For the past 20 years All Ears festival for improvised music has presented the most cutting edge avant garde music within the international scene for improvised music. By curating a diverse program, with an array of improvised music, the festival wishes to gather music lovers both used and new to the genre, inviting to a festival dedicated to the art of being present in the now.
All Ears festival for improvised music has a tradition of being curated by touring musicians and is therefore known to know the pulse of the international scene. The current curators of the festival are Anja Lauvdal, Christian Winther & Natali Abrahamsen Garner.
In 2022 the festival will be presented at the Munch museum, the music formed in the museum’s dedicated concert halls.
Venue / Directions
The festival will take place at the new Munch-museum in Bjørvika, in the city centre of Oslo. All public transportation to Oslo Central Station, and walk 4-5 minutes towards the fjord. You can’t miss it!
Saturday January 14 19:00 (Doors 18:00)
Nice Things Full Community (NO/DK)
Victoria Shen (US)
Mark Wastell / Maggie Nicols / Matilda Rolfsson (UK/SE)
Økse – Mette Rasmussen, Savannah Harris, Val Jeanty, Petter Eldh (DK/US/SE)
Lasse Marhaug (NO)
DJ Elin Már (NO)
NICE THINGS FULL COMMUNITY
Nice Things is a new Oslo-based record label and collective of young improvising musicians. They share a love for all music that embodies the creative spirit. Nice Things FULL COMMUNITY will give a good glimpse of this creative bunch. A fresh addition to the Oslo improv-scene!
EVICSHEN
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco.
Shen’s sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls «chaotic sound» to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.
Her personal identity; her body; is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd.
Shen’s multimedia practice extends beyond musical composition and performance to include installation and non-traditional methods of distribution. Her DIY approach to deconstructing the concepts of “materiality, value and mass production” both integrate and re-contextualize the formats of the readymade and assemblage techniques. For example, the album art for her debut LP, Hair Birth, utilizes copper to transform the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. In 2021, Shen produced a series of cut-up records in cast resin embedded with found materials, functioning not only as playable music media but as unique art objects. For recent performances, she pioneered the use of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, which allow her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. Needle Nails, Levitating speaker, and her Noise Combs are some of the objects created by her as part of an extensive repertoire of innovations in the design of sound augmentation. These sculptural elements invite the viewer to unpack one’s relationship with the material possibilities for creating sound.
MARK WASTELL / MAGGIE NICOLS / MATILDA ROLFSSON
Mark Wastell / Maggie Nicols / Matilda Rolfsson is an Anglo-Scandinavian trio coming together exclusively for All Ears!
A true veteran of the British free music scene, Maggie Nicols joined London’s legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist, and from then a lifetime of performing and recording challenging and beautiful works, either in collaborations with a range of artists as well as solo.
Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for over a quarter of a century. He is also Confront record label boss, which has a catalogue of over 150 releases.
Rolfsson is a Swedish percussionist based in Trondheim, at the moment devoted to her artistic research-project where she deepens her artistic praxis in the field of interdisciplinary interplay between music and dance in free- improvisation.
The Wastell/Nicols duo recently emerged before our eyes, and Rolfsson has played with both of them before in different projects, so All Ears were eager to ask if they could do a trio for us, only imagining the beatifully combined textures and distinct sounds coming from each of them.
ØKSE
ØKSE is the new band of Savannah Harris and Mette Rasmussen.
ØKSE means AXE in danish. The Axe has a lot of connotations, beeing one of humankind’s oldest tools. Axe is also Ashe the life-force that runs through all things, living and inanimate. It is described as the power to make things happen. Ashe is a current or flow, a groove that initiates can channel so that it carries them along their road in life.
Mette Rasmussen – saxophone, Savannah Harris – drums, Petter Eldh – bass, Val Jeanty – SoundChemist.
LASSE MARHAUG
Lasse Marhaug is the father of Norwegian noise music. The wizard from the north (he just moved back to Steigen after living many years in Oslo) does many things, but let’s focus on his amazing last album Context (2022):
«Trust it’s a rare and near-mythical beast, conjuring vast, treacherous soundscapes illuminated with pangs of sentiment that naturally weave strands of his non-musical practice in their psychosensual lustre and gritty attrition. As he steps into a new phase of his career, we’re left with a concluding chapter that stands as a summation and open-ended post-credits reveal. We’ve no idea where Marhaug might go next, but until then «Context” is a fucking dream.» (Boomkat)
Marhaug is also one of the All Ears founders. Over the years he has helped create so many new spaces for music, both with his own musicianship, running concert series and festivals at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter among other places, as a sound artist, graphic designer, producer, mixer, masterer, fanzine creator (Personal Best) label-runner (Pica disk, O. Gudmundsen’s Minde) and film-maker, and his range of different collaborators is extremely wide.
It’s with great pleasure that we’re presenting his solo show as our grand finale on Saturday evening.
DJ ELIN MÁR
Elin Már Øyen Vister aka Dj Sunshine (Elin Már) / DJ Puffin / DJ Skjegglav
Som helst ikke bruker pronomen, men om det skal brukes foretrekker hen, er en av 90tallets pionerer innen klubbmusikk og og var med å bygge opp jungle/d´n`b-scenen i landet. Elin Már hadde allerede som nitten-åring eget DJ program på Radio Nova (Baby’s Got Wax), som hen etterhvert spilte inn i London på DAT og sendte tilbake til Oslo. I London spilte Sunshine blant annet på Blue Note og hadde eget program på piratradio, samt en av de første nettbaserte radiostasjonene. Dj Sunshine hadde dessuten sitt eget musikkprogram på NRK P3 fra 2003 til 2006.
Sunshine har spilt land og strand rundt, og gjestet klubbkvelder ute i den store verden. I 2009 flyttet Elin Már til Nord-Norge/Sábmeørst til Kjerringøy og etterhvert til Røst, hvor hen har fokusert på kunst og komposisjon. Siden har hen lyttet til nedgangen i sjøfuglbestanden her til lands gjennom det pågående kunstprosjektet «Soundscape Røst» og jobber som komponist/kunstner/jordbeskytter og reiser grønnest mulig.
