Masaya Ozaki is a New York/Iceland-based composer born in Niigata, Japan. His work examines the idea of space as a transient entity, the subtleties behind small moments, the sensitivity of the ephemera, and the future of sound in an exceedingly materialistic world. He often finds inspiration in nature, the fragility of human interactions, and the momentums behind them.
Masaya’s artwork materializes as field recordings and compositions for film, dance, visual, and experimental arts.
Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir: Ekkó
Performers: Ylfa Þöll Ólafsdóttir and Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir
Text: Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir, from the work “Kvika”, used with kind permission of author
Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir ( b.1976) is a sound & visual artist based in Reykjavík Iceland.
She studied music from an early age and graduated as a classical pianist. Then she immediately turned to the field of contemporary music and art. A graduate of the Royal Academy of art in the Hague Þóranna has worked as a video and performance artist in the electroacoustic field. Björnsdóttir’s works are focused on the act of listening, representing themes such as: sound as an intuitive medium and as knowledge – knowing and being; allowing sounds to ignite myriad images and associations which give rise to various outcomes in form, time and space; her work has built upon the interplay of film and live music performances and takes on the form of sculpture, performance and soundwork. Her subject matters are varied but often revolve around human nature and a person’s worldview, how it shapes and progresses. Through a multidisciplinary approach her practice often places the viewer or audience at the centre of the work.
Þóranna has exhibited her work widely and performed at numerous concerts and art festivals in Iceland and internationally. Þóranna also works as a sound- and performance artist with the international art group Wunderland. In the last years she has taken the role as a curator of individual exhibitions and in 2020 co-curated the art biennale Sequences X titled “Time has come”.
Immersive. Imaginative. Transcendental. Mari Garrigue is a composer, digital luthier, sound designer, and vocalist based in Iceland. Her portfolio work incorporates a rich palate of hidden soundscapes explored and collected during her travels. The tapestry of her work derives from the natural landscape, electromagnetic fields, traditional instruments, and sound synthesis, which are used in tandem. Mari’s blend of the organic with the artificial produces rich, breathing textures which flow elegantly between the boundaries of reality and surreality.
Dimitri Lurie (born 1970 in St. Petersburg, lives and works in Oslo since 1999) is a film and video artist.
Lurie holds diploma in cybernetics from the State Polytechnic University in St-Petersburg. He has also studied at the Institute of theology and philosophy in his hometown and after moving to Norway was a guest artist at the State Academy of arts in Oslo.
In 1994 Lurie founded in St. Petersburg an independent studio DodoFilm Company. Since then he has produced a number of short, documentary & experimental films along with various video art projects. In 1999, Dimitri was invited to teach film in Norway and relocated his studio to Oslo. Lurie’s film & video work were shown at various TV channels, film festivals and art exhibitions worldwide and have collected numerous awards. His credo is to experement with the visual aspect and atmosphere of film rather than storytelling.
From the artist’ statement:
My creative profile consists of diverse genres and visual techniques: imaginative photography, cinematographic poetry, documentaries, short fiction films, experimental non-narrative video and spatial video installations.
I’m not a conventional film director, but rather a playful experimenter and innovator in film language, who is in search for new expressive forms to reflect phenomena of being and to question deeper meanings in the different aspects of human existence.
I profess filmmaking principles of the spontaneous cinema that captures and conceptualizes daily life and as the starting point for constructing a movie.
This tradition traces its roots to the direct cinema of the revolutionary artist Dziga Vertov with his observational methods. From the “Kino-Eye” group I have particularly inherited its lyrical use of a documentary footage. I’m interested in subjects that are imagined rather than directly observable. Thus, when some of my works reflect the historical or contemporary social processes passed through the prisms of my artistic perception; others seek to represent the intersections between daily life practices and the imagined connections, and to draw out their metaphysical ramifications.
Sól Ey (Sóley Sigurjónsdóttir, 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist from Iceland. In her work, she creates multisensory experiences that connect sound, space, movement, light and the body. With a background in composition, her work consists of performances, installations and instruments that emphasise performative interaction, immersion, and participation. Using sensors, DIY electronics, scenography, video projections, and spatial sound, she strives to create a dynamic interplay between objects and perceivers.
In 2021, Sól Ey graduated in composition from the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. She is currently a research fellow at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, where she is continuing her research on wearable and gestural electronic instruments.
