LP – Sonic Pieces

On the perilous crest connecting the conceptual fields of the drone music, dark ambient, experimental and modern classical genres, Jakob Kirkegaard and We Like We – a collective composed of Josefine Opsahl, Katinka Fogh Vindelev, Katrine Grarup Elbo and Sara Nigard Rosendal – give life to a project, whose beats are definitely noir, cinematic and evocative, full of dark and dystopian landscapes, filled by a surreal and synthetic violence. The anxiety reminds one of some Ballard style scenographies and fascinates the listener, thanks to the attention to detail and its general power. The musicians choose an experimental register, sharp yet lyrical, disconnected from an ordinary materiality and more often in tune with a slightly magical and peripheral vision. The recordings were made in Copenhagen’s Thorvaldsens Museum, in the middle of the historic centre of the North European capital, a museum space born under the initiative of the King Federik VI, a symbolic place full of classicist suggestions. Among the cuts, the meandering obsession seems to be time, a threatening present tense, full of abstract weaves and attempts at sensitive narrations. Time Is Local was made from over 12-hours of live sound installation, resulting from performances in the museum. Regardless of how everything was produced, the work acts with cohesive and engaging lines, although we can’t exclude that most of the music sequences derive from improvisational sources, based on the specific settings the musicians were playing. We imagine the sounds and the severe marble statues by Bertel Thorvaldsen, mute spectators to this contemporary representation. Every track is the result of an acoustic architectural characteristic of the twelve rooms used for the performance, where all the possible relationships between the instruments (cello, voice, violin, percussion) have been explored. Kirkegaard manages the mechanisms of the encounter between the spaces and the performers, organizing memories and other kinds of audio information.

 

We Like We, Jacob Kirkegaard – Time Is Local