Borderline Festival 2019 | 4th Day

"Murmur" installation: Maia Urstad (NO)

Onassis STEGI | Foyer +4
Admission free

"Spire": The Eternal Chord (UK), Charles Matthews (UK), Claire M Singer (UK), Sohrab (IR)

German Evangelical Church | Admission is free, on a first come first served basis | Entrance tickets will be available 1 hour before the event

German Evangelical Church does not have wheelchair access.

cORNIzA (GR) live AV ft. All Matters (GR)
Two or the Dragon (LB)
Jérôme Noetinger (FR) & Robert Piotrowicz (PL) & Anna Zaradny (PL)
Aïsha Devi (CH/NP) live AV ft. Emile Barret (FR)

Romantso | 5 — 10 €

"Murmur" installation: Maia Urstad (NO)

Radio FM 88.1-107: Recording the FM waves, Tuesday 19.02.2019, Bergen, Norway.

In Maia Urstad’s new installation “Murmur,” portable FM radios are suspended from strings in front of the windows in the exhibition space of the Onassis Stegi. Visually, the radios shape the continuous oscillation wave of the Sine wave. A composition of soft, white noise – often associated with radio interference – is broadcast via multiple FM transmitters: a sonic wave moving from radio to radio throughout the installation.

Sound artist Maia Urstad has used the radio as a sound source and aesthetic medium in many of her installations. Her work often questions how we communicate, what we use and what we dismiss from the sounds we hear every day. “Murmur” examines soundscapes in our history that are on their way to obsolescence. In 2017, Norwegian Broadcasting and other radio stations left the FM broadcast band in favour of DAB+. The diversity of program-makers is reduced to just a few local stations, and the FM band appears as a ghost medium with only remnants of broadcast, interference and blank spots.

As new technical inventions enter the market, our soundscapes change character. Typical radiophonic sounds disappear, often without us being aware, as new ones enter the stage. “Murmur” invites us to retain a curiosity to what is left behind, to what we might otherwise forget or let slip from our consciousness. The installation is an ode to the sounds found at the border between highly present and forever outdated.

Maia Urstad’s installation “Murmur” was supported by BEK (Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts)

"Spire": The Eternal Chord (UK), Charles Matthews (UK), Claire M Singer (UK), Sohrab (IR)

Spire: The Organ – The Emperor of Instruments

Project Spire comprises a series of concerts and record publications focusing on the organ and contemporary music. This is a joint initiative by Mike Harding, producer and editor of the label Touch, and the organist Charles Matthews. The program that was curated exclusively for this year’s Borderline edition features Iranian producer Sohrab, Scottish organist Claire M. Singer, The Eternal Chord electronics and organ duo, as well as works by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Leos Janacék, Dezső D'Antalffy, and Anargyros Denozios.

“It is impossible to overestimate the influence of the organ on the history of music and sound. From its earliest inception as the Hydraulis, to the bellows organs of the late Roman period, its absence from western music until the 8th Century to its development during the Middle Ages, the organ developed along with technological progress; the Portative Organ was portable; the Positive Organ could play polyphonic music and could rest on a table; and the Church Organ, which played the lowest and loudest notes and was permanently built into churches. But it was not until at least the tenth century that Church approval was given for Christian use of the organ.

It would be churlish to ignore the religious use of the instrument, but we should remember that for the first thousand years of use, the organ was not directly associated with the Church. Its acceptance by the Christian authorities had as much to do with absorbing or allying to sectarian political power as the obvious manipulation of the audience when the instrument’s sonic power was understood.

Having spent many enforced hours in churches or chapels when I was younger, listening to and studying the organ was often the only relief from the tedium of the church service itself. But it was also a source of great frustration that the organ players clearly never pushed the instrument to its limits, although the school organist loved nothing more than to break into a solo voluntary. Obviously they were as bored as I was.

Being fortunate enough to spend plenty of downtime with some of the most interesting sound explorers around, the subject of producing a compilation where the tracks were all either inspired by or more directly influenced by the organ has been frequently aired over the years. The conversations were always animated and expansive. The organ works of Arvo Pärt, particularly those performed by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, a pupil of Richard Rodney Bennett at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and others have reached a wider non-classical audience. So Benny Nilsen was inspired to visit St. Mary’s Church, Warwick, and work with one of England’s finest, Charles Mathews. Crawling around inside the instrument, positioning microphones most appropriately in the Church, or “capturing” the psalms composed by Marcus Davidson, Nilsen explored the possibilities with all the familiar lusts of the avant-garde.

As the brief widened, so did the responses… some contributors referred to earlier versions of the organ and its often highly political usage, others explored aged instruments themselves. Some studied the effects of the sounds produced on the physique and the psyche, and others conceptualised the brief and either built their own or recorded natural or man-made phenomena which utilised the same basic process - wind through pipes.

But it is impossible not to be drawn upward, whether towards the spire of the church or cathedral or to the huge and daunting forest of pipes themselves. The organ dwarfs all comers, and unlike other instruments, it is this non-musical element which makes the organ stand apart.”

–Mike Harding

cORNIzA (GR) live AV ft. All Matters (GR)

Vocals, as well as analog and digital electronic sounds by Krystallia Theodorou enter an ambient co-existence with visuals by All Matters.

Two or the Dragon (LB)

A peculiar duo from Beirut, playing bouzouki and percussion next to electronics and field recordings. With one foot in traditional music and the other in experimental, Two or The Dagon convey the intense contradictions of this modern Arabian city in a unique fashion.

Jérôme Noetinger (FR) & Robert Piotrowicz (PL) & Anna Zaradny (PL)

In the fall of 2018, Jérôme Noetinger, Robert Piotrowicz, and Anna Zaradny released the highly acclaimed album “Crackfinder.” Recorded live at the 2016 edition of Krakow’s Sacrum Profanum Festival, “Crackfinder” is a tour de force by three leading musicians of the international improvisational / electroacoustic music scene. From Piotrowicz’s synthesizers, to Zaradny’s saxophone improvisations and all the way to Noetinger’s live tape manipulations, the trio stands on the fringes of sound practices and explores constantly shifting aural phenomena. In Krzysztof Pietraszewski’s words: “Cracks – both material and metaphorical – do not have to be the negative effect of an abrupt event. They can be the beginning of change, an opening for the new, an impulse for action. It is, therefore, worth continuing the search for ‘the portals of change.”

Aïsha Devi (CH/NP) live AV ft. Emile Barret (FR)

Aïsha Devi and Emile Barret can embed pop culture, mysticism, and various traditional music genres into a solid, transcendental audiovisual show. Born in Switzerland of Nepalese origin, Aïsha Devi may as well be compared to a shaman who can guide audiences to parallel dimensions, using her voice as a main instrument.