Visiting Borealis for two of its five-day stretch in March, I encountered a festival that offered a refreshingly diverse take on the field of experimental music – diverse not only in terms of who is making it (the festival actively works towards equality of representation) but also in the practices represented. Indeed, perhaps a majority of the works presented in the festival intersected with fields of artistic activity outside of conventional musical performance.
This was immediately apparent at the opening of Sue Tompkins’ exhibition at Lydgalleriet. The show consisted of pages of text by Tompkins: graphical, rhythmic arrangements of deceptively ordinary words and phrases. Tompkins’ practice involves translating these texts into intensely focused performances hovering somewhere between concrete poetry and song. This was demonstrated in a screening of the film Country Grammar, a portrait of the artist made by Luke Fowler. The film conjured an uncanny sense of nostalgia (through the use of 16 mm film footage, domestic interiors and obsessively repetitive lines of spoken text); yet it was shot, cut and performed with an immediacy and rhythm that allowed it to dodge any worn-out tropes of performance documentation or music-art film.
Relationships between live performance and the screen played out even more explicitly in asamisimasa's concert Mickey-mousing. Taking the titular technique of cartoon soundtracking as a central conceit, the programme consisted of three recent works for ensemble and video, contextualised by a screening of one of Oskar Fischinger's groundbreaking experiments in animation, Motion Painting No.1 (1947). The live works by Kristine Tjøgersen (also the clarinettist of the ensemble), Johannes Kreidler and Joanna Bailie all took subtly different approaches to the music–image relationship but were united in their embrace of the unreal exaggerations of diegetic cartoon sound. Thanks to the astoundingly tight ensemble playing, all the pieces were realised with pin-sharp resolution. Bailie's Dynamite-barrel/Balloon-anvil was particularly interesting for its deconstructive take, distending and then orchestrating individual frames and samples of a Roadrunner cartoon. Stretched out to extreme lengths, the sense of connection became slippery and uncertain. Slapstick acts and sounds, divorced of their comic timing, were transformed into a woozy meditation on a seam of pathos and violence underpinning mass entertainment.
Across town, at the Bergen Kunsthalle, Joachim Koester's exhibition Bringing Something Back was used as the setting for a series of late-night performances. Mysteriously archival, almost anthropological in its assemblage of objects and books, 16 mm films and photographs, Koester's show was reflected back in the most striking manner during a solo performance by Jenny Berger Myhre. Enacting a hermetic table top ritual with laptop, record player, bird calls, contact microphones and cassette tapes, amongst other paraphernalia, the anachronistic nature of Myhre's instruments was thrown into relief by the precision and adeptness with which she operated them, timing actions with the exactitude of jump-cut edits. The experience was similar to that of Tompkins and Fowler's film in that one had the impression of a musical performance mediated by a visual grammar.
Several events during the festival were presented as more immersive, installation-based experiences. The acclaimed choreographer Mårten Spångberg presented News From the Last of the International Hot Shots / Natten, an understated and dreamy listening session for his sound collage work. A similarly hypnagogic experience was had during a guided meditation led by Shauna Cummins, but it was in Peter Ablinger's new work Remove Terminate Exit that the pursuit of a focused collective listening experience found its most spectacular realisation. A disorientating mix of concert, installation and psychoacoustic experiment, Ablinger's piece happened over two floors of the Greighallen's glass atrium event spaces. A mass of water-soaked bathrobes occupied the ground floor foyer, the dripping picked up by contact microphones and diffused over a speaker array on the upper level. Seated amidst this array, the audience was immersed in an 80-minute in-the-round performance for ensemble (BIT20), narrators, electronics and outdoor environmental sounds. Performed with unwavering energy and stamina under the baton of Ilan Volkov, the piece began at a zenith of volume and density before being gradually undressed; layers of sound were stripped away, focusing the ears on previously imperceptible levels of detail.
The dynamic percussion trio Pinquins took a very much embodied, quasi-theatrical approach to a more straightforward concert situation, presenting three works that variously incorporated a panoply of instrumentations and performance aesthetics. Switching naturally between acoustic instruments, electronics, voices and physical movement the ensemble demonstrated a remarkably versatile ability. Much of this was brought to bear in Brice Catherin's 36,000 Years Alongside Baubo. As the musicians positioned themselves throughout the space and made references to a certain ‘mythical vulva’ of prehistoric feminist cave art, 20 or so members of the audience were asked to play recorders and crotales, cued by a departure-board-like video, taking centre stage. The result was a compositional singularity of media, action and attention that conjured a peculiar, but not unwelcome, sense of cognitive dissonance.
Parallel theatrical concerns were at play in Future Opera, a trio of short operas by young Nordic composers billed in the programme as ‘push[ing] at the boundaries of what opera can and will be’. On the surface, however, all the works seemed relatively content to sit in a comfortable relationship with the institutions of opera – but then why shouldn't they? Indeed, perhaps including this kind of project in a festival that is so wide ranging was a bold action in and of itself.
It was this overall breadth of activity that was something of a defining feature of the festival, and one that was brought into sharp focus during a lunchtime discussion with the Icelandic composer collective S.L.Á.T.U.R., who had been commissioned to create a work that questioned typical performer–audience relationships. The group's response was to send performers out into the streets of Bergen wearing huge, geometrically shaped costumes, soliciting help from passersby to negotiate the city landscape. These relational, unexpected and unscheduled encounters provoked a heated debate around what constitutes compositional practice and how artists might productively engage non-specialist audiences in experimental music. To me, however, S.L.Á.T.U.R.’s work simply sat at an extreme end of a spectrum of activity that examined experimental music and the festival format from multiple perspectives. Indeed, in setting out to really explore and question what experimental music practices sound and look like today, Borealis’ programme felt vital, open-minded, inclusive, and not a little visionary.
