LungA School Fall Semester 2018 Cover image: Marie Skovgaard Larsen
Week 5: Wavy
We spent the last week of light, listening. It wasn’t planned this way, but that’s what happened. I stood on my head in the morning, watching the mountains outside the window. Upside down, they were basking in the last of their light. I turned the lights off — mørkfarvning. I had four saunas, and still, liquid remained inside. Periodic and symmetrical patterns at the air-liquid interface are called cymatics. When the surface of a membrane is vibrated, regions of displacement are made visible. Geometry determines what kind of patterns emerge in the excitatory medium. The body is an excitatory medium. Its geometry dams the tide. She said we’re going to stay like this for five more minutes. She said after a while you will get used to the burn. I spent the week piecing together a picture of a beautiful woman, however it turned out she was missing a part of her right ear. I woke up to a train in Russia. The passing cars sent blue parallelograms, scoping about the sleeping room. I lost the thing I wanted to say.
The thing about spirals is that you always return to the same points, only at new distances. “I try to stay in the background, and observe the scene!” “Shouldn’t you stay here and look after the shop?” The morning I forgave myself for not writing to every person on their birthday, Oliver permutated his birth date into beats. Can you move mountains with twenty-strong cht-cht-chts? Can you stretch the distance to the mountain by one iota, to gain an extra second of light in the valley? You don’t want to be a wall, you want to be a door — I assume. In the concert, the storm outside leaked in. The streetlight cast the score on the wall in flashes. Music morphed in and out of shapes, and shapes morphed in and out of each other. Taking turns to scream, I watched the roommates draw a shape between them, a cavity in which to wake up. A baguette-eating bird from the future maintained the space-time continuum. It may be an unlikely theory but the fact it exists at all animates something. At the north and the south poles, the aurorae mirror each other. We said we heard the northern lights and they sound like whales. We said we heard the northern lights and they sound like electric whales in the sky.
Paragraph 5 Duration: Performance key: Situation key:
168 hours Moving further in and/or further out Explosion and/or implosion
Jacob Kirkegaard As interviewed on Seydisfjรถrรฐur Community Radio 107.1fm Friday 26th October 2018
http://www.fonik.dk
Claire: Ok, we’re live now. It’s Claire and Shan here with Jacob Kirkegaard who is visiting LungA School this week and… Shan: We have a blizzard outside! C: We have some real weather coming in! Welcome Jacob. Jacob: Thankyou. Are we really live? C: We’re really live. J: On the ether? C: Yep, across the mountains. So Jacob, you’ve been here doing workshops with the students this week and sharing a little bit about your practice as well. It’s been really great to have you here. I think it’s expanded the students a lot as well in terms of thinking about what sound is, what it can be, and how it can help us open up to the world in a different way. I thought we could start with you telling us about your early life. Do you have a first memory of sound, or recording it? J: I guess maybe one of the first sounds that I remember, must be the clock in my house where I grew up. My dad had this big old clock that he would sort of crank up. And then it had this, ah, “DING… DING”. So that I guess has always been there, a childhood sound. And then at the same time, train tracks — we were living next to the train tracks. When those train bars would go down, there would be this particular sound that is still in Denmark — it’s still the same sound. It’s funny because everything has been renewed, you know, and when you’re in a bus, nothing sounds the same anymore. When I was a child I remember when the doors open, and the doors closed. There wouldn’t be any warning sound, it would just be “whooch… kllllewwwh”… and if you had to get off it would be “ding”. Today the sound is “pneeeeeei” like a digital, ugly sound, I would say. Not a pleasant sound anymore. And when the doors open, it will be like “reeeea, reeeea, reeeea, reeeea” you know? Probably because they’re super scared of being sued if something happened, or whatever. So these small, short, more pleasant sounds I remember from my childhood. The train tracks are still there — right now actually, again, I’m living close to one, so I can hear it from my house when the train bars go down. Those are maybe some of the first sounds that I remember. And then, I started recording when I was six years old, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. My dad gave me one and just pressed record and then left the
room. He said, “just have fun.” And I still have this tape, so I can hear him. On the tape he says “yeah, then you just take care that it doesn’t go too loud, it shouldn’t go to this red here when the thing is moving, when you speak.” And “oh, just speak into the microphone,”… So he goes out. Those are the first times I started recording, in my room, with a microphone and a heavy tape recorder where you could see the tapes moving. C: I’m interested in the element of time, in sound. Do you think sounds live through different time periods and then reappear perhaps? I’ve spoken to some others about this recently, where a sound from the past might occur, and somewhere else completely different it reappears, in another form, like a kind of ghost. But you hear it and there’s this familiarity, where you feel like you know this sound, but it’s from a different place or time. J: Mmm. Well first of all, relating to time, I think we’re used to seeing pictures from the past, mainly. If you go to the internet to search for something about a specific event, what you get is either information, text, or pictures. Or videos of course. But