The 40 minutes long performance recorded live at Permian in Tokyo will be released on vinyl and on streaming platforms April 24:th 2026. To celebrate the release the duo will announce new performances of the piece ‘One Step Closer to the Abyss’, previously performed in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Beijing, Paris and Sousse.
London based composer and musician Tomas Nordmark and Paris based musician and visual artist Per Hüttner have been working together since 2021. Together they develop creative and visionary performances using the technology platform the EEGsynth. The EEGsynth is a hard- and software platform that allows performers to create sounds and images using neural signals from the human nerves and brain. The technology is unique because it has been has been developed by European artists, musicians in close collaboration with neuroscientists since 2014. In the performances the artists use measurements of a performer’s brain signal on his/her head using an electro encephalogram (EEG) in real time.
In the performance entitled “One Step Closer to the Abyss” they present music and images that are generated and modulated by a performers brain activity in real time. They work with sounds from a traditional electric guitar which has been modulated by the brain multiple times to create aesthetically interesting sounds. They also have dynamic visuals that are influenced in real time by the brain. The performance takes its inspiration from Mark Fisher’s writings and his reflections on the weird and the eerie: how humans and art deal with the unknown in their everyday and in artistic creation.
The EEGsynth platform is used by artists and researchers in Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands and in the UK. They use signals from the human brain, but also from trees, fish and microbes to create performances. The team has made over 80 performances and workshops in a number of European countries, Mexico, Egypt, Brazil and the US. There has been a lot of interest both in the performances and in the technology. For instance French film maker Fabien Guillermont has made a full length documentary on the project.
Per Hüttner is a Swedish visual artist who lives and works in Paris, France and in Stockholm, Sweden. He graduated from Konsthögskolan in Stockholm 1993. He also studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin 1991-1992. He is mostly known for his photographic work and for his interactive, changing and travelling exhibition projects. A number of monographs about his practice has been published including Per Hüttner, 2003; I am a Curator, 2004; Repetitive Time 2006, Xiao Yao You 2006 and Democracy and Desire 2007
Tomas Nordmark is a Swedish-born artist, composer and producer living and working in London, United Kingdom. He was educated at the Department of Culture and Society at the University of Linköping in Sweden where he studied Audio Culture and Contemporary Art. His compositions and works have been featured in opera, public installations, film, theatre plays and in exhibitions. Since 2019 he has released music on the Brooklyn-based label Valley of Search with live performances in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Helsinki, Ljubljana, Tokyo and more.
Composed and performed live by Per Hüttner and Tomas Nordmark at Permian | Tokyo, May 31, 2024
Recorded, edited, mixed + artwork designed by Tomas Nordmark
Photography + video still by Per Hüttner
Mastered by Philip Granqvist
The artists would like to thank Riuichi Daijo, Philip Granqvist, Atau Tanaka, Jo Kazuhiro, Christophe Charles and Carl Stone
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
2 channel composition. London 2020
Composition supported by Sound & Music with a Francis Chagrin Award.
Project was post-poned due to the pandemic.
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.
More info about the project at MoTA
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.
The Future Hymn was a project aimed to discover a future contemplative tune via research and composition.
Project website
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
Ebenmaß – a project looking on the bilateral symmetry as a strategy for composing.