Over the last 15 years, LEMUR have developed bespoke electronics systems as a fifth ensemble voice alongside the quartet’s instrumentalists.

Working closely with a range of programmers, music technologists and sound designers, the different works have asked for processing and synthesis instruments, foot controllers, digital scores, network systems or spatialisation tools, all developed in close collaboration between the musicians and their technical partners.

These different types of electronic infrastructure have been developed as integral parts of each composition, a process documented in the recent publication LEMUR Electroacoustic Works. Elements of this material are available below.

Mikrophonie (2014)

For amplified quartet and live electronics · with Benjamin Maumus / GMEA, Albi

Mikrophonie turns the instruments inside out. Miniature microphones placed in and on flute, horn, cello and bass capture resonances, breath and mechanical noise that never normally reach an audience — inner acoustics that become the material of the work, set against the instruments’ outer sound.

Even the mixing desk is notated: panning, EQ and reverb appear in the score as performable parts. Mikrophonie marked the moment LEMUR’s amplification stopped being reinforcement and became instrumentation.

Lemuria (2017)

Concert installation for six audio islands, four instruments, two voices and electronics · commissioned by Borealis

Lemuria deploys the island — borrowed from Luigi Nono’s recurring motif — as sound distribution, spatial plan and compositional method at once. Six performers on low podiums, spread far apart and facing different parts of the room; microphones inside and outside the instruments; islands of loudspeakers pointing in every direction; an audience free to move between them. No two listening positions yield the same piece.

The system behind the work was built as an ecosystem per island — each musician with two sound sources and two speakers of limited reach, wrapped in a room-wide surround layer. Jeff Carey wrote the SuperCollider processing instruments, Bernt Isak Wærstad the control system, and Thorolf Thuestad designed the spatialisation. That system, refined ever since, still carries LEMUR’s live electronics — and the making of the work is documented in the exposition Å lage et Lemuria (VIS, 2018). Premiered at Grand Selskapslokaler, Bergen, 10 March 2017; performed again at the National Museum — Architecture, Oslo (2018).

Out of the Dark (2019)

Site-specific concert for the old Athens Stock Exchange · Onassis Foundation · electronics developed with Jeff Carey

Out of the Dark reverses the equation: instead of building its own archipelago, the work enters a space already loaded — the old Athens Stock Exchange. The audience sits in circles at the centre of the hall, facing outward, while the ensemble and twelve loudspeakers — on the floor and ringing the balcony above — surround them.

Live electronics act as a membrane between ensemble and architecture, drawing the hall’s resonance and history into the music.

Symphonie magnétophonique (2022)

Three movements for transportation hub, public square, concert hall, four soloists and electronics · Ultima

A symphony as itinerary: three movements across a transportation hub, a public square and a concert hall, the audience travelling between them. The tape-machine of the title nods to musique concrète — but where concrète brought the city into the studio, LEMUR brings the concert into the city, letting the two bleed together until the final movement gathers what the journey has collected.

Lemur 1924 (2024)

Live film-and-music project on three experimental films from 1924 · electronics developed with Niklas Adam and Gard Gitlestad

With Lemur 1924 the ensemble turns to film as a compositional framework. Three landmark experimental silent films from 1924 — René Clair’s Entr’acte, Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony and Léger and Murphy’s Ballet mécanique — are treated as scores: each work’s visual language, from Dadaist collage to pure geometric abstraction to mechanised rhythm, is read and answered in live electronic performance.

A century after the films premiered, the quartet’s instruments and electronics meet the montage frame by frame — repetition, superimposition and movement translated back into sound.

Lichtbogen (2026)

For quartet, lights and electronics · electronics developed with Niklas Adam and Mike McCormick · commissioned and co-produced by Ultima and GRM, Paris

Lichtbogen borrows its title from Kaija Saariaho’s 1986 landmark of musique mixte — continuing LEMUR’s practice of taking canonical titles as points of departure rather than material for quotation. Its subject is the electric arc: a phenomenon that produces light and sound at once, and both are embedded in the composition, a sonic fable spun from fragments of Norwegian industrial history and the crackling intensity of electricity itself.

Drawing on the sound-system tradition — where composition, production and technical design form a single practice — the 45-minute work fuses the quartet, live electronics and light design into LEMUR’s most extensive electroacoustic staging to date. Premiere at Ultima, Oslo, 11 September 2026 — in the ensemble’s twentieth year.