you don’t have a button on Google where it says ‘sound’ right? And sound is so related to time. I mean, my first reel-to-reel tape, where I recorded my first things, it’s in a way, as you say, it’s like a piece of time. The tape is maybe I think twenty minutes long, and it’s like twenty minutes from 1981. I’m sitting in my room one day recording. It cannot really be compared with a photo. I have quite a few photos from that time as well, but it’s like frozen time, or still pictures of course. So in that sense I think a tape can be like a chunk of time as well. In a way it’s the tactility of time, through sound. Which I like. About sound occurring in one place and then the other, well… I like to think that all sounds just go somewhere else, and they don’t just fade. There was a Danish writer, Peter Adolphsen, he wrote Small Stories. One of the small stories is called ‘If’, in plural, like ‘Ifs’. So one ‘if’ was, “if all pop songs that have ever faded out,” — you know how pop songs fade out, you know like, they go “continue… fade, fade, fade, fade…” — if they don’t fade out, but they just go somewhere else? Just as a thought experiment. I like that, it reminds me of this gold record plate that was sent out into space, you know with The Beatles and so on. You want to project sound of our civilization into the future, or into space, into eternity or into a place that doesn’t have time. I like that. Once I did a little experiment just for myself, because I thought it was fun, in Berlin where I lived. They were reconstructing the street, it was an old neighbourhood, with a brick stone street. They were tearing it up and fixing the heating system or whatever, the tubes. So I put my microphone out of the
window and recorded these guys, doing this construction work, and got the atmosphere of the street. Just for, I don’t know, 45 minutes or something. And then I put it on a CD, you know, a CD-R, back then? Then I put it in this little, flat envelope, and I went down there at night, because the stones were up, you know? I sort of put it in, underneath. Sort of hid it in there, so the stones would be on top and seal it for the future. Just as an experiment, so the time from that time, or recording from that time, but also the recording of the construction of the street, was… C: Embedded? J: Yeah, it’s now lying down there. Maybe to be found one day. C: Yeah but my computer doesn’t have a disk slot anymore, so… J: That’s true! I mean that’s the funny thing about, you know also when you find old wax rolls with sound? Or these early recordings. The first recording that was ever made was on soot. A piece of paper with soot. And the only reason they found a way with a laser to… C: Extract it? J: Extract it, yeah. It’s somebody singing Clair de lune. C: Oh yeah yeah, I’ve heard that! It’s beautiful. It’s on YouTube. You can hear it looped over and over, it’s kind of… J: It’s probably like “reeeeeeaw, screawwwwky skraaak” C: Yeah, it’s so strange! It’s cool. Well, maybe now is a good time to ask you to play something for us? Maybe a sound of yours? J: Oh, sure! Maybe, yeah, we tried to record some different things here at the workshop. Someone had the idea to record jellyfish. Because there are some jellyfish down in the fjord that Bianca was recording. We went down there and found one, but there was too much wind… but I put the hydrophone down, and we got one sort of movement, you know, where it opens to the back, the jellyfish, like “schwwwoooo, whhhhuuiitt”. And we could hear it actually, this little greasy sound. I can play this if you like? C: Sure, sounds great, please! [Jellyfish field recording]
C: Could you tell us about what you did here at the school? How this time has gone for you, and what you’ve learned during this week with the students? J: It’s been so nice to be here. I was in Seyðisfjörður fourteen years ago, for the first time, in 2004, just for a few days. So to come back is umm… I can remember the street outline here with the ferry and, but it was totally different times. C: The same ferry? J: I guess so. One big ferry, you know, coming in, lying there for a few days, and then out again. You know this atmosphere and the sound of the ferry coming in, the sound of the ferry lying there: “vhoo-vhoo-vhoo-vhoo-vhoo” C: Yeah it’s got a beat. J: This sound is all over town! S: What were you coming for back then? J: I was traveling with a colleague around Iceland, to record sound. We wanted, as far as I remember, to visit somebody here. There was a Danish woman here doing radio, who lived here for a while with her Icelandic husband. So we came and met them and spent a few days here. We didn’t have any particular project or anything, it was just a sound recording trip. So to come and spend a little week here, you know it’s been great. Everybody is so nice, and it seems like everybody is having a good time together, which is great to come and be a part of. The atmosphere between all of you is so good. I can also feel that it’s been intense for you to be here, and with all the different workshops. When I arrived I heard that it’s been really a lot of work with another workshop. A lot to digest. So I thought, you know, I have a lot to give as well, and it was really nice to feel where everybody was, and just give some input, tell my stories and my projects, and talk back and forth. I also talked about Else Marie Pade, the pioneer of electronic music in Denmark. She was a woman who was born in 1924. She was in the resistance, against the Nazis, in the female resistance group. And also in a concentration camp. And was the first one to do electronic music in Denmark. We collaborated and became friends — she died three years ago. So I did a talk about her today and showed a short film about her, and our collaboration. I also did a little presentation on E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) from New York and New Jersey, in the 60s up until now, showing some films on that,
