Above: Marshall Trammell. Still from the film “11 Postures”
In coming years, MUNCH and Borealis will collaborate on presentations of experimental soundscapes and music in Norway’s two largest cities. The collaboration starts with Borealis Preview – a taste of the upcoming Borealis programme, brought to an Oslo audience at MUNCH.
Borealis is a festival for experimental music and has for almost twenty years paved the way for genre crossing music and art in Bergen. Borealis Preview brings to MUNCH a hand-picked selection of artists from the 2022 festival, mixing music sound and ideas. Borealis' Artist in Residence, US percussionist Marshall Trammell, offers a dynamic musical intervention rooted in social activism; Oslo’s new music trailblazers Ensemble neoN present a pre-premiere glimpse of their new collaboration with Lasse Marhaug, and the multi-talented Jenny Berger Myhre brings her trademark blend of DIY experimentalism and poetic musing ahead of her radiophonic festival commission. A taste of West Coast experimentalism by the Oslo fjord, setting the tone for future collaboration between Borealis and MUNCH, Bergen and Oslo.
Marshall Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, social activist, and composer based in Oakland, California. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions and generate new local and global ecologies that embrace improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries. His performances on the drum kit is often a musical interpretation of people's reflection around their own lives and the society they live in. Trammell is a Borealis Artist in Residence from 2020–2022.
Ensemble neoN is a Norwegian contemporary music group working across artistic forms, collaborating with visual artists and performers such as Susanna, Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier and Johannes Kreidler. neoN strives to listen to a world that is constantly changing. It is this attitude that keeps challenging and expanding the ensemble’s musical language. The last years Ensemble neon has made a mark both nationally and internationally by performing at festivals like MATA, Ultima and Molde Jazzfestival. Their releases include ENSEMBLE NEON: Niblock/Lamb, Choosing to Sing, as well as the debut album \"neoN\" and The Forester with Susanna Wallumrød on SONATACD, both of which were awarded a Norwegian Grammy.
Jenny Berger Myhre is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, video, performance, and photography, based in Oslo, Norway. Her music is created from field recordings, fragments of melodies, computer generated sequences, modular synths, and lo-fi electronics – resulting in soundscapes with references to both the electro-acoustic tradition as well as experimental pop music. She released her debut album Lint in 2017 and has also been working with musician and novelist Jenny Hval, contributing to, and touring with the performance The Practice of Love in 2019. In 2022 she is releasing her second album Here Is Always Somewhere Else on Breton Cassette.
