First time performance in Sweden for Keith Fullerton Whitman. Quadraphonic, live electronics.
Opening performance for the evening by Dufwa — a collaborative project between Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson developed during the summer of 2016 while in residence in Balada, Spain. This field recording-based music moves on a continuum between drone, noise and generative rhythms by means of extensive digital processing and editing.
Presented with the kind assistance of Ems Stockholm.
Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer & musician currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Beginning in the early 90's while working towards a Bachelor's Degree in "Music Synthesis" Degree at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Keith began exploring electronic music's many facets, eventually yielding dozens of recordings for influential labels such as Kranky, Editions Mego, PAN, Planet µ, Carpark, Room40, Amethyst Sunset, Amish, NNA Tapes, No Fun Productions, Agents of Chaos, Arbor, Digitalis Limited, Ekhein, Heavy Tapes, Rare Youth, Root Strata, and many more.
These days his creative energies are largely put into the continued development of a singular take on "Live Electronic Music" incorporating an ever-changing hybrid software & hardware-based system that allows for the desired complexities of sound & vision. While this work has recently manifested itself as a pair of albums for Editions Mego entitled "Generators" & "Occlusions," it's largely intended for the stage. More recently, Keith has been performing a piece titled "Redactions," incorporating thematically & geographically relevant Musique Concrète elements into the modular setup. He is set to launch a new series of scalable, equestrian-themed digital music frameworks under the "Grid Work" banner in early 2017.
Over the past 20 years, Keith has given over 500 performances of his music - everything from solemn held-tones to pointillist reckless-abandon - at venues ranging from "Punk" basements to some of the most celebrated European & North-American festival stages such as Akousma, CTM, Dissonanze, Electronica En Abril, Impakt, Kontraste, Lanaudière, LUFF, Mutek, Novas Frequencias, Présences Électroniques, Skanu Mesz, Sonic Acts, Suoni Per Il Popolo, Terraforma, Ultrahang, Unsound, Werkleitz, ZKM, etc. In addition, he has given dozens of artist talks & history lectures at prestigious institutions including the Banff Centre, Dartmouth, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, & MIT & has taken part in Colloquia, acted as Guest Faculty, co-curated music festivals & organized concerts & film events in the Boston area & beyond.
He has collaborated both on stage & record with Oren Ambarchi, Caboladies, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Greg Davis, Frans de Waard, Deerhunter, JD Emmanuel, Lawrence English, Mark Fell, Robin Fox, David Grubbs, Glenn Jones, Michael Karoli & Malcolm Mooney (Can), Eli Keszler, Felix Kubin, Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht, Matmos, Norbert Möslang, Geoff Mullen, Benjamin Nelson, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, Joel Ryan, Jessica Rylan, Uwe Schmidt, TV Pow, Ben Vida, Nate Wooley, C. Spencer Yeh, and countless others. He is also known for performances and realizations of works by composers such as Ilhan Mimaroglu, Phill Niblock, Dick Raaijmakers and Conrad Schnitzler. He has composed for dance, and his music has been set to motion by choreographers & dance ensembles including Chantal Yzermans, Le Supplici, the Andersson Dance Company, and the NYU New Music and Dance Ensemble. He has supplied music and sound-design for several video game & "music for picture" projects, advertisements, and assorted environments, including film & audio installations.
A 2011 joint commission from Sonic Acts, Kontraste Krems, and Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) led to a week-long session in the fabled INA-GRM studios in Paris, during which Keith realized a life-long dream, completing an 80-channel, long-form Musique Concrète work entitled "Rythmes Naturels" utilizing many of the idiosyncratic early-electronic instruments held in the studio's archive. In 2015 he completed a second piece for the GRM's yearly "Présences Electroniques" festival.
From 2003 to 2015, he helmed a highly specialized experimental-music distribution company named "Mimaroglu Music," charged with helping labels & artists all over the world with the preparation & dispersion of their tangible music artifacts. Prior to this he was the Sales-Manager of noted New England distributor Forced Exposure, for whom he personally penned hundreds of "capsule" descriptions of catalogue new-arrivals. Since relocating to Melbourne, he has started a new venture, "Broken-Music," to pick up where Mimaroglu left off.
Maria W Horn (1989) is a composer whose work explores the inherent spectral properties of sound. Her compositions employ a varied instrumentation ranging from analog synthesizers to choir, string instruments, pipe organ and various chamber music formats. Synthetic sound is often paired with acoustic instruments in order to extend the instruments timbral capacities with precise control of timbre, tuning and texture.
Maria combines spectralist techniques and site specific source material in order to explore the inherent memories of a building, object or geographical area. In her recent compositions she uses acoustic artifacts from physical spaces to create musical frameworks for her compositions. Using these acoustic imprints as a starting point Maria weaves intricate harmonic patterns that slowly transform from intimate fragility to searing high-density aural monoliths.
Her debut album Kontrapoetik (2018) is a historical investigation, and a kind of counter-exorcism tackling the deceivingly serene, yet turmoiled past of her home region Ångermanland in the North of Sweden. Dies Irae (2021) derives from the resonant frequencies of an empty machine hall from the mining region of Bergslagen and Vita Duvans Lament (2020) is a sonic excavation of what used to be the only panoptic cell prison built in Sweden.
In addition to her artistic practice she is also the co-founder of Swedish record label XKatedral.
As a composer, musician and sound artist, Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly reemerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound.
Erlandsson has undergone studies in composition in Stockholm, where he received a Master’s degree in Composition of Electronic Music. In addition to his own artistic practice, Erlandsson holds a position as studio assistant at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm.
Erlandsson presents his work both as a solo artist and in collaborations, most notably together with Yair Elazar Glotman. In 2018 the artist and choreographer Erik Berg commissioned Erlandsson to score his most recent work, Unfortunate Desires, which premiered in the spring of 2019.
Recent releases include Minnesmärke on Hallow Ground (2020), the collaboration Emmanate made with Yair Elazar Glotman on 130701 (2020), Hypodermic Letters on Portals Editions (2018), 4-track guitar music on XKatedral (2018), Selective Miracles and Valentina Tereshkova on Posh Isolation (2016), and again together with Glotman, Negative Chambers on Miasmah (2017). Erlandsson has performed his work extensively, most recently at Présences Électronique hosted by the GRM in Paris, CTM 2019 and The Long Now in Berlin, Norbergfestival in Norberg, Sonica Festival in Ljubljana and in various music and arts venues around the world.
