Ståle Storløkken, organ Bjørnar Habbestad, flutes Hild Sofie Tafjord, horn Lene Grenager, cello Michael Duch, bass
The collaboration between Lemur and Ståle Storløkken brings together some of the most distinctive voices in Norwegian improvisation and contemporary music, set in the frame of church acoustics. At the core of the project is a shared, radical approach to the instrument as a sounding body, and a musical practice rooted in improvisation, deep listening, and collective form-making.
Ståle Storløkken is one of Norway’s most influential sound explorers, known from projects such as Elephant9, Supersilent, and his long-standing collaboration with Terje Rypdal. His work is driven by timbre, texture, and harmonic freedom, and by a persistent curiosity for the hidden possibilities and limitations of his instruments. Whether working with Hammond organ, church organ, or electronics, Storløkken seeks out unconventional playing techniques and emergent sonic details, always attentive to the moment and the space in which the music unfolds.
Lemur and Ståle Storløkken work within a shared improvisational space defined by intensity, openness, and attentive listening. Delicate melodic material may develop into dense sonic textures; mechanical structures intersect with organic movement; lyrical or sacred sonorities meet more raw and abrasive elements.
LEMUR 1924 is a live film-and-music project centred on three landmark experimental silent films from 1924:
Entr’acte by René Clair Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Inspired by Dadaism and early modernist approaches to cinema, the programme brings together radically different film languages. René Clair’s Entr’acte unfolds as a surreal collage of absurd situations and impossible realities, featuring key figures from the Paris avant-garde such as Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, woven together through virtuosic montage and layered visual techniques. This expressive universe is contrasted by Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony, a purely abstract work based on geometric animation, drawing on both Russian Futurism and Dutch abstract formalism in the De Stijl tradition. The programme concludes with Ballet mécanique, Léger and Murphy’s iconic rhythmic study, where repetition, movement, and superimposition form a mechanised portrait of everyday structures.
With LEMUR 1924, the ensemble turns to film as a compositional framework, treating each work’s visual language as a score for live electronic performance. The result is a bespoke sonic landscape, performed in close collaboration with technician and programmer Niklas Adam.
AMOR/LEMUR is the amalgamation of two very different musical ventures.
Glasgow-based avant-disco unit AMOR met LEMUR on stage at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art in early 2020, weeks before Covid shut down the live arts. The resulting live set turned into a dancable and extatic collaboration, a democratic approach attesting to the communal experience and possibilities of disco. Their following recording session captured much of this energy, resulting in “the loosest, liveliest and most elevated recording in AMOR’s catalogue”, according to their label Night School.
Richard Youngs, vocals and piano Luke Fowler, synths and samplers Michael Duch, bass Paul Thomson, drums and percussion Bjørnar Habbestad, flutes Hild Sofie Tafjord, horn Lene Grenager, cello
New, wordy and on the edge.
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.
Premiered at Rosendal Teater, Trondheim, in September 2020.
Lemur joins forces with fellow musicians from Ensemble NEON, asamisimasa and Aksiom in a pumping rendering of Terry Rileys In C.
The minimalist masterpiece of 1964 is the backbone of Sasha Waltz’ new coreography. Together with her dancers she developed choreographic material in similarly variable structure, always leaving room for new variations. This is an experimental, constantly evolving process that once again reconceives and refines Sasha Waltz & Guests’ long-standing approach as well as the dialogue between dance, music and space. The piece is performed by Nagelhus Schia Productions, with members from Sasha Waltz and guests.
Lemur with friends:
Bjørnar Habbestad, flute Hanne Rekdal, flute Hild Sofie Tafjord, horn Inga Byrkjeland, cello Jonas Cambien, piano Michael Francis Duch, bass Morten Barrikmo, clarinets Silje Aker Johnsen, soprano Solmund Nystabakk, guitar
Huset spiller! Bomuldsfabriken kunsthall 27. October 2018
Huset spiller! – or House music! brings together children, young people and professional artists in a large-scale happening organised by the music collective LEMUR. This is the third time that Bomuldsfabriken kunsthall and LEMUR have organised a creative meeting across art forms and age groups.
The production incorporates dancer and choreographer Siri Jøntvedt, visual artist Ellen Røed, composers Thorolf Thuestad and Jon Halvor Bjørnseth, and LEMUR’s Bjørnar Habbestad (flutes), Hild Sofie Tafjord (horn), Lene Grenager (cello) and Michael Duch (double bass), all interacting with children and young people aged 4 to 19. This year’s version has been composed for and with Bomuldsfabrikens spaces, in collaboration with Villa Mathilda kindergarten and music, dance and drama students from Dahlske upper secondary school in Grimstad.
Since 2011, LEMUR has curated the PB1898 concert series at Bomuldsfabriken. For several years they have been working on translating different forms of spatiality into musical works. In collaboration with Arup Acoustic in New York, they developed Critical Band, a site-specific work for highly reverberant spaces that is recomposed for each performance. In Mikrophonie the ensemble explored the internal space and acoustics of instruments, and in Lemuria they collaborated with composer Luigi Nono and architect Renzo Piano on the use of islands as a compositional and spatial metapho
OVERSETTELSER Bomuldsfabriken kunsthall 17th january 2015
Oversettelser is the second of LEMURs happenings created for Bomuldsfabriken kunsthall.
When artists collaborate across forms of expression, we interpret, translate, explain and misunderstand each other, often with very fruitful results. Because in this process we negotiate. We search for meaning in what is different and try to understand our own art through that of others. In such processes, new layers of meaning are constantly emerging, like parallel stories, intertwined.
When LEMUR invites colleagues and the Arendal region to the happening Oversettelser – Translations – , it is precisely to search for, investigate and provoke situations and experiences we cannot imagine before they take place. Pupils and kindergarten children meet musicians, dancers, installations, sound and video artists, all in order to create meeting points between the performative and the spatial.
So – to translate is not to reproduce perfectly. To translate is to be open to listening, hearing and sensing the unknown – without letting the fear of misunderstanding or misinterpretation stand in the way of new experiences.
Lemur is Ensemble-in-Residence at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall and has since 2010 curated the concert series PB1898, which takes place seven Saturdays a year. In 2012, the ensemble also produced the happening Happy Birthday, John Cage! which brought together more than 200 performers in all the rooms of Bomuldsfabriken.
Artists
Øyvind Brandtsegg + Axel Tidemann Lotta Melin Trond Lossius + Jeremy Welsh Jon Halvor Bjørnseth Eirik Havnes Isak Anderssen Atle Selnes Nielsen LEMUR Dahlske upper secondary school Villa Matilda Steiner School in Arendal Arendal Culture School
Samtaler om rom Seven sonic interventions at the National Museum, January – 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.
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.
Lemur feat. Stian Westerhus A merger of epic guitar sonics with acoustic gymnastics.
Concerts and recording sessions in 2016.
-‘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.