and John Cage’s collaboration with Bell Labs. So sort of a little bit reaching out as well, about what has been going on. And we were recording. Then today we went to do a little singing in the silo. Where we sang one of the ears. Which means to listeners out there, you can look up on the internet ‘Otoacoustic Emissions’ — that’s something I’ve been working on for twelve years now, creating projects. It is basically tones generated by the ears. So I was recording everybody’s ears, and half of them emitted tones. Including yours, Claire! C: Including mine! J: You have one tone emitting constantly from your left ear. C: No, I have three tones coming from my right ear! You’re so wrong! J: That’s true, that’s true. Oh, sorry man. There were so many. Maybe we should listen to it? C: Yeah ok, let’s listen to that. J: So, let me see.These are ear tones — spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. And they are Claire’s. She has reminded me she has three tones emitting constantly. And here are the acoustic recordings from her three tones, filtered. [Claire’s ear tones] J: So Claire, how do you feel about your tones? Now it’s me interviewing you! C: It really kind of shook me a little bit to hear them actually. J: Yeah? C: Well it’s weird, I want to say it resonated with me a lot [laughs]. But, yeah, it’s also so abstract in a way, to hear this thing that’s… I’m not quite sure if it’s inside or outside of me. It’s kind of both at the same time. J: It’s both I guess. C: Yeah, it’s kind of both. But that’s the nice thing about it is that it makes you, like you were talking about, question what’s inside and what’s outside. And if there is such a thing really as complete inside or outside. It’s made
me think a lot about the idea of exchange, and the way that we engage with the world, and the world engages with us. It’s exactly that — an engagement. It’s not passive, it’s actually very active in a way. And there’s this constant cross-over between input and output. That just kind of blew my mind. I don’t know, I suppose it’s something that we all intuitively feel, but it’s interesting to have this more tactile evidence that that’s really what’s happening. S: And I think also to hear your own sound as well. There’s that immediate acknowledgement when you see a picture of yourself or you look into the mirror. But this is a thing that I’d never heard about before, and then probably many of us haven’t had the opportunity to hear. And so when you do hear that it’s just a very strange experience, I would presume. To hear an aspect of yourself that’s been there the whole time but that you’ve never had access to. C: Mmm. But then I felt like after spending a day in your workshop, really tuning in to all these very subtle sounds, I went to bed that night and felt like suddenly I could hear so much more. I swear I could hear my own ear tones that night. And maybe, yeah I guess it’s just tapping into that. J: It’s beautiful. You know, like what you say, it’s like “ok, here’s something that has maybe already always been there.” It’s interesting, was it just because I wasn’t aware, or is there more? Is there something more that I don’t know is there, but I could hear it if I knew, or if I was tuned in? How do we tune in to the world? You know, how do we resonate with the world? I believe a lot in those things, tuning and resonance. And that it’s about finding the resonance. Because we are tuned in a certain way. Our ears are tuned, and our bodies are tuned. It’s about balance as well. You know, how things are balancing, and being in the right sort of tuning. S: Is there a sound that you’ve been chasing for years, that you really want to find? J: No. In the principle, no. Because I guess mmm… I like to be surprised, and in reverse to having an expectation. If I have an idea there is something I really, really, really need to — then I might be disappointed, that the world is not going to unfold how I want. And I think that’s the beauty of life, for me, to have the humbleness towards the world. It’s like one thing is my quest — or my inspiration, my motivation — for going out to try to find something. Knowing that I will never find exactly what I’m looking for. And that is good! Because if it was like this, life would be predictable; boring. But, I need some quest, I need some idea, something that triggers my curiosity to go. But then I need to know that things will be slightly different. And that’s what adds to
the mystery or the surprise, that we are two and not one. Because if I wanted something in particular, I could just make it myself. You know it would be better if I just sit in my room and construct like some kind of a patronizing composer, saying “it has to be my way.” That’s the beauty of recording, like doing field recordings, working with the sound of the world. It’s that it’s a bit unpredictable — I never know. And then I find something, I hear like a surface of sound, and then I can dive into it and hear other frequencies, or other things. It’s like, just the sound of this room is so vast. You have the electricity sounds, like “mm-rrrrmm… hmmmhhhh,” and then outside, the cars coming and going, and the wind, and squeaking from there, and, the slight feedback on your voices and… leaves outside… the room resonance. All these things. So in that way I don’t have a dream sound, definitely. I just want to go deeper and be surprised and not know. And just be awake and open. S: Have you been surprised by any sound? J: Surprised in what way? S: Like, that you were sort of baffled to be like “oh my gosh, this sounds like this,” or, “this actually emits sound.” I presume the first time you heard an ear or you heard about the ear that would’ve been quite interesting or bewildering. But just whether you’ve come across in any of your projects where you’ve been like, “wow-ee!” Or maybe you’re always like that? J: Yeah. I think one of my first experiences, the wow experiences, was