Smalltown Supersound presents

Music for solo percussion and electronics, from 1981 to 2026.

Kjell Samkopf has been making music at the intersection of percussion, electronics and sound art since the early 1970s. His work has always been oriented to sound itself as primary material: its texture, its spatial behaviour, its capacity to exist beyond the boundaries of the concert hall. A meeting with John Cage in 1983 opened new ways of thinking about composition, and the encounter left a mark still resonant in everything he makes.

This concert marks the reissue, on the Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, of Samkopf’s 1981 solo album, Music for solo percussion and electronics, recorded at the Studio of Henie Onstad Art Centre. He will perform excerpts from the original album alongside the world premiere of a new work. Heard more than four decades later, the album material reveals the continuity of his preoccupations: the vibraphone as a resonating body, electronics as extension rather than effect.

Samkopf's new work, The Cloud of Unknowing, takes its title from an anonymous 14th-century mystical text. Samkopf uses the writing as a generative system, translating fragments into numbers that shape melody, rhythm, form and layering. The result is quiet and precise: a solo vibraphone surrounded by eight channels of sound, nine points in a circle, a space designed for concentrated listening.

Programme

Underveis / On the Way (1981)

For solo vibraphone

P.G.A. G.H. / Because of G.H.(1981)

For solo vibraphone

Oppfinnelse nr. 5 / Invention No. 5 (1981)

For percussion and electronics, excerpt

The Cloud of Unknowing (shortened version), world premiere

For solo vibraphone and eight-channel sound file

Artist talk

Kjell Samkopf and Joakim Haugland (Smalltown Supersound) in conversation about the reissue of Kjell Samkopf: Music for solo percussion and electronics

Want to know more?

• Kjell Samkopf studied composition with Finn Mortensen in the early-to-mid 1970s, at a time when Mortensen’s open approach to contemporary music was shaping a generation of Norwegian composers. In 1994, Samkopf became Norway’s first professor of percussion.
• Joakim Haugland, founder of Smalltown Supersound, on discovering the music of Kjell Samkopf': “When I started Smalltown Supersound in 1993, as a spotty teenager at upper secondary school in Flekkefjord, my greatest role model was Per Platou and his Dbut Records. I wanted to be like Dbut, then and now. The records Platou released made me understand that it was possible to put out music far, far beyond the beaten track. One of the records Platou released was by Kjell Samkopf. The first seed had been planted.”
• Samkopf’s compositional method in The Cloud of Unknowing draws on Marcel Duchamp’s Erratum Musical from 1913, in which chance operations generate musical material. