Musicking in the field in between

My practice is situated within the work of an international community of creative musicians who work in the field between improvised and composed music. I am directly connected to the work presented by artistic communities in Norway, continental Europe (especially in Germany, France and Italy), and Australia, but I also observe relationships to individual artists around different corners of the world.  

My first encounter with the British guitarist Derek Bailey and the saxophonist Evan Parker in 1999 was the springboard into the scene of improvised music. I appeared on their doorstep in London with my drum, hoping to learn from the masters of improvised music. Shortly after, I became interested in the work of the English musicians Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell, and Matt Davies, as well as the Greek cellist Nikos Veliotis, all of whom were involved with the English improvised music scene. At the same time, developing a style of music that could be seen as a reaction against the hyperactive way of improvising that was so significant for the improvised music scene in England from the early ‘70s. They were interested in exploring different approaches to improvisation, and were particularly keen on introducing certain structures and silence in their works, inspired by the composers Morton Feldman, John Cage, or Cornelius Cardew. 

This style came to be known as The New London Silence. Its musicians made connections with related musicians such as Burkhard Beins, Andrea Neumann, Annette Krebs, and Axel Dörner, and Robin Hayward, to name a few. I became deeply inspired by their activity, which I associated with a minimalist or reductionist direction in Europe’s improvised music scene. In that period, I learned a lot about listening and about the value of sound itself—how to start a sound, to sustain it and to end it, and how to pay attention to the silence in between. The music I played at that time was almost only about starts, durations, stops and silence. I was fascinated by how it was possible to make beautiful music just by focusing on these four actions. However, I discovered later that playing couldn’t only be about these actions, that the musical result could quickly become shallow. I then gave myself the essential task to select valid, elastic, memorable material. Afterwards, I was ready to implement the chosen material in the process of starting, maintaining, and stopping with greater attention and dynamism. 

Now I have moved on from that kind of austere reductionism, but I still cherish the knowledge I acquired back then. It has left a mark on me, and it is still present in the music I make today, in the sense that I pay more attention to time, duration, and the allocation of events in a musical performance.

This New London Silence has existed in parallel with another scene with a tremendous influence on my playing: the Echtzeitmusik scene in Berlin, which can be characterized by a post-instrumental tendency. The album Rotophormen, from 2000, in which Andrea Neumann plays prepared piano and mixing desk and Annette Krebs plays electroacoustic guitar and mixing desk, is an example of an extended sound palette involving self-built instruments, going beyond a traditional instrumental practice. This album was an ear-opener for me.

Other groundbreaking instrumental developments in Berlin include work by the tubist Robin Hayward and trumpeter Axel Dörner, who have been building technologies that unified the electronic processing and the acoustic sound of their instruments. The Echtzeitmusik scene represents a variety of musical practices that operate in between musics referred to as “improvised music,” “new music," and "experimental music.” Many more of these practices are documented in the book Echtzeitmusik (Beins 2011). I was very influenced by this scene in the late ‘90s and the beginning of the 2000s. During this period, I visited Berlin many times, establishing contact with artists such as Burkhard Beins, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Annette Krebs, Kai Fagaschinski, Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, and many more. I am still connected to this scene, which continues to attract artists from all over the world and is constantly growing and redefining itself. 

The reason why I felt so compelled to travel in this time was because the Norwegian improvised scene, during this period, had not yet developed such a diverse character. Until the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Norwegian artists was almost entirely influenced by those connected to the German record label ECM and the American jazz scene. The improvised music scene I experienced in England, France, Germany, Netherlands, or even in nearby Sweden didn’t seem to get a foothold in Norway before the beginning of the 21st century, with the exception of the Stavanger-based saxophonist Frode Gjerstads, who was collaborating with John Stevens, Johnny Dyani, and others from the British improvised music scene from the early 1980s. However, the last 20 years have been a game-changer for experimental music in Norway.  New vibrations were starting to emerge in the music scene with the startup of the club Blå and the musicians around the record labels Rune Grammofon, SOFA, and Smalltown Supersound, together with artists like Supersilent, Spunk, Paal Nilssen-Love, Ingebrigt H. Flaten, Ivar Grydaland, Tonny Kluften, David Stackenäs, and Håkon Kornstad. We have experienced a flourishing of opportunities, a number of arenas and festivals, and greater access to institutions of music education. The independent music scene in Norway has grown into one of the most vibrant scenes in Europe.