in Cologne where I touched a fence along the Rhine River and I felt it vibrating. I got this accelerometer, a kind of contact microphone sensor, and put it on. And inside this fence were just these singing tones of how it was vibrating, “woooouuuuuwwww…” It was really super beautiful. And in that sense it opened up my mind you know to…. It was this sound: [Fence field recording] J: These are micro sounds — very, very low volume, normally you can’t hear it, but if you put your ear to the fence you would hear it. So I could use this accelerometer to really amplify it, and it was like a piece of music to me. Just from the fence. That blew my mind, and put me onto the way I am now, really. Before I was recording sounds from my surroundings that I could hear already, and trying to put them in and make them more mine and manipulate them. Take a water drop and pitch it down, play it slow. It would go like “goohwooop” so I could make rhythms like, make something drip like “tdlkk tkk tkk tkkk” and then play it slow it would go like “goh-goooohp, gohm goohm gmm gmm” and I would then loop it: “goh-goooohp, gohm goohm gmm gmm —
goh-goooohp, gohm goohm gmm gmm — goh-goooohp, gohm goohm gmm gmm…” For example, this way. It was very fun and wonderful. But now it’s been like a way to explore the world from going into the other side of things, or behind the immediate, behind the membrane… or listen to the membrane. Listen to the listening organ. Listening to the ear... C: I thought it might be nice to hear you talk about some Icelandic sounds that you’ve recorded. I actually just selfishly would love to hear the aurora again! But you also mentioned that you were listening to stones or rocks the last time you were in Seyðisfjörður, one in particular. Or maybe not one in particular in the end, but I’m curious about those. J: Yeah, that was one thing I tried to do here. I had been to a place called Dimmuborgir, which is also a dark metal band or something. But Dimmuborgir is a place I think near Mývatn, which was underwater many years ago. These volcanic stones underwater. There are all these weird formation stones, and a so-called church there, which is a naturally-formed cave kind of thing, you can walk into. And then there is like an altar, a place where sort of you could do a speech from or something.There’s some kind of elf, Nordic mythology belief there. I was told that if I wanted to record these stones I would have to, umm, ask first. C: Ask the stones? J: Yeah, so I asked, “how can I ask?” I don’t remember, there was a woman who could speak to the stones. She suggested I could put my hand on the stone and just ask within myself, like “can I record you, is it ok?” And I did in Dimmuborgir and that was just like, “yeah, sure!” But here in Seyðisfjörður there was a… apparently there is a stone, or at that time, I don’t know if the elf has moved. Or dwarf… I think it’s a dwarf actually. That lives on the other side of the fjord. There is a stone there. You saw the stone? C: I saw the stone, yeah. J: Can you explain what stone I’m talking about? C: It’s quite big, it’s maybe three metres around, it seemed huge. I went for a walk on the other side of the fjord and I was instantly drawn to this giant stone. And then I kind of went off the path and walked up to it. Then I noticed there was also some kind of a sign attached to it, that I couldn’t read because it was in Icelandic, but when you were telling me about this I thought maybe it was the same one.
J: Yeah. It’s apparently the one where it’s inhabited. So I went to see if I could record that. I put my hand on it and the feeling I got was a very tired feeling, very much like [sighs] “Ohhhhhh…. Do you really have to do that, record me? Well I mean if you want to, you can do it, but…” So, I didn’t do it. You know, I didn’t need to. I don’t want to record it if it… I just really got this feeling, I don’t know. I’m not being superstitious, or well I don’t know, I just try to do what, you know — now you’re in Iceland and this is the belief and so you find this belief in yourself and just respect. I tried really to sense, and I sensed that feeling. And I just let it go, didn’t record it. I imagine this verrrrry old elf living in there, thousands of years, that’s just like “well you little prick. You little Danish…” [laughs]... No it probably didn’t think that. S: I think it’s beautiful that you didn’t record it. I think that’s really nice. C: Yeah also I think just because you can record something doesn’t mean that you should. Or just because you can hear these deep sounds, you know, maybe we don’t always need to hear them. There’s kind of a nice interplay between what we know and don’t know... J: Exactly it’s like what are we, what am I doing it for? If it’s only for myself, my own egoistic sort of “I want” — you know there has been enough Danish people here before who occupied this place. I don’t want to come here and record something that doesn’t want to be recorded. I’d rather interact. And that’s how I feel, it’s like being a curator of sound. I don’t feel like I take anything when I record, ever, because sound is just not a material thing. But in this case I didn’t want to record it. Sometimes I’ve also heard sounds that are so great I immediately thought, “wooooah I wanna record, where’s my microphone?” But then it’s beautiful just to listen and keep it in the memory. I’m not the type who runs around with my microphone all the time. I like to just let things go, also. There are things that I love, that I don’t want to record. Like the blackbird, I love this sound. But I also really don’t want to record it. It has to be free, totally free. [Northern Lights recording] C: Oh! What are we hearing?! J: It’s Aurora Borealis. Northern Light. This is recorded here in Iceland. Yeah. C: Thankyou. That’s so amazing. I think maybe that’s a nice note to end on? J: Heyyyyy this is Jacob Kirkegaard and you’re listening to LungA Radio! Tunnnne in!
