Lichtbogen

LEMUR

Friday 11 September, at 20:30–21:15

290–450 kr

Please note that venues vary in capacity. A festival pass grants access to the programme, but entry to individual events cannot be guaranteed if a venue reaches full capacity. We therefore recommend arriving early. Admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.

In ensemble LEMUR's new work for light, instruments and self-built electronics, an orchestra of loudspeakers wakes to life, while four musicians knead shimmer and noise into sounding form.

Lichtbogen is a sonic fable woven from electrical arcs and fragments of Norwegian industrial history. Four soloists navigate a deliberately unstable sound world, shaped by the geometry of the room, its atmosphere, and the bodies within it. The sound is constantly moving, searching and splintering, suspended between order and collapse.

When a sufficiently high voltage is applied between two points, the air ionises and forms an electric arc. For LEMUR, this phenomenon becomes a compositional method: a way of organising sound, light and energy.

In Marmorsalen, acoustic sound, live electronics and Gard Gitlestad's lighting design are integrated into one single system. The quartet plays cello, flute, double bass and horn, while also using self-built electronic systems that connect them directly to the work’s electrical circuit.

The music crackles and seethes, forming dense masses of energetic sound that surge through the room. Acoustic or electronic — the distinction becomes difficult to tell. The composition takes shape, sometimes intimate as a campfire, other times uncontrollable and charged, like an electrical discharge on an industrial scale.

Want to know more?

LEMUR's work with electronics draws on the sound system tradition of reggae culture, where composition, production and technical craft are tightly interwoven.
Elektriske lysbuer were central to the Birkeland-Eyde process, which used electrical discharges to fix nitrogen from the air and produce nitrates for fertiliser. The process gave rise to Norsk Hydro and a large-scale expansion of Norwegian hydropower.
Lichtbogen is also the title of a piece by Kaija Saariaho (1986), performed by IEMA Ensemble on 18 September as part of the concert And Now, the Weather.
Interested in electricity? See also Volta Feedback with Yann Leguay.