Underskog

Velkommen til LP lansering for albumet «Spektralmaskin» av Peder Simonsen & Jo David Meyer Lysne. Albumet ble gitt ut på plateselskapet SOFA før sommeren, og er duoens første utgivelse. Denne kvelden får vi en presentasjon av prosessene bak musikken og demonstrasjon av noen av instrumentene de har laget.

Starter kl 18:00.
Arrangementet er gratis.
Velkommen!

Spektralmaskin, a collaborative album by the Norwegian musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne and Peder Simonsen, owes its name to a sort of prospecting: the process of sliding e-bows—small magnetic motors of adjustable speeds used to sustain sounds, here of Lysne’s own design—along guitar strings to produce harmonics. As these harmonics can occur erratically, the technique rewards the musician patient enough to scoot the e-bow about the string, waiting for the delicate sounds to crest.

The duo’s fascination with this technique, which pervades the album’s three tracks, dates to the beginning of 2020. At the time, Lysne was amidst a shift from jazz performance to composition, pursuing a burgeoning interest in space, timbre, and tuning, as well as building e-bows—the latter from repurposed magnetic hard drives—and novel instruments. Simonsen, a composer, producer, and member of the microtonal tuba trio Microtub, was meanwhile steeped in experiments involving just intonation. During a visit to Lysne’s studio, Simonsen proposed using Lysne’s e-bows to play guitars that had been harmonically tuned, resulting in striking possibilities for chords and timbres. (The word spektralmaskin, Norwegian for “spectral machine,” is Lysne and Simonsen’s attempt to encapsulate the e-bow as a machine trained on material that is “spectral,» referring to harmonic spectrum.) An album felt imminent. The recording process began at Studio Paradiso, a rock-oriented studio in Oslo with a collection of vintage microphones, following stretches of minute technical adjustments to capture the space’s acoustic intricacies.

In the studio’s dim light—an apt induction into the album’s own hazy atmosphere—Simonsen and Lysne began recording improvisations on synthesizer and guitars, with Lysne using e-bows on different speed settings to hunt for guitar harmonics. Encircling these results are composed parts for French horn, contrabass, violin, bass clarinet, and tuba, performed and inspired by local colleagues: violinist Vilde Sandve Alnæs, bassist Inga Margrete Aas, saxophonist Espen Reinertsen, percussionist Ingar Zach, and hornist James Patterson, in addition to Simonsen and Lysne themselves.

Beneath Spektralmaskin’s brimming exterior lies an enigmatic heart. Slight sounds and timbres poke periodically through the darker corners of our listening, for a feeling that the album might be concealing as much as it lets through. The room embraces us but retains its riddles.

—Jennifer Gersten
Bandcamp:
sofamusic.bandcamp.com/albu…