C: I think you should swap jobs with us! You’ve got a bit more pizzazz! J: We’re here at the LungA, its five pm, nice chilly weather outside! C: [laughs] Yeah, it’s snowing it’s really coming down! Ok well thank you so much it’s been a real pleasure. J: Thank you too. Likewise. S: Peace out!
Oliver Laumann + Mija Milovic As interviewed on Seydisfjรถrรฐur Community Radio 107.1fm Friday 26th October 2018
https://soundcloud.com/mega-ekspres
Shan: In three, two, one and we’re on the air. It’s Claire and Shan again and we have Oliver and Mija here, two workshoppers visiting us from Denmark. Thankyou for joining us! Oliver: Thanks for having us. S: We also have Mandy here with us. O: Hi Mandy! Claire: Mandyyy! Mandy: Hi everybody! We’re here, we’re on air! C: Actually Oliver and Mija, you guys have been here for almost two weeks. It’s been super nice to have you around and get to know you the week before your workshop, and then to have you doing your thing this week also has been really fun. S: I’m interested in where you guys first met and the first project you collaborated on? O: Well we knew each other, and have known each other, for quite a while. But two and a half years ago we decided on playing a concert. And that was during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. It was in this street in Copenhagen that has a small café and… I don’t remember which one of us had a gig there and the other one… Mija: It was me…. [laughter] S: Hahahaha. Not important, the details are just not important... (yasss!) Keep going! O: Yeah ok! Umm. Well, I joined. And we played a concert there, and so it was very much about playing music together. Since then it has been about a lot of other things, I mean we’re still playing a lot of music, and before and after LungA we’re kind of on a tour. We’ve been playing concerts in the Faroe Islands and Iceland. And yeah we make a lot of music together but we’ve also been doing a lot of theatre and been involved very much with activism and combinations of all these things.
S: I overheard a conversation with one of our LungAs and she was mentioning a little bit about how you had given some practical advice on activism. I loved how that was making its way into the workshop as well. M: Yeah, we stayed in Serbia for quite a while with Goodiepal [Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen] and some other artists, and musicians and friends, where we worked and also just hang out with refugees, and got to know the situation there and how difficult it is. We did some music but we also worked as a refugee organization, independently. Where we handed out sleeping bags, collected money, took care of money transfers from their families because without a passport you can’t really receive money. And yeah, just hung out with them and hosted, or brought them into our apartment so they had a place to sleep and all these things. So I guess what we then found out was how important it is to give this information to our friends, and the LungA people, and at places where we give workshops — or to anyone actually. Sometimes it can be really hard to know what to do if you want to help or if you want to actually just learn about stuff, and so we thought — ok we can be really practical here: what do they need and how can you do something if you want to? O: Yeah yesterday we had a long talk about activism, and I mean, it’s not that we know exactly what’s going on or have a final destination for the whole refugee situation, because the laws concerning these matters are changing all the time. So it’s very much a field that you enter, and you have to be extremely flexible, and find ways to deal with it. So on one hand, being involved with these problems for a long time and getting to know the situation is of course important because then you can help. With the knowledge of where it is safe to go if you want to travel into the European Union, for example. Where you shouldn’t go because it’s super dangerous to go across this border or this border… All this information is of course really valuable. But at the same time we don’t know whether it’s the best idea to actually do that, to go to Europe or inside the European Union because a lot of these countries are treating refugees like shit. So this project was also about dealing with the situation that we were in, then, because Serbia is a crazy place in many ways. For a refugee it’s a hardcore place to be. Nobody wants to seek asylum there, and nobody actually wants to stay there either. But the European Union is paying Serbia a shitload of money just to keep refugees there. So it’s a weird situation. But we were talking about this yesterday. I think whenever we saw or had experiences in the midst of this sometimes
really depressive situation — when we would have experiences where our friend Hassan from Pakistan would eat with us at a local Serbian restaurant, where he wouldn’t be allowed if we weren’t with him. And he would communicate with local Serbian people, and all of a sudden something very normal and human would happen and he would be accepted, it seemed, because they would just talk together. And maybe afterwards these people might think, “yeah ok, he was good enough, he was actually a nice person.” I think what I’m trying to say is that we were trying to make the situation there as good as possible as well. Like, being the nicest possible person to meet on this fucking hardcore way. Which is what it must be like to travel like that. C: Hearing you talk about how you dealt with the unknown of the refugee situation made me think about the connection between improvisation in a lot of your work, and then using those skills, that tool, and applying it in these very real life situations. Do you think there’s a connection there, using improvisation as a tool? M: There is a direct connection you could say, because a lot of the things that we showed in our workshop we also played with the refugees, or played with people we meet. Whether it’s children or refugees — it could be these notations, animated notations or movement notations that we worked on. Regarding improvisation I guess that’s maybe also the same thing. I think that it’s really important when I work with whomever that I see who the person is and get the best out of the situation, or make it bloom and make it magic in any way possible. O: With this particular situation in Serbia for example there was no organization for us to join when we came there. So of course we had to improvise our way into dealing with it. So yes I would say our method in general, if you could talk about it — of course there are several — but improvisation is super important for us in the sense of making music with people. And it’s a way of dealing with people and being, too. M: And also just the way we live our life in general. O: Yeah we never know what’s going to happen very far in advance. We hate to plan stuff far, far ahead! C: I think that’s also a really valuable thing for young artists, such as the LungAs, to be able to see and experience from the visiting artists. Just the different ways of living a life that can often be seen as quite unpredictable, and unstable, but that it’s possible, I guess.
