Bjørn Torske DJ-set at Turkish Delight in Oslo 1/4
March 31, 2011Comments Off
You can hear Bjørn Torske spin his wonderful records at Oslo`s Turkish Delight on Friday the 1st of April. More info here.
Hear Pechenga`s Gitaro
March 30, 2011Comments Off
Pechenga is Rune Lindbæk and Cato Farstad.
Pechenga is the name of the area in Siberia that’s distantly visible from Vardø (pop. 2500), the Norwegian fishing island Rune Lindbæk & Cato Farstad both call their birthplace, and where they made their debut album, Helt Borte. While Cato stayed and became Vardø’s one-man musical milieu, Lindbæk moved to the city of Tromsø before establishing himself in Oslo and Berlin as a sought-after musician, producer and remixer. (Lindbæk has worked with NYC Modal Music,
Lindstrøm, Idjut Boys [as Meanderthals], and remixed The Knife, to name a few.)
In the winter of 2007, after forming a mutual respect and admiration for each other’s work and love for old synth music, prog rock, and ambient music, Lindbæk and Farstad hunkered down in Lindbæk’s grandmother’s house in Vardø to work on music together. Surrounded by the dark of the season, the flickering northern lights, cold storms,
and heavy snow, Helt Borte was born in an intense two-week period. They cite ambient masters Stars of the Lid, Dead Texans, Peter Namlook, Brian Eno, Steve Roach, and Biosphere (Lindbæk’s old Tromsø neighbor) as a massive inspiration in creating this album. Helt Borte was self-released by the duo in 2008 on their Pechenga Records, and made available only in Norway. The record sold a grand total of 59 copies before Smalltown Supersound’s Joakim Haugland “discovered” it, naming it one of his favorite albums in recent years. He promptly signed the project and decided to give it a worldwide release. Since the signing, Pechenga have already gone on to remix Jose Gonzalez’s “How Low.”
The name Helt Borte means two things in Norwegian: “completely gone,” and “hero is gone.” Artwork for the album is made by Kim Hiorthøy
Hear Pechenga on Altered Zones
March 29, 2011Comments Off
Check out this newspiece about Pechenga at Altered Zones and hear the track Gitaro here.
Lars Horntveth The Quietus interview
March 29, 2011Comments Off
There is a big interview with Lars Horntveth on UK`s great The Quiestus site here. The interview took place on a boat in the north of Norway. The photo shows Lars fishing in his bathing-suit. Thats how a real Viking do it!
New Mungolian Jetset 12″
March 28, 2011Comments Off
Diskjokke Juno chart
March 27, 2011Comments Off
Check out Diskjokke`s latest favorites at Juno here.
Kim Hiorthøy art exhibition at Standard
March 24, 2011Comments Off
KIM HIORTHØY
“MY FAVOURITE NUMBER IS 4.000.000.000″
01.04.-07.05.2011 / PREVIEW: FRIDAY 01.04.2011 / 19.00-21.00
—–
STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to announce Kim Hiorthøy’s “My Favourite Number Is 4.000.000.000″, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprising a set of eight watercolours, the densely layered realism of Hiorthøy’s drawings previously exhibited has been replaced by a biomorphic abstraction. The thinned and diluted patches of colour and pictographic reduction that appear in his watercolours seem to address the very figural moment of perception – when forms emerge and reify.
“Loudspeaker playing Muzak.
Light fire under loudspeaker.
Listen.”
- John Cage, from Brown, Carolyn: Chance and Circumstance – Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham, 2007
“If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. […] I paint what I want to see.”
- Philip Guston, from Philip Guston – Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, 2011
The eight watercolours in Kim Hiorthøy’s current exhibition – all installed on the end wall of the gallery – favour the inconsistent and incomplete. While coherent in terms of visual vocabulary and all treated with the same value and texture, these works seem to be seeking out a source material of emerging rather than solid forms. Or rather, Hiorthøy’s works arrange shapes equally likely assembled from imagination as having been re-assembled from recognition. Abandoning drawing and confining to the watercolour’s conditions of non-precision, colour becomes the primary parameter of his compositions. In each of these works Hiorthøy restricts the composition to a single or reduced number of organic shapes, which for the most part are executed in broken colours and consistently left isolated against the creamy white background of the paper.
In their pictogram realist manner they share a certain resemblance to maps, mosaics, typography or architectural drawings. One could claim that the exaggerated flatness of these works evoke memories of early twentieth century still life. Even so, one is left with elements of uncertain iconographic value. What is being observed (in case it is the optic and positivistic logic of the ‘still life’ should be what establishes the foundation for these works)? The answer could partly be that one is observing the method of observation – in which an object is finally possible to extract from its surroundings. In Hiorthøy’s works this figural moment is stretched out, lending trust to both intuition and the inherent imperfection of imprint. As is the case with the non-specificity of asemic writing, Hiorthøy’s watercolours occur to have formatting and structure while still leaving the viewer unsure as to what extent one is reading, looking or interpreting.
Analogous to the construction of jokes, a recognizable pattern is broken or made untrustworthy. This collapse is at once familiar and surprising, or as claimed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing”. Flat and fleeting – the sheer and fluid paint making the objects and surroundings equally void of any true substance – these eight works sketch an account of what a conversation between Paul Cezanne and Paul Rand could have been like.
