances, hehas knowledge. Inadditionto installa­ approach to local andembodied and rhythms, withanexperimental landscapes, archives, languages term engagement withspecific practicehis artistic involves long- asbothsound method andmedium, Bergen, Norway. Usingmusicand composer in based andartist (1972) Eide Espen Sommer isa ments. Agraduate of Grieg winning art collectivewinning art - oriented, with mental music Lars Ove Toft H.C.Gilje David Rios Janne Kruse Signe Lidén Monika Sandnesmo Mark Vernon Thanks to:

Marres House for Contemporary Culture

Capucijnenstraat 98 6211 RT Maastricht +31 (0)43 327 02 07 [email protected] marres.org COLOPHON Artist: Espen Sommer Eide Tuesday – Sunday In collaboration with Mari Kvien 12 – 5 PM Brunvoll, Martin Taxt Curator: Valentijn Byvanck The Waves is made possible with Marres, House for Contemporary Images: Jochem Vanden Ecker the support of Fonds 21, the BankGiro Culture, is located at the heart of Texts: Espen Sommer Eide, Valentijn Loterij Fonds, the Mondriaan Fund, the old city of Maastricht. Together Byvanck Arts Council Norway, Norwegian with visual artists, musicians, Translation (interview) / copy editing: Society of Composers, Bergen designers, chefs, and perfumers, Laura Schuster | Mediafictions Municipality, Bergen Centre for Marres develops a new vocabulary Translation (lyrics): DUO vertaalburo Electronic Arts, SOFA Music. for the senses. In addition to a Coordination: Janice Huinck vibrant program with exhibitions, Graphic design: Ayumi Higuchi Marres receives structural support presentations, and performances, Printed by: Gianotten Printed Media from the Ministry of Education, Culture Marres also offers a large city garden Co-produced by: Borealis – a festival and Science, the Province of Limburg, and a popular Syian Sicilian restaurant. for experimental music and the Municipality of Maastricht.