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Punkt 2019
Punkt
Kristiansand, Norway
September 5-7, 2019
Punkt, with its 15th anniversary, is a quite young member among this year's prominent jubilees. It is still in the thrilling and promising future that has taken its course from 2005 on. Punkt then brought studio-technology to the stage, thereby establishing an extended form of improvisation, the live-remix of a concert as a whole, on the crossroads of other musicians' listening, their memory and recorded traces of that very music. After 15 years it has become a striking practice of an open form that has developed via felicitous moments of transformation, stunning highlights as well as productive failures.
The Punkt Projections at S?rlandet Art Museum with graphic work of Nina Birkelan and photography of Alf Solbakken floating on a mixtape of Punkt musical performances through the years compiled by Punkt-originators
Jan Bang
live samplingb.1968
Erik Honore
samples / effectsb.1966
Punkt has been covered at All About Jazz through the years, from 2006—2019: see the reviews here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.
A recollective intro
As a 2018-addendum and short exercise in recollection, a snapshot of last year's coherent opening night of Punkt with exclusively younger-generation-musicians is here called to mind. The five performances in the bare geometrical ambience of Kristiansand Kunsthall were revealed as a strikingly coherent, concentrated and exemplary sequence showing the range, variability and the possibilities of contemporary electro-acoustic music created by a new young generation. As such it served as an ideal and well-chosen basic stepping-stone into the wider landscape of live-remix work during the next two days.Starting out with the hyper precision of Agnes Hvizdalek's vocal work on the sub-atomic level employing the entirety of the human vocalization apparatus the subsequent Skrap duo of Anna Lauvdal and Heida Mobeck went into an extreme opposite field with their rampant tumbling and sprawling conglomerations of utterly diverse snippets and threads of all kinds of collected music, sprouting in a glistering volcanic seething. The duo Glimt of Ingvild Sandstad and Ieva Praneviciute then brought another kind of precision in its subtle crossfading of acoustic and electronic sound. The Greek duo of Giorgos Varoutas and Anna Linardou took up the vocal thread of the beginning in a quite different way. From abstract vocalizations intertwined with masterful sophisticated electronics the music gradually grew into veiled and slightly distorted fragments of Greek and other Mediterranean folk songs. The force of these songs strongly permeated the electronic vapor time and time again and lent them a special touching emanation. In his performance at the end of the evening Matthew Collings broke it open again. His way of varying and expanding a strong basic pattern unleashed a layered dust-cloud of sound. With its special tension of stasis and turbulence, it manifested as a strong counterpart to Hvizdalek's initial solo-performance.
Four sequences
Punkt 2019 offered six seminars, an exposition and four varied series of concerts/live-remixes spread over one night and two whole days. Each sequence of concerts/live-remixes had its very own character:(1) from microtonal materiality into song-lines emerging from electronics noir
(2) angelic contrasts and sounding fringes
(3) from discoing out to rocking hailstorm, moving and uplifting the mountains
(4) all these combing, strumming, unraveling creative deeds
The performances took place at four locations in town: at S?rlandet Art Museum, at the Cathedral, at Club Kick Scene and at Kilden Music Hall.
Sequence 1: from microtonal materiality into songlines emerging from electronics noir
The sequence of the opening comprised Trio Azkadenya, Ensemble Modern + Jan Bang and brand-new quartet Dark Star Safari as a premiere. Azkadenya, a double bass-violin-vocal configuration of Inga Margrete Aas, Vilde Sandve Aln?s and
Sidsel Endresen
vocals"Generically speaking she is not just producing plosives and stuttering guttural sounds, playing around, nor is she imitating instruments. Her expression moves with basic vocalizations combined in a non-arbitrary way, to syllables freed of conventional meaning placed and articulated with great urge, driven by a deep musical intuition. She digs deep into the essence of the human voice and creates a strong visceral coherence. Melody is always in the air (or triggered vaguely in listeners' minds), sometimes touched upon or even fully articulated. She is one of the most extraordinary post-bop vocalists and the source for younger Norwegian jazz and improv singers."
