When Janne released her solo album Movements for Listening she organized a release concert featuring the musicians who featured on the album. This is the last bit of the concert where Øy is playing an improvised piece together with Anders Kregnes Hansen, before the rest of the musicians join in for a little bonus at the very end.
The piece starts with me improvising with Juliana Venter’s voice as my only source material. Juliana was the only musician who was not able to join the concert so we thought that sampling her voice would be a nice way of virtually bringing her along with us. The sounds are from Juliana’s track on the album If You Find Yourself Falling, Dive. You can see Janne putting on shoes after she performed barefoot for the previous piece, so therefore the opening is my little solo spot. My aim for this was for the audience to clearly hear that I am using Juliana’s voice and to have a nice balance between tension and beauty.
I start of by simply triggering different bits of the vocal, blending them with fades in the start and end of each sample and adding delay and reverb.
Then on my Organelle (a little sound computer) I am running my home made Snowgrains instrument, a granular synth instrument where I am playing small bits of the voice in different tempos going from hearing the individual slices as rhythmical single elements to playing them in such a quick tempo that they sounds like a frozen in time version of the voice. With this instrument I am also pitching it so it can harmonize with the other instruments.
I am using a Bugbrand Pt Delay pedal that is a very gritty lofi delay that when pushed turns the voice into pure noise and sounds of the beach. You can also hear that it is panning slowly between left and right speaker.
And lastly Monome Norns Shield which is another little sound computer running a script that is using a pitch tracking bandbass filter to isolate just small frequency areas in the sound. Because the filter is so narrow and is constantly changing frequency it makes almost like a little melody.
After this Janne and Anders join me. There is a contact mic on the floor, connected to my equipment so Janne can trigger different slices of Juliana’s voice. As the piece goes on you can hear me change what slices Janne is triggering. Anders start by bowing his vibraphone in key with the vocal samples. Then Anders starts playing singing bowls using drum sticks and Janne starts playing on her homemade setup featuring hanging taps. Yes the metal things that are usually under her shoes. They also work very well as free hanging percussion instruments! They are of course not perfectly in tune, but turns out they randomly have pretty distinct pitches, that sounds very musical and works well. We were joking that they were tuned in the taplydian scale, hehe!
The main piece ends with a combination of all this + Anders playing the vibraphone with mallets.
At 9:45 in the video you can see the rest of the musicians starts to walk onto the stage. This part we had not had much time to talk about (and the little we did talk about is not really what happened!), but I think it turned out very nice, and it was a very exciting moment for the whole concert.
That’s it!
You can watch the rest of the concert over at Janne’s Vimeo page.
Recorded live at Gamle Munch in Oslo during the release of Janne Eraker’s double vinyl Movements for Listening on November 3, 2023.
All the music is on all streaming platforms.