Date/Time
16th November 2024
12:00pm - 2:00pm
Location
St John's Church
Categories
We collaborate again with fellow birthday organisation, the boutique Berlin based record label Sonic Pieces. Founder Monique Recknagel has been quietly curating and hand-crafting each release (now numbering fifty) creating a small but strong community of artists, whose ideas explore the border between contemporary classical and avant-garde. Today we present three of them from across Europe.
Deaf Center comprises Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Erik K. Skodvin and pianist Otto A. Totland, who operate at the axis of ambient, contemporary classical and drone music. Old school friends, they both grew up in a small village in southern Norway, each having a history of music-experimentation during the early internet days. At the start of the 2000´s they finally decided to collaborate. Deaf Center has released several recordings through the last 20 years, including albums Pale Ravine (2005), Owl Splinters (2011) and most recently Low Distance (2019) on Sonic Pieces. In their music the importance is placed on timelessness, friendship and the combination of warm human connection with otherworldly abstractions.
Erik K Skodvin grew up in Norway during the early internet days and found sample-based music software during his mid-teens. Since then, he has dedicated his life to music, and the dualities of light vs. shadow, loud vs. silence, improvisation vs. composition. He began early releasing music on small internet labels in the mid to late 90ies before starting his own label Miasmah in 1999. Not long after, he started the project Deaf Center, moving next to create his debut solo under his Svarte Greiner alias in 2006 and by 2024 he has released around 15 solo albums, countless EP´s and singles as well as many collaborations.
The Gothenburg-resident impressionistic singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Sumie has just completed the recording of her third album. It is the follow-up to Sumie, her selftitled debut, and Lost In Light, both issued by the UK’s totemic Bella Union label, also the home of Father John Misty, John Grant, Mercury Rev and Susanne Sundfør. Sumie’s as-yet untitled new album will be issued in 2025. These rare appearances are the first opportunity – anywhere – to hear a selection of her new songs. Expect lyrical obliqueness, and the marriage of understated intensity with filigreed atmospherics.