Solo performance by Matana Roberts with an opening set by Space — the trio of Lisa Ullén, Elsa Bergman and Anna Lund, plus Edition festival director John Chantler DJ'ing...
Presented in collaboration with Fasching.
Matana Roberts is the internationally acclaimed New York-based composer, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, sound artist and visual artist of whom the music site Pitchfork has said: “One of the most exciting new spirits in contemporary music”.
Roberts is perhaps best known for his musical masterpiece Coin Coin, which is now up to four discs and which, via improvisation, spoken word and quotes from songs and anthems, examines history, memory and ancestry, not least from an American horizon.
Born in 1975 in Chicago, Illinois, Roberts grew up on the city’s South Side and studied classical clarinet. Roberts formed the trio, Sticks and Stones, with bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor. In 2002, Matana Roberts moved to New York and started as a street musician in the subway.
Matana Roberts works in many different contexts and several different media with music, visual arts, dance, poetry and theater. In the summer of 2015, Roberts was artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of research-based sound works entitled i call america. The following summer, Roberts had a solo exhibition at the Fridman Gallery titled I Call America II.
“A unique, shape-shifting compositional voice” – LA Times
“Coin coin is a brilliant and deeply original project”.- LIRA
Lisa Ullén lives in Stockholm, but grew up in the northern part of Sweden. She is a graduate of Stockholm’s Royal College of Music where she studied classical piano in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A versatile player with a singular musical vision, Ullén has repeatedly proven her ability to imprint her absolute sense for tonal texture on whatever musical context she appears in from duos and small group collaborations with Nina de Heney and Okkyung Lee to larger ensemble situations such as Anna Högberg Attack!, Vilhelm Bromander Initiative and her own Motståndsorkestern (Resistance Orchestra).
Elsa Bergman studied double bass in Trondheim, Norway, at Sund Folkehøgskole and later at the Jazz Department of the Norwegian Academy of Music. Since then she has worked in various free jazz and improvisation groups.
She released her debut solo album 'A' in 2021.
John Chantler is a musician and organiser living in Stockholm, Sweden working with synthesis and exploring the aesthetic implications of different infrastructure for electronic music performance.
Originally from Australia he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden in 2014 where he has directed an annual festival for ‘other music’ in Stockholm called Edition and runs Fönstret — releasing music by local artists and surfacing material from the festival’s archives.
His solo recording Tomorrow is too late (October 2019, ROOM40) was originally commissioned by INA GRM for the 2018 Présences Électronique festival in Paris. His most recent release Hell or High Water (2023) is a collaboration with Daniel M Karlsson for computer controlled analog synthesis.