Sandwiched between Azkadenya and Dark Star Safari a configuration of musicians from Germany's prestigious Ensemble Modern—Dietmar Wiesner (fl), Saar Berger (horn), Sava Stoianov (tp), Giorgos Panagiotidis (vln), Eva B?cker (vlc)—together with
Jan Bang
live samplingb.1968
Samuel Rohrer
drums
Eivind Aarset
guitarErik Honore
samples / effectsb.1966
Sequence 2: angelic contrasts and sounding fringes
The second sequence brought us to Kristiansand's Cathedral just a few footsteps from S?rlandet Art Museum where Norway's eminent keyboardistStåle Storløkken
multi-instrumentalistHelge Sten
guitar, electric
Arve Henriksen
trumpetb.1968
Steve Tibbetts
guitarb.1954
Mark W Anderson
guitarFor me it remains wondrous how these musicians alertly and smoothly let arise a vaporous flow of music from their immediate choice and sonic manipulation of particles from just-heard music (Storl?kken, Trondheim Voices, Tibbets/Anderson) in mutual exchange and division of labor. Every part of the just indicated process is a highly sophisticated thing not to mention the creation of such a rich and spraying flow of narrative significance. They enmesh fragments of the received music in a deep space, the twilight of a huge cave with lots of mysterious openings from which circulating melodic swathes ascend, levitating. Thereby they create an open, inviting form of improvised music that trustingly 'plays itself' at a high degree. There are a lot of possible fits in this kind of flow. It's a question of finding the most promising and surprising ones, arriving at the best fits in the immediate interaction of the live-remix crew. Despite lots of knowledge and routine this remains a highly intuitive process. When watching and listening to it, you can from time to time discern flurries of the original performance in surrealistic disguised forms such as a strangely muted sound of the percussive hang-bowls on the background. Happily, the speed and seductive force of the flow is such that it is mainly absorbed subconsciously by the listener. This may also trigger images of musical bats, moles, insects and birds causing vibrations and phantasmagoric figments—the bestiary of live-remixing.
Sequence 3: from hyper discoing out to rocking hailstorm, moving and uplifting the mountains
The night program at Kick Scene club, which has been hosting Punkt for a while now, showed another rougher side of Punkt which has been obvious from the very beginning of the festival. The range and the contrasts have never been part of a commercial tactic as at many other festivals but have always been a part of a coherent artistic concept and awareness. The night started with the seven-piece band Drongo, a bunch of freewheeling, bustling young musicians originally growing out of Kristiansand music scene. In a line-up of a keyboard escort of Fender, Prophet and Korg (Auver Gaare, Eirik Ask, ?ystein Heide Aadland) two guitarists (Tov Espelid, Nicolai Gill Johannesen) and a rhythm tandem (
Magnus Westgaard
bassb.1996
Myself, I was familiar with
Thurston Moore
guitar
James Sedwards
guitarThe members of
Supersilent
band / ensemble / orchestraceased to give leeway to new bloom or to become dormant and supersilent again. On this day, Arve Henriksen and St?le Storl?kken embodied both sides of music and nature dialectically connected. Helge Sten stayed in the balanced and sealed middle. Supersilent regularly reaches extraordinary violence of sound that forces the audience to undergo it fully and suffer (or kick on it), put in good ear-plugs or just keep larger distance or leave. Extreme loudness is for sure something that plays more and more a role at Punkt and in general. Its function is worth reflection and discussion.
Sequence 4: all these combing, strumming, unraveling creative deeds
The last night comprised three concerts each with an adjacent live-remix: first the Shamisen Concerto of Japanese composer " data-original-title="" title="">Da? Fujikura featuring shamisen virtuoso Hidejiro Honjoh with Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra (members of the orchestra took part in the 2009 edition of Punkt), then the You | Me opus of Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr and finally an appearance of the new Rymden trio of
Bugge Wesseltoft
pianob.1964
Dan Berglund
bassb.1963
Magnus Ostrom
drumsb.1965
Esbjorn Svensson
piano1964 - 2008
Strings have taken a prominent role at Punkt through the years. Last year's edition, for example, presented two high profile string units, Norwegian drummer Thomas Stroenen's Time Is A Blind Guide with Ayumi Tanaka (piano), H?kon Aase (violin), Ole Morten V?gan (bass) and Leo Svensson Sander (cello) and the premiere of Norwegian-Italian-French double trio Unbroken that consists of violinist Régis Huby, viola player Guillaume Roy and cellist Vincent Courtois on the French string side, Jan Bang, guitarist Eivind Aarset from Norway and Italian percussionist Michele Rabbia (for a review of Unbroken see here).