I also credit a number of individual musicians with helping guide me towards my current musical pursuits. My first two influences in experimental percussion include the Swedish percussionist Raymond Strid and the French percussionist Le Quan Ninh. Strid, whom I met in 1997, opened my eyes and ears to a new way of drumming. At that time, I was still playing on a traditional drum set with some additional percussion. Raymond’s way of coloring the music with his unconventional, autodidact technique was like what I imagine watching Jackson Pollock paint would have been like—spontaneous and highly personal, with a sense of timing that I hadn’t heard before. It was so liberating to observe, experience, and play with a drummer who had developed a totally different concept of drumming outside of everything that I knew. 

I saw Le Quan Ninh for the first time in Minneapolis in December 2000. I had just landed that same morning and was going to play the day after with the trio TRI-DIM (with Håkon Kornstad and David Stackenäs) at Prince’s Club downtown, but the organizer invited us to a solo percussion show straight after arrival, and so we went. There was Le Quan Ninh, standing with one horizontal bass drum in front of him. On the floor there were cymbals, pinecones, singing bowls and various percussion. He moved like a cat around this single drum, adding all kinds of material on the drum skin and applying a variety of techniques that I had never seen before. I was mesmerized. After the concert, I remember saying to Håkon and David, “I know we just arrived, but I need to go home and practice.” Le Quan Ninh might not be the first percussionist to play the bass drum horizontally and use it as a resonator, but he was the first one I witnessed, with a performance so impactful that I then decided to play horizontally myself. Today, it seems like all experimental percussionists are laying the bass drum flat, and I wonder how much of this trend is attributable to Ninh’s influence. 

I later came to work with Le Quan Ninh in a project initiated and produced by Michal Libera based on Cosmos, by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, for two percussionists and speaker. That I have been able to work so closely with my most significant influences, including Ninh, is not entirely a surprise to me after so many years, as I’ve found the percussionists in my field to be very generous with sharing their experiences and knowledge. Another such person is the German percussionist Burkhard Beins, whose attention to detail, dynamics and meticulous choice of sonic material is of great inspiration to me. I have additionally been lucky enough to meet the Swiss/Italian duo Christian Wolfahrt/Enrico Malatesta, which performs exclusively on bowed cymbals, creating highly complex sound spectrums with an economy of means. In 2013, Beins, Wolfahrt, and Malatesta joined forces with German performer and visual artist Michael Vorveld and myself to form the percussion quintet Glück, releasing a self-titled album on Mikroton, in 2015. Our music, constructed via compositional and improvisational methods, creates its own discreet language and a distinctive fragile aesthetic. 

Another percussionist with whom I've been able to collaborate is the Italian percussionist Michele Rabbia. Rabbia works in a variety of contexts, but is particularly sought-after in the contemporary music scene, especially in France and Italy. My duo collaboration with Michele Rabbia is an electro-acoustic adventure, comprising one snare drum for each of us, plus a shared horizontal Gran Cassa. Rabbia employs both pre-recorded material and live processing of our duo, projected through a PA. My own setup is an amplified configuration of my haptic system with transducers on the snare drum and the Gran Cassa. During the course of my fellowship, we performed a number of concerts and recorded our second album, Musique pour deux corps (SOFA2021).

In my current musical field, I’ve moved from dogmatic improvisational ideas towards a closer emphasis on form and structure. I call this “the field in between." The question that naturally arises, however, is “in between what?” In an attempt to answer this question, I want to draw a parallel to what writer and researcher Marcel Cobussen writes in The field of Musical Improvisation: “First, improvisation is, in my opinion, a complex event in which many actants, many actors, factors, and vectors, both human and non-human, converge and interact. Second, I think it is not a good idea to write about improvisation in general, as it encompasses too many and too diverse practices”(Cobussen 2017).

I agree with Cobussen; moreover, I would like to suggest a word other than “improvisation” to describe that complex musical event in which these factors converge and interact. In my practice, improvising is a tool for creating music. I believe that improvising is a skill that needs to be nourished and developed over time, like listening and composing. Improvising plays only one part in the complex activity of the creative process. Therefore, I find it incomplete to call my music “improvised,” as improvisation is but one of the tools at play. I find Christopher Small's term “musicking" to be a more open and generous term for describing my creative musical process. As Small writes, “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing”(Small 1998). Musicking opens up to a broader view of the field of actants that are present in the creative processes of a performance. It is strongly connected to the process of listening, the development of a sound palette, the relation to timbre and the acoustics in a space, the compositional aspect of improvising a form, and the actual creation in real time before an audience. 

