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Out of the Dark – a site specific concert for the old Athens Stock Exchange, ensemble and electronics.
Out of the Dark is the latest of Lemur’s pieces recontextualizing major works from the contemporary and experimental musical canon. Using the ensemble’s particular blend of improvisation and composition as a mirror, Lemur transform titles and concepts into new and original work. The spaces of the once mighty building of Sofokles Street is presented in an arrangement inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s score from 1998. The audience is surrounded by both musicians and a tailor-made speaker system.
Commissioned by Onassis Foundation
Premiered June 7th as part of Tectonics Athens
Actor, performance artist and playwright Kate Pendry and composer-performers LEMUR collaborated in the impromptu event KOLLISJON, at Arendalsuka 2016, revealing a shared concern for the role of art production in todays political climate. Furthermore, a strong dedication to artistic craftmanship was encountered, a reliance of the direct bodily, non-digital presence of live performers. Together they have started a process to develop a new form of instrumental music drama, creating conditions for a hybrid form between the directness of an improvised concert and the premeditation of a dramatic text.
Enemy of the people
Lemur/Pendry’s Enemy Of The People seeks to include and immerse the audience in the characters’ emotional landscape and ideological battlefield. We plumb the strata of subtext by acknowledging it. What lies beneath.
The performance is a meditation on the themes found in Enemy Of The People. We allow the essential conflicts in the play to manifest and play out – to be drawn out through the realtime interaction with the instruments. We explore the strange loops of feed-in and feed-back where the artists are tuning into each others sounds, drawing out, expanding upon, feeding each other as they respond to each other. We consider the problematic of intellectual discourse in political plays; how the fourth wall can become sometimes opaque – even impenetrable. The audience has heard it all before … if not on stage then in the national and international discourses that abound. We’ve become adept at filtering out, drawing lines, not listening – because it’s simply too exhausting to listen.
Premiere at Avantgarden, Trondheim in September 2019.
Sonic interventions at the National Museum.
Project period January to October 2018
LEMUR is Ensemble-in-Residence at the of National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in 2018. The project Samtaler om rom is a dialogue with the museum’s rooms, programs and priorities in the period. Installations, performances, new productions and concerts are wedged in between the ordinary exhibitions, as an experimental and interdisciplinary approach to presenting architecture.
The project uses the institution’s natural ebb and flow as a framework: The first intervention takes place in an empty Ulltveit Moe Pavilion in January and February, followed by tailored performances, productions and events around the exhibitions «Visning» and «Boligideer”.
EVENTS
Polytop – a site specific sound installation for Ulltveit-Moe Pavilion is displayed in the period 20.1.-5.2.
The concert installation Lemuria – for ensemble, two singers, electronics and a mobile audience, is shown 9.2. kl. 19:00 and 10.2. kl. 1:00 p.m.
Hjemme hos – A series of house concerts in private Oslo apartments appear in June-October
Leilighetsportretter, a sound and video work by Ellen Røed and Lemur will be created in connection to the exhibition “Visning” and displayed towards the end of the project period.
More information about the project at http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no
Polytop – a site specific sound installation for the Ulltveit-Moe pavillion with active monitors, transducers, headsets, speaker cones and exhibition furniture. 
Premiered 20th of january, 2018, Oslo.
Like many other works by LEMUR, Polytop is a point of reference anchored in creative reuse of 20th century art music. The title plays on composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’s own term for spatial audio installations, an expression that he developed partly in cooperation with Le Corbusier. Developed as a site specific work, Polytop uses the transparent but intimate quality of Sverre Fehn’s glass pavilion from 2008 to question how rooms affect the way we listen, and how our listning affects a room. The installation utilizes different acoustic zones in the pavilion, encouraging the audience to walk around, sit down, listen with headphones or be immersed by sound.
The work is commissioned by the National Museum, supported by the Norwegian Arts Council.
Polytop is one of the four elements of ‘Samtaler om rom’, realized during Lemur’s period as Ensemble-in-Residence at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, in 2018.
Composition: Bjørnar Habbestad, Hild Sofie Tafjord, Lene Grenager, Michael F. Duch
Sound Design: Thorolf Thuestad. Speaker-cone mesh constructed by Thorolf Thuestad and Eva Pfitzenmaier for “ord/word/Wort & land/land/Land”.
Coproduction: Foreningen 3DA, Notam, nyMusikk, Lydgalleriet.
