In Naldjorlak French composer Éliane Radigue takes us on a journey of microscopic proportions as a seemingly simple musical situation reminiscent of her earlier work for synthesizers unfolds. Naldjorlak is a work for unaccompanied cello and Radigue’s first composition for acoustic instruments and relies on a verbal communication between composer and performer. Cellist Charles Curtis, hones in on just one note for the duration of the piece, however, this premise which at first can strike the listener as simple is anything but.
What 91 year-old Radigue is asking of her listener is to be present and it might come as no great surprise that she has been a practicing Buddhist since the 1970's. To experience Radigue’s music you need to be able to follow sound to its silence, and that is a mental state. Naldjorlak is an invitation to deep listening. What do you hear when you stop in your tracks and begin truly listening as Charles Curtis drones on? Curtis is right at home in Radigue’s investigation of sound and his playing reminds us that without a great performer a great work of sound art does not exist. Had there been a score we could have mused that the work itself exists for the reader to experience through reading, but given the fact that composer and soloist have worked verbally it is more difficult to imagine this piece without its performer and so it’s difficult to fully know when we are hearing Radigue and when we hear Curtis.
Curtis brings Naldjorlak to life so subtly that it’s easy to think that he is doing nothing. It sounds deceptively simple at first but if you take the time to actually experience the pace of the droning you will notice that not only are the two versions offered on this release vastly different in character and expressivity. They aren’t really drones with its implicit monotony, rather they are microscopic worlds of constantly changing textures of sound, and it is the way Curtis so masterfully mediates Radigue’s ideas that makes these recordings from Los Angeles and Paris so captivating.
Eight people sit at their own office desks. One raises an elbow to their mouth and lets out a muffled groan into it; another starts lazily slapping their forearm; a third suddenly creaks like a worn-out spring mattress. But the young singers of ÆTLA don’t crack a smile – their deadpan is the main comic ingredient in Matias Vestergård’s Apollonian sketch show SEX in Concert.
They quickly move from a whore’s chorus to a Renaissance madrigal, the transition seamless, with the humor tagging along: an Italian word that sounds like »aquamarine« becomes »ah! kvamarin«, and in this way, 400-year-old works by Gesualdo and his like-minded peers are sprinkled with Vestergård’s salon-style wit. But the movement also goes the other way: Vestergård’s newly composed pieces are tastefully ornamented with moving voices and flirt with strict church modality.
The desks are constantly rearranged, the office workers shifting from tableau to tableau, while the task of writing lyrics into a Google Doc projected on a screen rotates among the singers: Amalie Smith, Marvin Gaye, outraged anti-capitalist critique, and cheerful chat language – everything tinged with desire, but above all with ambivalence toward desire. Everything flows, including Vestergård’s compositions, which in one moment test icy echo techniques, and in the next turn up the heat with perfectly crafted barbershop.
SEX in Concert is clearly an exercise, and as director, Johan Klint Sandberg has had a field day with the office comedy. But the exercise succeeds (even if the hands stay above the covers): before you know it, an hour has passed in which Vestergård, Sandberg, and ÆTLA have slipped poetry, madrigals, and new vocal music down the throat of a young audience. It can actually be quite fun!
Christianshavn Residents’ House, March 18–22
»Music for us is a way to create a connection and community with other people.«
Although Schæfer has only released three singles so far, the band has already made a mark on the Danish music scene. The duo and their friends, Anna Skov (vocals) and Emil Mors (keyboards), write socially relevant, subtle and humorous songs that point fingers at both the outside world and themselves.
»Music for me can do something very special. It brings people together in shared experiences, but it can also be a very personal mental tool. Personally, I use music all the time – to create energy on a run, to create concentration for work tasks, or to find peace in stressful situations, such as in the dentist's chair. And of course to create joy and a good mood. Music is always an essential ingredient in good memories.«
Rikke Andersen has been at the helm of SPOT Festival since January 2024. With a background as a venue manager and booker at Fermaten in Herning, she has solid experience from both the creative and organizational side of the music industry. She has previously worked in the record industry, been deeply involved in marketing and communication, and has had a hand in several cultural projects.
It is both difficult and unfair to approach the concert Alle sætter spor (»Everyone Leaves Traces«) with a critical mindset. It concerns real people with something at stake and with their hearts invested: residents at the social-psychiatric housing facility Sønderparken. They placed their inner lives in the hands of six artists and thus became co-creators of a total of nine songs, which premiered at Museum Ovartaci.
The project Musikalske alliancer (»Musical Alliances«) is simultaneously art, research, and relief. A co-creative endeavour intended to give a voice to people within psychiatry. The result was songs marked by banjo-tinged gallops, painful violin stabs, empty houses filled with inconsolable crying, torn torsos and deep, lingering bow strokes – but also hope, care, and softened edges. Acting as mediators of these life experiences were the poet Gerd Laugesen, three musicians from the ensemble Lydenskab on cello, violin and guitar, as well as pianist Martin Ottosen and vocalist Ulla Bendixen from the electro-folk band Sorten Muld.
It was a capable group that delivered a high musical standard. Even so, it seemed as if this important project succeeded with its co-creation and its conversations, but perhaps not entirely with its artistic expression. Was it because the lyrics were filled with clichés? Or rather because the entire staging felt somewhat inward-looking – almost like a school concert? Despite Bendixen’s wonderfully airy and expressive vocal, the performance felt strongest in the few segments shaped by poetry readings. Yet I had to learn, by indirect means, that the poems were adaptations, while the song lyrics were the residents’ own words. And those were the voices I was meant to learn to listen to.
The Greenlandic word Takkuuk means »attention«, and it is the slightly ironic title of one of the more chaotic projects at this year’s CPH:DOX. The film is a collaboration between visual artist Zak Norman, film director Charlie Miller, and the Belfast-based electronic duo BICEP, and it also features seven musicians from Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi. In other words, a multitude of voices and agendas are at play, and the project clearly bears the marks of that.
The process leading up to the film sounds more interesting than the work itself. Norman and Miller travelled around the Arctic, seeking out musicians and researchers while filming glaciers and ice. The film’s seven young musicians then entered the studio with BICEP to create a shared soundtrack: a kind of club-oriented remix of seven very different practices, ranging from drill and heavy metal to joik, throat singing and drum dance. It might have been fascinating to follow those encounters, but instead the film takes us in another direction.
The editing shifts between a documentary strand of interviews and a surreal music-video aesthetic, where specially built cameras pan across the surface of the ice, bathing it in coloured filters referencing the northern lights and club lighting. In the interview track, the participants are allowed to steer the conversation themselves, which sends it in many directions. We touch on the spiritual undertones of traditional musical expressions, and here one would have liked the film to linger longer. One intriguing sequence explains how drum dance relates to the performer’s heartbeat, and how that rhythm is almost the same as the pulse of drill. More of that, please.
In a subsequent talk, the filmmakers explained that the work was originally produced as an audiovisual installation for five screens. That makes sense and might have worked better. Considered as a documentary film, Takkuuk is fragmentary, chaotic and directionless, which is a shame, because the young musicians seem to have much more to offer.
»Takkuuk«, Zak Norman & Charlie Miller (UK), 2025 (67 min). Screenings: 12, 17 and 19 March
