CD – true blanking

A suite of over forty minutes is the outcome of this multimedia collaboration between Keith Rowe and Kjell Bjørgeengen. Rowe comes from a long line of free-form practitioners and is primarily an improvisational guitarist. Bjørgeengen is an experimental video artist who shows no fear in foraying into electronic music – he uses a synthesizer created by Dave Jones of the Experimental Television Center in New York and inputs signals from an oscillator that synchronises with video, highlighting the relationship between sound and image. The suite unfolds slowly, almost like a stream of consciousness, in which Rowe’s audio manipulations and Bjørgeengen’s video oscillators seamlessly interact, creating an immersive and hypnotic electroacoustic dialogue. The visual element, although absent in the audio version of the CD, is palpable through the sonic density and timbral depth with jagged textures and electric effects moving through complex levels. Rowe, known for his unconventional approach to the guitar, completely distances himself from traditional structures, preferring improvisation and the use of everyday objects to extract sounds. In this work, his manipulations become an integral part of the soundscape, embracing background noise, distortion and interference as essential elements of the composition. Bjørgeengen, for his part, inserts a visual aspect that, although not directly visible, is evoked through sound oscillations that seem to have a direct correspondence with the images he could have projected. The work turns out to be a layered listening experience, which requires dedication to be fully appreciated. The duo’s exploration questions the relationship between sound and space, between listener and artist, in which the boundaries between the audio and visual medium dissolve. A Thought for Two is, in this sense, yet another conceptual manifesto, a sonic journey that invites us to reflect on the concept of perception and sensorial interaction.
 

Keith Rowe, Kjell Bjørgeengen – A Thought for Two