A technologically challenged music drama for improvising actor, ensemble and live processing.
Enemy of the people is a new performance by LEMUR and actor/playwright Kate Pendry, cutting through Ibsens text with the ensembles own sounds, lines and music whilst struggeling to remember the script and score of a well known american shark movie and fragments of Grieg’s cello sonata. The romantic celebration of truth against authority is pitted against the ramblings of mass murdering cult leader Jim Jones. The result is instantly contemporary and heartbreaking political.
The project welcomes an emotional landscape and an ideological minefield: presenting a politically relevant performance in the intersection between music and theatre borrowing from the direct presence of an improvised concert and the carefully selected direction of a theatrical text.
Almost 140 years after Ibsen wrote the play, Pendry + LEMUR use his themes and conflicts as a starting point to explore if and how the paradox between the direct meaning of the word, together with the abstract music can answer the problems we face today, even though the Norwegian relationship with our national poet seems to be worn.
A site specific concert for the old Athens Stock Exchange, ensemble and electronics.
Out of the Dark combines performances in several rooms, field recordings from the surrounding area and a bespoke sound system to articulate the space of the old Athens Stock Exchange. Using data from the hours leading up to the 2008 crash, a detailed score structures the activities of the four musicians, the sound processing and the spatial design.
Commissioned by Onassis Foundation.
Premiered June 7th as part of Tectonics Athens
Seven 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
A series of sound and video works by LEMUR and artist Ellen Røed for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.
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.
Premiered at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, fall 2018.
concert installation for 6 audio islands, 4 instruments, 2 voices and electronic sound processing.
Premiered 10th of March 2017
‘Lemuria’ is the fourth in an ongoing series of works from LEMUR, appropriating titles and concepts from the canon of 20th century art music for creative re-use. The title draws not only upon the myth of the lost sivilization of Lemuria, but also a movement from Luigi Nono’s work “Guai ai gelidi mostri”, one of the many points in his oeuvre where the notion of islands occur.
Lemur’s “Lemuria” uses the island metaphor as a concept for sound distribution, in the placement of musicians and audience and as a compositional strategy. The work is built up from isolated sounds and material types developed independantly by all performers, that later are combined into textures highlighting different aspects of the performance space.
The piece is performed from 6 “islands” spaced out through the venue. Each island is a station manned by a performer, two speakers and a light source. Each performer is both soloist and ensemble as the music reconfigures the site and the sound across the span of the performance. Audience can choose to sit or move through different positions as they please.
For the first time, Lemur collaborates with singers Stine Motland and Unni Løvlid. The two truly unique voices bring with them a complimentary range of extended vocal techniques as well as the contrasting qualities found in the different aestetics and traditions of norwegian folk and experimental music.
Lemuria is performed in a customized multichannel system for live processing that carefully balances the individual sound quality of each player and microphone with the colour and signature of the venue. The system is devised by Bjørnar Habbestad, Thorolf Thuestad, Jeff Carey and Bernt Isak Wærstad.
Lemuria is composed by Bjørnar Habbestad, Hild Sofie Tafjord, Lene Grenager and Michael Duch.
Sound engineer, live processing and spatialization by Thorlof Thuestad.
Audio processing software for Lemur is developed by Jeff Carey.
Hardware construction and programming Bernt Isak Wærstad.
Lemuria was premiered on Borealis festival in Bergen in March 2017
Matrix of possibilities
Robert Barry
seismograf.org
There is a peculiar gait employed by those who deign to patrol the space of a concert hall during such works as invite their audience to walk about during the performance. Lolling but hesitant, always solitary and serious-faced, they look a little like movie somnambulists. But such studied perambulations are hardly necessary to the appreciation of Lemuria, a new work by Norwegian improvising group LEMUR, for so successfully did it evoke, by its own means, a sense of movement, narrative, and far-off places.
Inspired by Luigi Nono’s Guai ai gelidi mostri and the spurious ‘lost continent’ proposed by Victorian zoologist, Philip Sclater, the piece sees LEMUR’s four regular members (flautist Bjørnar Habbestad, cellist Lene Grenager, horn player Hild Sofie Tafjord, and double bassist Michael Francis Duch) and two additional vocalists (Unni Løvlid and Stine Janvin Motland) dispersed amongst six ‘islands’ throughout the concert hall at Grandbergen, following a loose score, more like a matrix of possibilities than precisely encoded instruction, governing pauses and processes rather than specific notes. Listening to Duch tenderly pluck at his bass strings, letting them rattle against the screw of his bow, and the always-otherworldly voice of Stine Janvin Motland, I feel myself transported, temporarily, dreaming of other worlds.
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.