O: Yeah, free for all. But that’s the greatest thing ever, I think. And that’s what the greatest things come out of, at least for me I guess, or the greatest magic I experience is when we have no clue. C: Can we play a song? O: Should I start with something that isn’t ours? Do you guys know Roland Kirk? This track is called Theme for the Eulipions. And Rahsaan Roland Kirk is — you can see a picture of him here — he’s standing in the streets of New York in a suit and a high, like a really tall hat, and sunglasses and… he’s just playing one saxophone here, but sometimes he’s playing like four saxophones at once. He’s an incredible instrumentalist but he also wrote incredible music. And the workshop reminded me of this song. We are playing this one piece in the beginning of the concert that we’re doing tonight, where Steinar, a local Icelandic student, came up with this bass riff. And it’s a super nice riff. Especially when he remembers — he sometimes forgets it when we have to play! But this song, seems like a jazz tune, a straight ahead jazz tune, but it’s very mysterious and magic, I think. [song interlude — Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Theme for the Eulipions] S: Beautiful thankyou so much for introducing me to that. I was enjoying having a little bit of a bob, with my biscuit. Ummm… Claire! C: Ok, I like to ask this question of everybody we interview, about a first memory that you have of your medium. Do you have an early memory of playing or hearing music? O: My father was a saxophone player. I wasn’t really forced to play an instrument, actually he was giving me some advice — “Don’t go for this. It’s too hardcore.” But it was always around, so of course it seduced me, I guess. And I played different instruments and stuff, but I guess the first or the heaviest early experiences with music I remember was when I got to play with a real band when I was quite young. First on percussion and sitting next to the drummer, checking the drummer out. I’m a drummer now, but I wasn’t then. But yeah, that was important, super important. M: I have a memory I think, but I don’t know if it’s a picture, you know, sometimes you see a picture of yourself afterwards and maybe that becomes the memory. But I think I remember being very young, sitting with my father’s headphones on and listening to music. And I really liked Queen when I was young, like five or something, but also after, absolutely. And I remember this feeling of being totally in a vacuum of music. Which you can be
when you lock yourself in with headphones. I really liked that feeling. Maybe kind of like stepping into another dimension, or something, music can do that when it surrounds you. I like that. S: You play instruments and sing, but what’s the strangest instrument that you’ve been able to play? O: Tonight I’ll be playing this hunting horn. That’s exciting. It’s on Steinar’s song, the one I was referring to earlier. And it’s quite lucky because the root note of the song is by accident the only tone the hunting horn can actually play. And then I’m also squeezing another tone out of it. But that’s a challenge and it’s kind of weird. I don’t know if it’s the weirdest but it’s a weird one that’s very present. M: Also a weird one I like is the cow horn. My friend Magnus made twenty cow horns, which we play in the band I have with him called Viktors Garage. And I really like playing those horns. They can only make one note, also, but they sound like they’re calling for something. O: A very cool instrument that I haven’t played, which I would like to play, but I will never be able to afford is the SynthAxe. It’s basically a synthesiser guitar. But it doesn’t have strings, it has like microsensors, so you can play extremely fast, and it looks like a spaceship. And you need like four huge racks to even plug it in and play it and it’s a completely nonsense, insane instrument, but it’s also very cool, I think. C: Who plays that? O: Um, Allan Holdsworth is one of the pioneers of the SynthAxe. He’s a fusion guitar player. S: Have you heard of this… there’s a flute, that’s made out of a vulture’s bone. I think it’s meant to be the oldest instrument in the world. Have you heard of it? O: No? S: They were doing a presentation at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I can’t remember the artist and I can’t remember the name of the flute. But I’m pretty sure it’s the oldest instrument, or maybe the oldest wind instrument, found. But there’s a video of someone playing the flute to a vulture. Oh no, I think the thing’s extinct now, so it’s like the closest living relative was the vulture. And there’s a video of somebody playing this flute. When
