IT IF
16 minutes, 8 channel ambisonic composition for Amoenus 13:4 bespoke speaker system. London 2021 (Amoenus / IKLECTIK)
Composition commissioned by Amoenus and IKLECTIK, supported by the British Arts Council.
Swedish artist and composer Tomas Nordmark will investigate the use of space as a compositional & performative tool to further the development of his piece “It If”.
The use of the 3D sound space as a musical instrument is made possible through Auditif, a tactile 3D audio controller that allows for real time positioning as well as looping customised motions of the sound sources in space. If the length of the “spatial loops” are not synchronised with the musical time of the piece, a “spatial polyrhythm” is generated, with motions interweaving with the dynamics of the composition.
Project in collaboration with Amoenus and IKLECTIK
Project documentation: https://www.clotmag.com/oped/amoenus-w-iklectik-art-lab-artistic-explorations-into-3d-audio-by-agata-kik
Immersive Audio R&D: A Retrospective from AMOENUS on Vimeo.
THE NECK (II)
2 channel composition. London 2020
Composition supported by Sound & Music with a Francis Chagrin Award. Currently under production.
THE NECK (I)
24 minutes, 8 channel composition. Ljubljana 2019 (Museum of Transitory Art)
Composition commissioned by MoTA for the Arcade Gallery and previewed as an installation at Lutkovno gledališče / Ljubljana puppet theatre during the SONICA 2019 festival.
The Neck is an eight channel, 24 minute long composition work made by London-based, Swedish electronic music composer Tomas Nordmark. The poem “Näcken” by Swedish poet E.J. Stagnelius (1821-1823) serves as a point of departure for the work in which Nordmark investigates the obscurity of the mythological shape-shifting water sprite ”Näcken” (in Scandinavian folklore often depicted as a naked man luring humans down into his water with beautiful violin music) and tries to open up a dialogue with the creature itself. The composition uses slow and evolving phase-shifting calculations, a process reminiscent of the American downtown minimalists and inspired by the French literary OuLiPo group – yet the oscillating composition and narrative entwine in the spirit of a mythological mutation.
The composition was also part of the SONICA X IKLECTIK event in London, November 28:th 2019.
Supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee
Sound artists and composers Pascal Savy (FR/UK) and Tomas Nordmark (SE/UK) team up for ‘Memories of Lost Futures’, their new collaborative project presented at IKLECTIK for the first time. The London residents will use hundreds of years old sacred compositions as a point of departure for their performances and will seek to re-contextualise them into critical and forward-looking electronic compositions as a way to explore alternative forms of a future that failed to happen.
The late cultural theorist and writer Mark Fisher argued with the concept of hauntology (Jaques Derrida, 1993) that we are haunted by a future that failed to happen, thus leaving us in a stasis of the present. Fisher gives examples on the effect of hauntology within popular culture such as a the lack of real inventiveness in modern music that instead championing repetition of decades old concepts and styles – which Fisher argues has initiated “the slow cancellation of the future” (Franco Beradi, 2011).
Using ancient compositions embodying a sense of timeless transcendence as a form of extreme hyper-anachronism, Savy and Nordmark will perform two new electronic pieces manifesting the haunting state of a future that we lost. In the process they hope to use this hyper-anachronism as a possible vehicle for an aftertime. Both artists believes this aftertime could be a luminosity or a brilliance, concealed in archaic fragments and revealed through a process of transmutation.
Work-in-progress: The Future Hymn – a project aimed to discover a future contemplative tune via research and composition. The projects gathers researchers and practitioners in liturgical music and text as well as sound artists and composers.
Pre-study compositions:
- Contemplation #244, performed at Norrköpings Konstmuseum (Sweden), October 8:th 2016
- Contemplation #1, featured on split cassette tape with Swedish sound artist Edward Mokkila, fall 2016
Work-in-progress: Ebenmaß – a project looking on the bilateral symmetry as a composing strategy and a communicative tool.