04.06.16
Land Art Rebild, DK

The first nordic Drive In of Sound Art went to Rebild in Denmark as part of Land Art Rebild initiated by Lise Seier Petersen. A few years before a major storm caused huge damage to the forest, and served as the inspired for form and look of the Drive In of Sound Art.

Opening Speeches: Lise Seier Petersen and Morten Lønborg Friis
Piknik performance: Svein Ove Kirkhorn

The Artists:
Norway: Maia Urstad, Siri Austeen and Signe Lidén
Sweden: Anna Hedberg
Finland: Joonas Siren
Denmark: Trine Hylander Friis, Flopper and Ane Østergård
Iceland: Thurídur Jónsdóttir


Supported by:
Nordic Culture Point
Stiftelsen Clara Lachmann
Rebild Council
Kulturkanten Jutland
Arts Council Norway

Photo: Svein Ove Kirkhorn, Anette Bruun Hansen

Artists participating in this exhibit:

Maia Urstad


"Margareth’s bell"

The title refers to a story I read on internet when searching for information about the area around Rebild. It describes two bells from the Solberg Church, which are no longer in use. One bell is from around 1100 and represents one of the oldest of its kind in the country. The bells from that era are usually without inscription, but the Solberg bell has a cross and several tiny fonts, which are difficult to interpret because they are very small, and the characters are flipped. The first problems with the bell occurred in 1880, causing a sonic dissonance. Sixty years later, a crack was discovered, and after yet another 22 years, it was replaced. According to superstition, small shavings of a church bell had a healing effect on almost all human and animal suffering. Therefore, the bold and brave sneaked up to the bell around midnight - under the full moon when the magic was at its strongest - to obtain a piece of its healing power. The big Solberg bell carries traces of these nightly guests from ancient times. The little bell was dismantled in 1999. It has the inscription "Margrethe Wiffert 1610". This one, however, has no carved marks...
In this work, I build an imagined narrative around the bells, the nightly guests, Margrethe, and the inverted text on the big bell that is not possible to decipher. The voice is by Conrad Kemp.

Click for larger view

Siri Austeen


Revisiting Possible Spaces

In Revisiting Possible Spaces I use my own sonic experiences and memories as a starting point for this sound piece which is specially composed for Drive In Rebild. Aural horizon, scale and abstracted sonic everyday life is here key words. Through reflection on a handful of memory-based soundscapes * this notion of a familiar room at an unknown location was made.

I have long been committed to relationship between sound, place and identity and thereby become interested in the actual listening as action. Listening as both artistic practice and as a way of being in the world. Sound and listening is directly associated with time spent and therefore also with how time is used. How we spend our time and how we live our lives.

*

fathers bird feeders

mothers sewing Machine

neighbors staircase

a girlfriends beehive

my water flute

city tram

song to vacuum cleaner

water can on water


Click for larger view

Signe Liden


Wind Stories

"I think we should build instruments that assist sounds to write themselves in the air", Espen Sommer Eide said, so we started building wind-vibrating measurement-structures – mobile meteorological music instruments be tuned to the soundscape.

Testing, recording: One day in September 2015, we brought the prototypes of the instruments along and traveled to the northeastern tip of Norway, crossed the border to Russia and arrived at Nikel. The Dark Ecology project had invited us to do a temporary artwork in the polluted industry town Nikel during the Summer of 2016. We traveled there to prepare: Eide and I planed a concert in the partly scorched mountains above the city for the audience to walk with us while we were playing, listening and calibrating the instruments to the atmosphere.

History through the ear: During our stay in Nikel, we invited a group of pensioners for a "sound club" meeting and invited them to talk about their memories of sounds heard throughout their lives in the city.

Wind Stories is based on recordings from this trip, from the testing of instruments and conversations about the history through sounds.

Anna Hedberg


The wind takes us - movement and chance

Click for larger view

Joonas Siren


"Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?"

I remember one childhood summer, when I first realized that my father couldn’t hear the grasshoppers singing. I felt confused; why are there sounds that can not be heard by everybody?
This memory resurfaced a few years ago, when I was thinking more about my personal relation to sound.

To my knowledge the sound of singing grasshoppers is perhaps one of the few specific aural phenomenon that can be lost from hearing. Grasshoppers and crickets sing in a very high pitch between 12 – 20 kHz and these frequencies can be lost because of normal aging.

I find it poetic that there are sounds that are connected to the process of aging. The disappearance is somehow a reminder of our limited, transient existence.

"Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?" is a generative sound-work, where the different field recordings of grasshopper sounds are transposed/pitchshifted. A computer program continuously pitchshifts the recordings in real-time up behind the 20 kHz human hearing threshold, emulating the disappearance from everybody.

The computer also pitchshifts them down to 5 kHz enabling those have lost them to hear the grasshoppers again.
www.joonassiren.fi

Flopper


kitchen sink realism


Is that a floor boards creak
What was that ... a low humming from a bumblebee
And the freezer in the supermarket goes berserk
Is that the neighbor shaving?
Does the person living below shout at the dog
Kids singing in the staircase

The tiny sounds of everyday life court and mixed...
Like wreckage piled together as an unique structure
Even rain finds its place.

Ane Østergård


Sound Letter From My Holiday In Space.

Dear family. It has been some trip. It’s difficult to describe in words what really happened instead I photographed the past 100 years in one picture, and translated that picture into sound. The 'Sound Drive In' is my portal from space and where you can hear my letters.
Big hugs and take care, Band Ane

Thurídur Jónsdóttir


Hymni

In Hymni (meaning Psalm in Icelandic) I focus on a hidden voice of a blood centrifuge. All the material of the work derives from a recording of such machine found in the National University Hospital of Iceland in Reykjavik.
www.thuri.is

Trine Hylander Friis

Landscape Transcription

I am driving slowly through the forest with a rolled-down window, absorbing the details. Dark vertical closely spaced trunks, prickly crooked branches interspersed with tiny flashes of light, soft mossy ground, a smell of soil and half rotten leaves. I draw it all in. Accumulate.
The light changes, the landscape opens, the horizon makes my eyes water. I force them wide open, note how the clouds rapidly drift, the grass surge and bow flat on the ground. Filling my lungs to bursting point-


With support from Danish Composers' Society / Koda's Cultural Funds