The "Shamisen Concerto" with the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra under conductor Christoffer Nobin and soloist Hidejiro Honjoh raised high expectations due to its intercultural character and that very special Japanese three string solo-instrument, the shamisen. It is played with a huge plectrum in the whole hand, the bachi, and is similar in tone to a banjo. It is a highly flexible and variable instrument in terms of sound and ways of strumming and plucking presently used in different kinds of music. It can however sound a bit strange and distant in the context of a Western symphonic orchestra. Fujikura did not try to 'equalize' or 'harmonize' it but worked with the differential quality. The shamisen has a strong steely but thin sound, no bright sustain. The player can produce scratching sounds as well, scraping sound with a tone destabilizing way of bowing. It can also sound like the beat of wings. It got its projection and dynamics in the concert(o) here from the alternation of plucking and strumming. The 'battente' sound of the strummed shamisen was drifting in the sea of the orchestral sound, bobbed up from it and disappeared again, emerging and submerging. It also moved shadowy, ghostlike through space, appearing and disappearing. In other parts the shamisen was setting in a stomping, rock-like theme that again and again slipped away. The orchestra then mirrored the shamisen, however, in slightly distorted and time-lagged way which gave the effect of listening to two different pieces shifting through each other. It was a constant game, with not only different sound characteristics and foregrounding and shifting back, but also a game that let the music wander through the whole acoustic space. However, this delicate game of space and sound with lots of nuances got a bit lost in the acoustics of the hall. Closer listening revealed a lot of characteristics in this symphonic concerto piece that were also found in the subsequent concert by the seven-piece " data-original-title="" title="">Kim Myhr unit, among others. That tells a lot about Fujikura as a composer. He respected the traditional way of playing -not exploiting the rich possibilities of extended techniques—but composed in a completely contemporary way with influences from a diversity of genres. This part of Punkt 2019 with a symphonic orchestra was a special opportunity worth continuation in next editions and should be exploited more than 20 minutes.
The live-remix came from one of the prime, equally electro-acoustic units, the duo of vocalist extraordinaire Sidsel Endresen and electronic master mind Jan Bang. Opposite to lots of vocalists that presently multiply themselves by looping and sampling I never saw Sidsel Endresen performing with anything more than a microphone, here facilitated by master sound engineer Asle Karstad. The echoing and feedback aspect Endresen leaves to her long term duo partner Jan Bang, freeing herself for improvisations from the core of human vocality as described above. The shamisen concerto gave Endresen possibilities to go into crackling, raspy explosive articulations piercing the floating and whispering electronic fabric, thereby also provoking little cracks on both sides. It was a short footnote hinting at a new hinterland and a highlight of the festival.
Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr assembled his "You | Me" opus in reclusion for months in his studio. After that he brought it to the stage transforming it with six fellow musicians in a live version. Having seen it first at Berlin Jazzfest in November last year it has since evolved through an extended international tour and alternating line-ups involved in its performance. The Punkt-performance with
Tony Buck
percussion
Ingar Zach
percussion
David Stackenäs
guitarAdrian Fiskum Myhr
bass, acousticThe immediate live-remix came from a new duo unit under the name Elektroshop, P?l-K?res Elektroshop. It turned out as a visually attractive, funny juggling with sounds and light from the depth of space swirling on the strumming continuum of the Kim Myhr unit. Drummer " data-original-title="" title="">Paal Hausken and producer/keyboardist/composer K?re Christoffer Vestrheim delivered a relaxed, refreshing and highly enjoyable new element of hyper electronic circus— definitely something of a charm of its own with no need to impose meanings of all sorts. Yes, and Hausken and Vestrheim are experienced young veterans on the Nordic firmament who know the ropes. Wrapped in the dancing visuals of master " data-original-title="" title="">Tord Knudsen, music, visuals and movements became a colorful entangled whole.
