Sold Out
Registration Full
VNM Festival 2023
Vox Organi: Day 1
Curated by
Moderated by
Mentored by
Collaborated with
No items found.
In ATEM, Sandra Boss stages a dialogue between human and machine. The MIDI-technology of the church organ is taken into play, not only to explore the super-human powers it has to offer, but moreover to expose its sonic possibilities where rhythmic patterns appear as structural and timbral effects. Suppression, exhaustment, excitation and release all coexist in this piece.
Since the early 1990s Blake Hargreaves has explored the sonic and expressive possibilities of the pipe organ through experimentation and improvisation. Recently this practice has expanded to deliberate encounters with unfamiliar instruments, excavating new creations at each novel interaction. Hargreaves has documented such actions with nearly 100 pipe organs across the Americas and Europe. Bringing this practice to the context of a live happening with the massive Casavant at Pacific Spirit is an honour and privilege for Hargreaves, to explore the realities of the present through the complex lens of the organ’s construction, community and land.
Sandra Boss (DK) is a composer who manifests the familiar in new and surprising ways. She works with home-built extensions and expansions of the classical instruments, and the organ has especially taken on a distinctive role in her practice. She has made works for church organs, reed organs, electronic organs and for home-built MIDI-controlled organs. What these works have in common is that they bend a musical reality in ways that were not thought possible. Her tightly shaped works are not easy to categorize, but arise as particularly attractive and distinctive musical sound universes.
Sandra Boss has a background in classical music and later studied electronic music at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. In 2019 she finished an artistic-based PhD on sound art from The University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has performed at numerous international venues including KRAAK Festival (Be), Detritus Festival (GR), Super Deluxe (JP), Klangkunst Festival (DE) and LAK – Festival for Nordic Sound Art (DK).
Since 2016, Blake Hargreaves has been recording improvisations on the world’s pipe organs and composing original works for them. The project seeks to find new sonic and conceptual/spiritual approaches to the instrument and is depicted in an upcoming film. His album Improvisations on the Pipe Organs of Europe, released on Ultra Eczema in 2019, was reviewed in Boomkat as “Among the most enchanting recordings of organ music we’ve heard (…) timeless and haunting”.
In 2020–2022 Hargreaves hosted the FutureStops Podcast, exploring the organ in the 21st century. He was the curator of the FutureStops Festival at Roy Thomson Hall and other venues in 2022. He directs the Fluorescent Friends label in Montreal, and has been the Co-Producer of the annual Cool Fest concert series since its inception in 2007. His other projects include releases on labels like Ecstatic Peace!, Olde English Spelling Bee, American Tapes, and InYrDisk, and he has been featured in publications like The Vice Photo Book and The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music.
Videography:
Mingtao Kong
Audio Documentation:
Dan Kibke
Videography:
Mingtao Kong
Audio Documentation:
Dan Kibke