Description
At Raflost 2022, I will present an instrument-in-progress Hreyfð – a wearable speaker instrument that produces sound using microphones, a gyroscope, and a teensy microcontroller. The instrument is a part of ongoing research linking the physical body and its gestures with electronic music, thus integrating sound and movement. With this new instrument, the body also acts as a physically moving sound object that modulates feedback with gestures.
– born in 1995 Klaipėda, Lithuania. In 2018 finished composition studies at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Since then, pursued career as a composer, electronic music producer and artist, signed with a well-known UK record label Moshi Moshi Records, supported such bands as Algiers, First Hate and Dopplereffekt.
Monikaze music could be described as Avant-pop, combining her raw and manipulated vocals with different electronic and acoustic textures, which are often inspired by a wide range of genres such as IDM, electronica, jazz or instrumental works by post- minimalist composers.
M.A.P. is the collaboration between artists Haraldur Karlsson and Litten Nystrøm and a shared platform where the artists embrace the fusion and unfold possibilities between artforms; tactile material and electronic Art, in works which engage with contemporary society and circumstance. Their installations aim to challenge our idea of space and reality to reveal a world beyond our sensory limitations.
Iceland based artist Haraldur Karlsson works with experiments in video art.
Haraldur studied art for 9 years in Iceland and Holland and taught video art for 9 years at the Icelandic Art Academy. In the last 99 years his focus is on commissions, artist co-operation like M.A.P., own research and production of tomorrow’s art-forms.
Danish born artist Litten Nystrøm, studied art and design in Copenhagen and has been living in Iceland since 2011. She was the manager for the Residencies & Projects program at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art; she co- founded the Iceland based artist group RoShamBo; the design label RÓ and FOSS – an artist-run publishing house for artist books of limited editions. Since 2019 she has been teaching at the Fine Arts and Design Department and starting and running a BIO-Lab in LHI Reykjavík.
Glupsk is a band that makes music, sometimes with instruments, almost always with a computer. Sometimes there are three performers, sometimes more, and sometimes they are not present in the space they are playing in.
Glupsk er hljómsveit sem gerir tónlist stundum með hljóðfæri, eiginlega alltaf með tölvu. Stundum eru þrír hljóðfæraleikarar en líka stundum fleiri og stundum eru flytjendurnir ekki í rýminu sem þeir eru að spila í.
NRA is a carpet revolution currently taking place in Brisbane, Australia spearheaded by multi-visionary artist Joseph Burgess/Unregistered Master Building. Footsoilders of the movement include fellow artist Joshua Wilkinson and members of the KEPK art space on the south side of Brisbane.
NRA’s recent work utilises a carpet tufting gun to reflect scenes of unrest in Joseph’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. Portland is has been a pivotal city in the BLM movement since the murder of George Floyd. Each night as police and protestors have clashed on its streets downtown has become reminiscent of a warzone. With monuments set on fire, molotov cocktails, and fireworks illuminating the streets of the city. Boarded-up buildings frame the current tension between armoured federal agents and masked citizens. These events are personal to me as I experienced police brutality there in 2009. My work around this topic aims to re-stage my angst about that experience and the city’s current circumstances by re-interpreting these images in a new way using the mechanical process of the tufting gun.
I hate fireworks
Audio/Visual Performance
Tufting Gun, Canvas Frame, Scaffold, Audio,
Duration 5 minutes
A tufting gun is both loud and aggressive in its application of yarn onto a canvas surface. It’s designed to quickly produce carpet. This project disregards its traditional use-value to instead utilise it as a symbolic tool to render images of unrest in Portland in a very potent and disarming way. The performance involves a live carpeting viewed from 360 degrees and consists of a projector projecting an image onto a canvas surface placed on a scaffold structure. From behind the scaffold I retrace the image using the tufting gun.
My tufting gun is fitted with piezos (ceramic disk that translate surface pressure to voltage) that triggers amplified audio samples. The samples include field recordings from Portland protests collected by friends on the front line and sound bites from mainstream media. (see support material video). These samples are selectively triggered by each pulse of the carpet gun creating a pulsing cacophony of sound to accompany the ‘appearance’ of a ‘protest’ image in carpet.
As mentioned, the current circumstances in Portland are troubling for me. This project, in particular its performance, aims to not only restage images of the social unrest but to reconcile the tensions that exist within and in society at large. The re-representation of images in carpet has the curious potential to ‘soften’ their impact while remaining significantly potent and disconcerting (through its very ‘gun-like’ nature) to infer/reinforce the already existing tensions that are present not only in the USA but in many parts of the world.
