Morten Søndergaard & Marie Højlund

Vocal Rhythms - from Recitation to Repetition & Resolution
Artist talk and performance by Morten Søndergaard & Marie Højlund

Sunday, June 14th, 2015 - 19:30h

Errant Bodies
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin
www.errantbodies.org


The Danish composer and sound artist Marie Højlund and the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard have collaborated in many ways, but first and foremost through exploring the relationship between words, sound and music together. Morten has written the lyrics for two of Marie Højlund’s albums with Marybell Katastrophy and they both take part in all sorts of music and art projects in the active scene around the members of the band (that also include Jakob Schweppenhäuser, Emil Thomsen and Klaus Q Hedegaard Nielsen). In the talk and performance at Errant Bodies they will talk and perform both solo and together.

Marie Højlund explores the voice as a disruptive agent dissolving the divisions between inside and the outside and the way it is rendered and translated through other objects. The voice as a temporary rhythmic and fragile environment. Our most faithful and intimate companion but consistently a strange stranger. She will use her own voice through looping, distorting, layering and processing in her performance, as well as present projects where she engages citizens’ voices in art projects, as in the project Lys, Landskab og Stemmer (www.lysogstemmer.dk) where she and Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen collected 758 different voices in East Jutland reading Inger Christensens poem Lys (Light) aloud. The recordings were transformed into a 24-speaker outdoor composition presented in six different sites, each six hours long, one for each site, unfolded over six evenings in 2011.

// Video clip from one of the six evenings at Trehøje: https://vimeo.com/32379599
// Performance with a high school choir at a shopping mall in Aarhus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVLSKhqnbvI

Morten Søndergaard is a poet, but he works in many others fields but always on the base of words. He often works with repetition and looping as medium and he will reflect on this in his piece at Errant Bodies, as well on difference between or coincidence with sound and sense. He will literally play his books and he will give his own personal reading of Brandon LaBelle’s book "Lexicon of the Mouth”.

// http://mortensondergaard.net/english/
// http://www.wordpharmacy.com

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Marie Højlund (born 1979) is a sound artist and composer and has exhibited sound art installations around Denmark including Love Alley, Kunsthal Aarhus, Kunsten Aalborg, Roskilde Museum for Samtidskunst and Spor Festival. As a composer under the alias Marybell Katastrophy she has won critical acclaim, awards, received numerous grants and commissions, released several albums and played concerts and festivals in Denmark, Germany, Austria, England, Ireland, France and Italy including Roskilde Festival (DK) and Nordklang (AU). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Audio Design at The Department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. In her practice-based and artistic research she is particularly interested in exploring different strategies to create dynamic atmospheres with sound and voices integrated into the physical environment in shared spaces in the Danish hospital.

Morten Søndergaard (born 1964) is one of the foremost of the generation of Danish poets to emerge onto the scene in the early nineties. Søndergaard’s first collection of poetry, Sahara i mine hænder (Sahara In My Hands) was published in 1992. This debut collection has been followed by a succession of works which have won him both critical acclaim and a number of literary awards. Language is Morten Søndergaard’s medium and his métier, one which he practises not only as a poet, but also as a translator, sound artist and literary editor. And while his craft is solidly rooted in the classic poetic tradition he is constantly intent on exploring the possibilities of language and new ways in which these can be presented. Over the years, alongside his written publications, this has resulted in musical and dramatic works and in recordings, exhibitions and installations centring on language and sound. Morten Søndergard’s most recent publication is The Process and Half the Kingdom (2010) and Pros and cons of developing wings (2013). - Barbara Haveland