Technical system
42 channel sound system distributed over more than 60 speakers of different sorts and sizes.
Sound sources
Recordings of source material have been made in Trondheim, Oslo, Bergen, Reykjavik og Köbenhavn, between 2012 and 2017. Contributing musicians are: Lemur, Caput Ensemble, Microtub, Eivind Lønning, Morten Barrikmo, Tanja Orning, Dirk Bruinsma, Robin Hayward, Lotte Anker, Torben Snekkestad, Liza Gibbs, Anna Klett, Ole Henrik Moe, Kari Rønnekleiv, Daniel Formoe, Ellen Holmås, Astrid Solberg, Astri Hoffmann-Tollaas, Johannes Borchgrevink, Marianne Baudouin Lie, Anders Rove, Jostein Bolås Brødreskift, David Andersson, Björn Petersson, Morten Berger Stai og Kristian B. Jacobsen.
Lemur Polytop
Here is a short video from the opening of our installation Polytop. It is up until February 4th so it is still possible to see it!!
Posted by Lemur on Dienstag, 30. Januar 2018
A series of sound and video works by LEMUR and artist Ellen Røed for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.
To be premiered at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, fall 2018.
Røed’s subtle and slow panoramic strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer. As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.
The project is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the National museum´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture.
Ellen Røed (1970) examines the terms for production of meaning in the video format by constantly questioning the technology and the photographer’s role and influence on material. Her works are characterized by a distinctive musicality, a sense of the performative, for the action aspect of art making . Røed and Lemur have previously collaborated in connection with the project “Happy Birthday, John Cage!”. Ellen is currently a Profile Professor at the Stockholm University of the Arts.
www.ellenrøed.no
A requiem for the CD-medium
To be released on +3DB records fall 2018
The composition, recording and release of Critical Bands is an extension of the site-specific work Critical Band from 2012. Particular for this work is its iterative form; it is re-composed for each performance, tailored to the venue through acoustic analysis and adaption to the space in question. Since its premiere in The Nidaros Dome in Trondheim in 2012 new versions have been realized in Oslo, Bergen, Copenhagen and Reykjavik.
Where Critical Band is essentially site-specific and singular, escaping the idea of CD-production, Critical Bands(!) celebrates the ability of the CD-medium to incorporate different acoustic spaces in one and the same object. Recording takes places in five different cities, with a diverse group of ensembles and spaces. The result is a new work incorporating both previous and newly developed material.
Participants in the Critical Bands project are:
Lemur (NO), Caput (IS), Microtub (NO/DE), Lotte Anker/Torben Snekkestad/Anna Klett/Liza Fox (D), Tanja Orning/Morten Barrikmo/Eivind Lønning/Marianne Baudouin Lie/Trondheim Kontrabassorkester/Kari Rønnekleiv/Ole Henrik Moe (NO).
Wokshop venues are:
Nidaros Dome Church (NO), Harpa (IS), Literaturhaus (D), Sofienberg Church (NO), Notam (NO), Athetic Sound (NO).
Critical Bands is supported by Norwegian Arts Council, Nordisk Kulturfond & Menntamálaráðuneytið
For large improvising ensemble.
Premiered 21st of October 2016, Oslo
Karyobin is centered around principles of group interaction rather than specific musical delimitations. The title is a reference to the 1968 classic by Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), as an hommage and acknowledgement to the parallels between LEMURs and John Stevens methods for developing structure in free improvisation.
The work is developed through a process involving LEMUR as composers interacting with different groups of performers in order to structure micro and macro action. The work is flexibly designed and adapts to the participating musicians, ensuring that they have a substantial influence on the musical situation through different kinds of decision-making.
Central to the work is its underlying attitude towards music-making as a social enterprise. Its development is the result of several collaborations with ensembles like Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Great Learning Orchestra, Iceland Symphony Orchestra and N ensemble.
A merger of Stian Westerhus’s epic guitar sonics with Lemurs acoustic gymnastics.
Concerts and recording sessions in 2016. Release TBA.
-‘The sense of menace is generated with huge energy by the belligerently brilliant Norwegian guitarist Westerhus who coaxes a plethora of tortured sounds from his axe, bowed notes elongating into harmonic dismemberment of epic proportions. (…) This is heady, sometimes heavy, otherworldly stuff, fuelled by jazz but never hindered by it. Welcome to the new century of improvised music’.
– JazzWise Magazine, U.K.