you were saying “I would like to play this instrument, but I don’t think I’ll be able to,” I thought of this flute, which was super beautiful. C: Maybe you can tell us about what you’ve done this week with the students? I know we’re going to see a concert in a short while… Mandy: (Jazz, jazz!) C: A jazz concert! Sounds very mysterious. Well not the jazz bit, but what’s going to happen with the jazz! Can you talk about how you approached the workshop? Mija: We did a lot of different things, we worked with musical notation in different ways — movement notation, animated notation — so we also called it a sort of inspiration week. Because we were also here last week, and saw that they were really busy with things. We wanted to loosen up and just smash them in the heads with a lot of information, and then they would smash us back with a lot of information they made, because they were super productive, and it was really fun to work with. But yeah, one thing was notations. Then we also played a bit, just improvised, not so much though because time was leaking, if you can say that. We also did some choir. We did some really cool stuff, but I don’t want to tell too much because it will spoil what will happen tonight. And we talked about, as we were saying before, activism. O: At the beginning of the week I showed this graph I guess you could say. I wrote ‘music’ — and then an arrow, from ‘music’ — and below that, an arrow — and then ‘music’ — so an arrow pointing at music. And basically that meant music as a method and music as a goal. So, various ways of using music in order to get at a completely different result than what you would think music could actually do. That could be music in the context of politics or therapy, or actually just as a tool to make, yeah, as a tool in other fields of expression, like doing drawings inspired by music, or whatever. And the opposite, using other material or ideas in order to make music. M: Yeah because we knew that not all of the students played or had a link to music, but it’s all the same, so we just wanted to connect music to making sculpture or anything. O: Which is very much also our philosophy in general, when we’ve been doing workshops, or when we play with people in general. I really enjoy playing music with people who don’t have the same ideas of what music is as myself. Or who might not think that they can actually play music. I think
since we were in Serbia, and we’ve been back in Denmark for a while, doing workshops in asylum centres around all of Denmark, most of the people we are trying to make music with don’t have much experience with music. But I think they really do succeed. And I think these guys at LungA do as well. Even though some of them say “I really want to play drums but I’ve never really done it,” or whatever, and then they are really doing it now. C: I think that’s cool. And I think it’s been nice also to see after the really intense week we had last week. With the students just being able to kind of lean in to, and really absorb this other practice that is quite unfamiliar for a lot of them, and just expand a little bit, and breathe and take in a lot of new material… Should we play another song? M: Yes! Should I say something about it? This is a song, it’s not released yet, but it’s called Christian. The words are in Danish, and… O: The name, Christian. Not a Christian person. Well it could be I guess… M: Oliver is playing drums, and I am singing, and then we have a guitarist called Lars Bech Pilgaard. The band is called Funen, and I think we should just listen to it. [song interlude — Funen, Christian] S: Yaaaaaaaassssss. Incredible. C: So, you were interpreting a crime novel, in the lyrics — is that right Mija? M: Yeah I tried to at least. It was also an improvisation. But Oliver’s mother is writing TV crimes… C: Awesome…! M: And she has a lot of books, so I borrowed some in the studio and tried to turn it into a song. It also really doesn’t make sense, but in a way it does make sense. Yeah. O: Especially the one line where you, like, shout, “I try to stay in the background!” M: Yeah. “… and observe the scene.” Yeah. S: You were sort of translating it for us. What were some other lines?