Fermata is a piece for a microtonal drone instrument called Threnoscope and an acoustic instrument. It is a framework for improvisation of microtonal music, where both the live coder and the instrumentalist contribute equally to the piece’s development. The Threnoscope is notated through live coding, with sounds being represented on a graphical score next to the coding terminal. Its visual appearance illustrates the harmonics of a fundamental tone, as well as speaker locations. Musical notes move around the spectral and physical space, long in duration, and sculptable by the performer. Fermata has been performed with Adriana Sá (London), Miguel Mira (Lisbon), Iñigo Ibaibarriaga (Bilbao), Áki Ásgeirsson (Reykjavik), Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Oslo), Peter Furniss (Edinburgh), Helen Papaioannou (Sheffield), and Peter Herbert/Hannes Löschel (Linz) and Tommi Keränen (Helsinki). This time Eiríkur Orri will join the piece on trumpet.
Biographies
Thor Magnusson is a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex. His work focusses on the impact digital technologies have on musical creativity and practice, explored equally through practice (software development, composition and performance) and theory (academic publications, lecturing, talks) . He is the co-founder of ixi audio (www.ixi-audio.net), and has developed audio software, systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials and created two musical live coding environments. He has taught workshops in creative music coding and sound installations, and given presentations, performances and visiting lectures at diverse art institutions, conservatories, and universities internationally.
In 2019, Bloomsbury Academic published Magnusson’s monograph Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions. The book explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation. The book underpins his research in creative AI, where, as part of the MIMIC project (www.mimicproject.com), Magnusson has worked on a system that enables users to design their own live coding languages for machine learning.
Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson is a frequent collaborator with some of Iceland’s most innovative artists, Eiríkur has been a fixture on the alternative and experimental music scene since the late nineties. He spent nine years touring and recording with múm and has collaborat- ed with Sigur Rós as a brass player and also a musical director for their 2012-2013 Valtari and Kveikur tour. Eiríkur has a background as a jazz musician, which leads to him being a sought after improviser in Reykjavík, performing with Skúli Sverrisson, Hilmar Jensson, the Reykjavik Big Band and others. His trio, Hist Og, released its debut album, “Days of Tundra” in 2019. It was well received, including three nomi- nations to the Icelandic Music Awards. His musical approach varies from abrasive and disembodied noise to medita- tive sound weaving, often incorporating electronics. As an arranger, he as arranged strings and brass for Sigur Rós, múm, Sin Fang, Kira Kira and others.
Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions
In this lecture I present resent research that explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. I will look at how new digital music technologies trace their origins in traditional instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording. The scope will range from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence.
I will point to a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices.
Thor Magnusson is a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex. His work focusses on the impact digital technologies have on musical creativity and practice, explored equally through practice (software development, composition and performance) and theory (academic publications, lecturing, talks) . He is the co-founder of ixi audio (www.ixi-audio.net), and has developed audio software, systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials and created two musical live coding environments. He has taught workshops in creative music coding and sound installations, and given presentations, performances and visiting lectures at diverse art institutions, conservatories, and universities internationally.
In 2019, Bloomsbury Academic published Magnusson’s monograph Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions. The book explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation. The book underpins his research in creative AI, where, as part of the MIMIC project (www.mimicproject.com), Magnusson has worked on a system that enables users to design their own live coding languages for machine learning.
Okuma is a duo based in Reykjavik, Iceland. They like to describe their music as post-apocalyptic, sourcing inspiration in reflections about our times.
Saxophone and electric guitar are interfaced with modular synthesizers and computers, fed through real-time processing units. A highly interactive setup providing a very open and intuitive playground. Okuma is constantly exploring ways to unify these elements into a world of sound that leaves room for improvisation – complex harmonies and organic textures, raw electronics, subtle melodies and unexpected rhythms.
Okuma (Tómas Manoury & Daníel Friðrik) er dúó starfrækt í Reykjavík. Þeir skilgreina tónlist sína sem heimsendatónlist – staða mannsins í nútímanum er þeim hugleikin og uppspretta hugmynda. Þeir nota gagnvirkan búnað til þess að tengja saxófón og rafgítar við módúlar-syntha og tölvur fyrir rauntímahljóðvinnslu. Okuma rannsakar ólíka tengimöguleika til þess að skapa hljóðheim sem er opinn og flæðandi en virkar einnig sem rammi fyrir spuna. Akústík mætir elektróník á lífrænum leikvelli þar sem allt getur gerst.