It makes sense to me to add “improvising" to Christopher Small’s list, which implies that the action of improvising plays only one part and, in relation to my work, not necessarily the most prominent role. The word “improvising” alone is not fully illustrative of my practice, nor is the use of notation or preconceived structures. Predominant in my practice is trust in memories and visions of the musical material. The disposition of musical events, their duration, and repetition with variations are all factors intertwined in a fluctuating mechanism that ultimately yields music. 

The introduction of the haptic system has led me to create music with layered sustained sonic material. I am influenced by drone music in many forms: bagpipe music, Indian classical music, the music of La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue, and Phill Niblock. I believe that, to some extent, I make drone music. Influences of Indian classical music are clearly evident in my work with the group Huntsville, where I include a tabla machine, an electronic shruti-box and an electronic saranghi in my percussion setup.

In 2017, I participated in a performance at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid with the Japanese Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada and his son Tashi in collaboration with Lume de Biqueira, a Galician bagpipe trio. Unfortunately, there is no documentation of the performance, but I still recall the experience as a revelation for me, as it allowed me to explore my infatuation for drones through layering and orchestrating of frequencies in lengthy compositions. 

From 2005, I have developed long-term collaborations with the French-Norwegian ensemble Dans les arbres (see Dialogues); the trio Huntsville, comprising the Norwegian guitar player Ivar Grydeland and the Norwegian bass player Tonny Kluften; the trio MURAL, comprising the Australian saxophone and flutist Jim Denley and the Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr; and the trio O3, with the Italian flutist Alessandra Rombolà and the Spanish accordionist Esteban Algora. These four ensembles are united in their use of both improvisation and composition to search for a collective tonal language. My method has always involved incorporating and adapting my personal tonal language in these ensembles, including the vibrating material with transducers I have developed in this research project. In many cases, my proposals have aligned with those of my fellow musicians, and other times they have not. However, the ensembles have always been open to new strategies and impulses from each individual member through a democratic process. 

Some of my instrumental developments have taken place within these ensembles. From the moment I left the drum kit, I have continuously expanded, and in many ways transcended, the traditional percussion role. In Huntsville, I started incorporating tonal instruments early on, like the shruti box, the tabla machine and Tibetan singing bowls. In Dans les arbres, I introduced ceramic microtonal bells, which to some extent laid the foundation for the sound of the ensemble together with Christian Wallumrød's piano preparations, Ivar Grydeland's prepared banjo, and Xavier Charles' adaptive clarinet playing. These ensembles practice overlapping roles, breaking down usual expectations for the instruments with their expanded material palettes. All the members of these ensembles have opened up new terrain in their search for collective sound, and thus also contributed to the field of collective music creation. In many cases, new solo material has arisen from my interaction within these ensembles that I have gone on to develop further in my own work. The collective processes have influenced my personal work and vice versa, for which I am very grateful. 

My work is also closely connected to microtonal music. In my setup, I employ a vast number of non-tempered instruments—metal bells, gongs, ceramic bells, and the like—which have guided me to the music of the American composer Harry Partch. I would say there is a direct sonic link from my ceramic microtonal bells to Partch's Cloud Chamber Bowls. In 2012, Ensemble Musikfabrik commissioned a complete replica of Harry Partch’s instruments from the German percussionist and instrument builder Thomas Meixner. When I knew that these instruments were available in Europe, I was immediately inspired to initiate a collaboration with Ensemble Musikfabrik. My idea was to compose a piece that included traditional instruments, selected instruments by Harry Partch, and my own percussion setup. After five years of planning, composing, and rehearsing, my piece Parts of the Horse are Notably Present, for the Ensemble Musikfabrik and myself, was premiered in September 2021, in Bergen, with NyMusikk.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, the project was postponed from 2020 to 2021; thus the premiere intersected with my artistic research The Vibrating Drum at NMH. The consequence of this was that I was ready to incorporate the findings of my research within my extended percussion set up and use my new haptic system in the piece with Ensemble Musikfabrik. Composing then became a playground for exploring ways to synthesize my vibrating speakers, traditional instruments, and Partch’s microtonal universe. Here is a snippet from part III of the piece, recorded live during Ultima at the Opera House on September 18, 2021.