Kim Hiorthøy (b. 1973, Trondheim) lives and works in Berlin, Oslo and Stockholm. Recent exhibitions include Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Galerie Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam, “14th Vilnius Painting Triennial: False Recognition”, CAC, Vilnius; “Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard”, Montevideo / Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam; “The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing”, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – MIMA, Middlesbrough; “The Line Is a Lonely Hunter”, New Jerseyy, Basel; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen. Coinciding with this exhibition, STANDARD (OSLO) will do a solo presentation of Kim Hiorthøy as part of the Open Space section of Art Cologne (April 12-17).
For further information please visit our webpage: www.standardoslo.no or contact Eivind Furnesvik at eivind@standardoslo.no or +47 917 07 429 / +47 22 60 13 10. STANDARD (OSLO) is open Tuesday-Friday: 12.00-17.00 / Saturday: 12.00-16.00. Sunday and Monday: Closed
Mungolian Jetset and Razika to play the Øya Festival
March 24, 2011Comments Off
Mungolian Jetset is confirmed to play Oslo´s Øya Festival in august. Also Razika will play the festival. You can get more info about the festival at their site here.
K-X-P a great 8/10 review at This Is Fake DIY
March 22, 2011Comments Off
K-X-P – K-X-P
21st March 2011 | By Matthew Horton | Rating: 8/10 Review here.
This gripping, primal jazz-rock odyssey is full of surprises – the existence of a gripping jazz-rock odyssey for one, but also that it comes from a Finnish trio led by Timo Kaukolampi, until now semi-famous as producer and writer for pop’s perennial next big thing, Norwegian singer Annie. Little of that knack for shrill, cheeky melody worms its way in here, and nor do K-X-P allow banks of electronica to buff up an essentially organic sound, yet still there’s a pop sensibility that frees up muso restrictions. K-X-P use an unfussy set-up – synths, bass, drums – to fashion something attractive, layered and unexpectedly catchy.
But yes, it’s a rock dynamic with jazz leanings, instruments played with a live freshness, a sense of quest and experimentation spreading under its skin. For the first minute or so, ‘Elephant Man’ even plants feet firmly on a techno platform before rolling drums take the song into a tribal freakout. Alarmingly, ‘Mehu Moments’ hoves to with a synth throb straight out of David Guetta’s work on Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’, although it soon becomes plain that this is a rhythm track and no cheesy pop adornment. Instead the piece takes flight on flirty bass, almost disco in its joyous skip before noodly analogue keys suggest Terry Riley’s minimal jazz composition ‘Rainbow In Curved Air’. That’s about the most high-falutin’ reference here, on a largely instrumental album that places greater emphasis on the groove than po-faced craftsmanship.
In fact, it’s easy to spray the krautrock tags around – so let’s do it. ‘Labirynth’ rockets along with Can propulsion, drop-outs and circling effects neatly summing up its title. This is a tooled-up dance track with a creepy, jerky synth riff and passages of metal-edged funk. K-X-P also lock into a steadfast groove on ‘Aibal Dub’, but here it’s closer to the relentless rhythms of ESG, anything fancy kept to the bare minimum as the mantra becomes the thing. In less imaginative hands this could be boring, but K-X-P splash around the effects and, above all, grab attention with muscular playing. Programmed beats can feel soulless; the metronomic application of these real players has a sweaty intensity.
We hear Kaukolampi now and again, first of all with a nagging post-punk chant on the Glitter Band (or Battles) stomp of ’18 Hours (Of Love)’ and later over the hard flat beats and zappy synths of ‘Pockets’, yelping out lines like Alan Vega as pressure builds with every whump until release comes with the sort of wig-out that died with hardcore rave. A voice makes a change, but it never overshadows the steel and whipcord rhythms that give the album its essence. Only on final track ‘Epilogue’ does the rock monster rebel against the groove, blocks of synthesiser forming a looming wall of sound that shares common ground with Salem’s witch house, where beats meet metal with oppressive force. Otherwise this set bowls along with a kinetic force, the natural product of a rock outfit that prizes rhythm over reason and freedom over structure to create an unlikely pop moment.
ARP at Sound + Vision at The Kitchen
March 21, 2011Comments Off
ARP has curated a night of film+sound to take place at The Kitchen tomorrow Tuesday March 22 @ 7PM.
The event is FREE!!! Among those on the program:
MATT WOLF –– who made the amazing Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination ––
will show a teaser from his forthcoming feature Teenage, a collaboration with punk writer Jon Savage.
TONY MARTIN –– the first to project to Terry Riley’s In C in the early 60s and a regular projectionist for
The Jefferson Airplane and the SF acid scene –– will present a rare screening of a film with music by Morton Subotnick.
SAM FLEISCHNER will present an excerpt from a forthcoming film documenting the recent collaboration
between legendary Jamaican singing duo The Congos and hypnogogic pop deconstructionist Sun Araw.
More thorough info on the entire program can be found here & here:
BOMB –– http://bombsite.com/issues/0/articles/2943
THE KITCHEN –– http://www.thekitchen.org/event/243/0/1/
