Sonisk Selskap 2025
Hope in Darkness. 10th to 12th of January
Musicians (residency and concert):
Kristin Bolstad: vocals
Ragnhild Sannes: cello
Owen Weaver: percussion
Bodil Lunde Rørtveit (Sonic Sheriff): vocals
Dancers from ImproLaBergen:
Malin Nøss Vangsnes-Weaver
Ewa Lorenc
Katja Nyqvist
Rita María Muñoz Farías
Johanne Sundfør
Guest: Veronica Robles Thorseth
Choreographic score:
Rita María Muñoz Farías and Veronica Robles Thorseth
Live illustration:
Øystein Nesheim
Crew:
Technical Director & Sound Engineer: Leo Preston
Assistant Sound Engineer & House Technician: Priscilla Miranda Navas
All cameras (dancers, visual artist & musicians): Nils J. Nesse
Streaming & video technical: Andreas Lassen
This was the eighth edition of Sonisk Selskap in Wrap’s AV Lab. The three day laboratory was led by Bodil Lunde Rørtveit and recorded by Leo Preston. The laboratory ended as always with a 30 minute improvised multi-media concert (on the 12th of January) with dance improvisation by dancers from ImproLaBergen in Wrap’s storage room, and the Big Project Room. Øystein Nesheim made a live drawing, using pencil and paint markers in the Big Project Room, responding to the dancers and music in real-time.
A live audience experienced the musicians live in Studio B, together with projections showing the dancers in the Big Project Room and storage room, as well as Nesheim’s live drawing.
The small size of the ensemble, and the fact that they worked 100% acoustically, lent its self to a particularly focused process. Rørtveit structured the sessions into a series of improvisations based on particular themes and ideas which the group developed through brief discussions between each improvisation. As the title Hope in Darkness suggests, several improvisations explored contrasts such as light and dark, and these starting points developed into further explorations, relating to the interests and sonic palettes which emerged within the ensemble.
A few improvisations were done with the entire ensemble wearing insulated headphones, which enabled them to focus on and play with sonic details within a quieter register, such as breath and the sounds created by subtle movements and friction.
In order to provide more acoustic scope during these sessions, Preston rigged up Wrap’s very long corridor as a reverb chamber, and used this to augment the natural reverberations in the studio, through the PA. It was also thought that singers/musicians might choose to explore the possibility of performing in the corridor, although this never seemed necessary and wasn’t taken up.
It was important not to break the flow of the sessions with technical adjustments/discussions, and use of headphones was initially dropped when musicians felt that what they heard was more problematic than helpful. However, Preston continued to adjust the headphone mix from his monitoring position in Studio A based on the comments from the ensemble, and later the headphones were re-introduced with great success.
Recordings were made using 20 inputs with the dLive mixing console and a third party audio-over-network I/O.
Audio was distributed to other rooms using DX168 stage-box’s as part of the dLive system, and video was distributed using NDI infrastructure.