As the one who once gave a decisive impulse for Bang and Honore to bring the studio as a tool for improvisation on stage
Bugge Wesseltoft
pianob.1964
Dan Berglund
bassb.1963
Magnus Ostrom
drumsb.1965
Esbjorn Svensson
piano1964 - 2008
The live-remix (by
Nils Petter Molvaer
trumpetb.1960
Memorieseminars
This year's Punkt seminar program was curated by exquisite writer/musicianDavid Toop
multi-instrumentalistThe theme of the Punkt seminars was Voice of Memory: "sounding, listening, memory and the sense of who we are. Memory is vital to music, if only because sound is always running away from us., slipping into the air like a ghost. To understand from, relationships, the developing shape of a musical piece depends on keeping memory alongside our immediate sense of what is happening. This is quite a challenge, particularly since music can be so immersive, emotional and physically seductive, but without this capacity, music would only possess the most basic characteristics of sound—its ability to disturb. There are many facets to musical memory, ranging from personal and cultural identity, to archival and technological memory, to the different memories involved in notation or improvisation, to the way we constantly rewrite our memory of music in relation to our changing selves. The contributors I have invited to this year's Punkt seminars all have fascinating and diverse takes on this question. I have asked them to think about the format of how they present their ideas and that's all I need to know. What they actually show, present, perform or discuss is entirely up to them and I look forward to being surprised." (David Toop)
He invited Yuka Fujii, Dai Fujikura and " data-original-title="" title="">Elaine Mitchener for the first day; Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz, Camille Norment and Daniella Cascella were invited for the second day. Unfortunately, Elaine Mitchener had to cancel her visit at the last minute. David Toop subbed for her by reading from his recent book "Flutter Echo." Here's a short impression of the presentations I attended. About Thurston Moore's reading from his teenage years' musical memories I already commented above.
Yuka Fujii is author of the book Like Planets [unreel]. The book documents in photographs and sparing text in five chapters—Solstice, Holy Games, Brilliant Trees, Alchemy, Equinox—a seemingly quiet, intimate, existence in the company of her then partner, the artist, David Sylvian. It is a time between the early to late 1980s, in which
David Sylvian
vocalsb.1958
"I've frequently created film based around still images, slowly dissolving from one image to the next. I've always found this simple technique very moving and engaging especially when accompanied by the appropriate soundtrack. Punkt finally gave me the opportunity to explore this approach more fully as did Mark Wastell who has created a specially commissioned composition for the piece. The book stands alone as a work in itself for the individual to explore in their own time. The film works on another level. A shared experience which takes place within a given time frame hopefully drawing the audience into the world created by both sound and vision." (Yuka Fujii)
Fujii's pictures, in fascinating ways, are schematically remote and intimately close at the same time, with strong suggestions of striding through the dust of time and the emotional-intellectual processes underneath. The cinematic shifting and fading of the pictures nourished lasting feelings and remaining understanding for the viewer that were only tentatively explicable. The static and dynamic side of the pictures unfolded a touching experiential quality.
David Toops' reading from his recent autobiographical book "Flutter Echo" was an inspiring affair. In his delightful, slightly understated and yet elevating way he introduced the audience to his early sonic and musical perceptions. It immediately triggers listeners' own aural traces from the past leading to amazement at how deep these spots and traces are implanted in the mind, how the personal sonic spurs developed alongside sometimes quite peculiar knots. Toop succeeded in awaking the pleasure of self-wonderment.
Considerations: loudness, labs, length
From a biological and social view, loudness always has a purpose. It can serve to appear big and large, to intimidate, to be heard, to dominate, to have fun, to celebrate, to prepare/accompany acts of physical or psychological aggression etc. Concerning music making, volume and loudness through history is connected to amplification, starting from the mask in ancient Greek theatre, via opera houses and opera singing and stronger and further reaching instruments, such as the baritone saxophone, to broad and heavy electrification since early 20th century. Electrification has opened gates to seemingly infinite levels of loudness, even hyper loudness in its own right. And it seems the race for the loudest of all is still going on in music making, which means that the level of loudness in general still goes up further. It might be due to self-feeding and self-reinforcing dynamics but might also be a sign of protest, desperation, opposition, resistance in a time that much is drowned in a cacophony of voices and noises. After
Jimi Hendrix
guitar, electric1942 - 1970
Stian Westerhus
guitar
Christian Fennesz
guitarLoudness together with other contextual social elements can also have purgatory effects. It's then not the loudness as such but its function as a tool of enforcement among other forces. At Punkt 2019 Supersilent undoubtedly took the cake—not only in terms of measurable decibels, but in terms of the impact of the sheer force incited ... .