C: “Should I stay in the shop?!” O: Oh yeah! Umm, “Shouldn’t you stay here and look out for the shop?” [laughter] S: So good! Oh goodness! C: Ok so we’ve got Mandy here, our studio audience. She’s a current LungA. And she’s got a few questions for you guys. Over to you Mandy. Mandy: Thankyou, thank you for being at my show again. Yeah they’re just, they’re the studio audience, I don’t know what they’re talking about [laughs]. Anyway, so you said this was an improvisation, but it was really good, it didn’t sound like an improvisation, but I’m curious — what’s your favourite way to write songs? And maybe it’s improvisation, but if it’s not, then I guess there’s lots of ways you could do it — but what’s your favourite method? Mija: I think I really like to get together with a band, and then just play for many hours, and then sometimes you hit this wave and you can feel, ok it’s here now. Also with lyrics, I really like to improvise lyrics on the spot. Maybe sometimes with you know, like a crime novel before, or a text I prepared from home and I have a bunch of papers with me. But sometimes then you just hit this wave together and you can feel it, then you can cut it out and say “ok this is a song,” and then we’ll do it again, or maybe not. Then when you play a show you can just do the same thing, improvise. Because also all the waste — I also like all the waste — when you can feel, like, ok we are searching, we are all searching in different paths and suddenly we find each other. I like to write songs that way but I also like to write songs alone in a classic way. But if you want to hang out with guys you like and people you want to play with then it’s a really good way to make songs, I would say. Yeah. Write together. O: That’s hard! I really like to work in many different ways. But of course improvising music in general is maybe the thing I’ve been doing the most, and before doing projects that were very much my own, as now, I’ve just been playing drums with whoever wanted to play drums. So that has very much been about being able to improvise whatever situation comes at you. Like, ok, someone comes with the new songs so you have to learn fast and you have to not just learn it so it’s ok, but you have to really, really, really do it. But I also like to just make beats for weeks in the computer and that’s a
completely different process. So I guess it changes all the time. Mandy: Thankyou. And then I have one more question, which is if there’s anything new that you guys felt you learned from the workshop? Because I know what I learned! Which is a lot. But I’m curious what you guys got out of it. Mija: I don’t know where to start because I think just meeting you, and meeting you guys, has been so great. For me, to see how you work, and how you work with each other, and what you think, and what you dream at night, and stuff like that. It’s just exploded in my heart, and I think I’m kind of slow, so I guess I’ll learn it when I float away from here. O: I think, just to be very straightforward, I think that you, I mean, you, really confirmed a lot of the things that I believe in. I mean in terms of improvisation and fucking going for it. So… Mandy: Woo! C: Go Mandy! O: Rock on. No but seriously that goes for everyone here. They have really dared to do a lot of weird shit and come up with some incredible stuff I think. Mija: Yeah. So creative. Mandy: Thankyou so much! S: I wish I was a part of the workshop! C: We’ve talked a fair bit this week about music as movement. Literally, as movement of sound waves. So my question is — what’s your favourite music to dance to? O: I mean, music as movement, I know that’s a different thing maybe than what’s nice to dance to, but in a way it’s the same thing I think. Because we’ve been working as Mija said with musical notation and for me the way where that has, not ended, but ended up, right now, is very much notation as movement. So through static notation, to different forms of graphic notation, into animated notation, into movement-based notation. And also Amanda and some other students have made scores that are moving around. Or they are the score, and they move around. So I guess they are kind of dancing out the movement. And I like that.
M: Right now I just wanted to dance to Cher. Is it called Life after Love? All: Yeahhhhhh! S: I love that! [singing] “Do you believe in life after love!?” C: We danced to that on the weekend, I’m sure we requested it at the bar! S: We did, we had it! M: Really?! Aw. S: Yeah it was really good. O: Yeah, it’s great — first auto-tune that I heard, on some vacation. S: It was beautiful. Our friend Mandy just whispered into my ear to say that you guys have a planned meeting actually, so let’s play a little game to end on. So the idea is that Claire and I are going to say random words at you and you have to say the first thing that comes into your head. So, Mija… M: Alright. S: Ok. Squirrel. M: Bucket. S: Dandruff M: Laughter S: Turtle M: Penguin S: Nina M: Simone S: Myles M: Hair
S: Hair! [laughs] C: Badoom tss! M: Hair? Oh it was hair? Again?! S: Yeah, hair! M: Umm.. Claire! S: Wifi M: Umm. Nice times! [laughter] S: Toothpaste M: Toothbrush S: Aliens M: Nice people. S: Dumbledore or Gandalf? M: Gandalf. S: Oooh. C: Ok Oliver are you ready for this? O: I’m ready. C: Ok. Princess Mary O: Frederik, her husband. C: Microsoft O: Sam?
[laughter] C: Storm O: Remember the storm? [Shan giggling] C: Helen Hunt O: I forgot who that is. S: She’s the one in Twister. O: Twister… C: It’s ok, “I forgot who that is” is a good answer. O: Ok, pass, sorry. C: LungA O: School of heaven! C: Time machine O: To bring me to another great place like this... C: Giant O: Elf C: What’s this Shan?! S: Journey Agent! O: Eulipion C: Dumbledore or Gandalf? O: Gandalf. All: Oooooooooh.
S: I have a crush on Gandalf. Ok, thanks for joining us here on Seyðisfjörður Community Radio C: 107.1FM, tune in! S: Woop woop C: With zero online listeners. But if you’re driving in the area and you’re listening, hello! All: Helloooooo! S: Thank you so much Claire, Mandy, and Oliver and Mija obviously. Do you have a website? O: Yes, together we’re called Mega—Ekspres. And we have a Soundcloud, we have a YouTube channel… S: Alright, we have some LungAs here waiting for you, so I think we’d better get ready for this concert! Ayyy!