Apart from this loudness race as a consequence of electrification we are caught in more general sense in electric amplification. Music and speech in the tiniest rooms is miked and amplified as the normal mode. It is more and more difficult to imagine how things once worked without it and what acoustic reality in those days was like. Punkt, with its approach of sampling of live recordings as a point of departure for on the spot creation of new musical shapes, shortened the time gap between absorptive listening and personal (re)creation of the past. It brought an improvisational continuum of creation and re-creation into existence. In the pioneering years of Punkt Festival at Agder theatre its laboratory character was much more evident than nowadays. For the remix the audience had to rush to the basement where the remix crafters were tinkering and could be observed by the audience on the same level. Nowadays the tinkerers are often shadowy alchemistic figures behind or beside the stage, mysteriously mixing their sonic concoctions. In practical terms, the present set-up has a lot of advantages and creates a new sphere (of mystery). In the 2015 edition of Punkt the audience still had to change room at the Kristiansand cinema complex, but then there were also simultaneous remixes were going on. This is a plea for clearly reintroducing the laboratory situation to Punkt Festival. The best laboratory room I experienced in a concert recently is the Hvelvet Room at Sentralen in Oslo. There you can really see and observe on same ground-level electronic musicians working on their instruments, a very clarifying experience.
Due to length of this excursive paragraph I'll reflect on the issue of length of performance on the next occasion.
Outro
The electronic vacuum cleaner of Punkt leaves nothing unscathed, lets things slide, morph, wrap and lay bare, shatter and scatter, splitter and pulverize into close or distant, odd or familiar, recognizable or confusing transformations. It's a game where acoustics and electronics meet and challenge, inspire and influence each other. There are a lot of advanced things happening in acoustic music that should hit and meet Punkt in future editions. The outcome of Punkt programming approach is a magical mystery affair every time—perplexity, astonishment guaranteed. The arrangement of locations in town is different every year too, some precious basics but never 100 percent habituation effect.Tags
Live Reviews
Henning Bolte
Norway
Oslo
Nina Birkeland
Alf Solbakken
Jan Bang
Erik Honore
Agnes Hvizdalek
Anna Lauvdal
Heida Mobeck
Ingvild Sandstad
Ieva Praneviciute
Giorgos Varoutas
Anna Linardou
Matthew Collings
Inga Margrete Aas
Vilde Sandve Aln?s
Sidsel Endresen
Dietmar Wiesner
Saar Berger
Sava Stoianov
Giorgos Panagiotidis
Eva B?cker
Samuel Rohrer
Eivind Aarset
Erik Honore
St?le Storl?kken
Helge Sten
Arve Henriksen
Natali Abrahamsen Garner
Steve Tibbets
Mark Anderson
Auver Gaare
Eirik Ask
?ystein Heide Aadland
Tov Espelid
Nicolai Gill Johannesen
Magnus Westgaard
Hans Uhre
Simen L?vgren
Thurston Moore
James Sedwards
Deb Googe
Jeb Doulton
Supersilent
Da? Fujikura
Hidejiro Honjoh
Bugge Wesseltoft
Dan Berglund
magnus ostrom
Esbjorn Svensson
Christoffer Nobin
Kim Myhr
Asle Karstad
Tony Buck
Ingar Zach
Michaela Antalová
Daniel Meyer Gr?nvold
David Stackenas
Adrian Myhr
P?l Hausken
K?re Christoffer Vestrheim
Tord Knudsen
Dan Berglund
Nils Petter Molv?r
David Toop
Yuka Fujii
Elaine Mitchener
Eva Prinz
Camille Norment
Daniella Cascella
David Sylvian
Mark Wastell
Jimi Hendrix
Blue Cheer
MC5
Serena Maneesh
Ben Frost
Uwe Schmidt
Atom TM
Stian Westerhus
Christian Fennesz
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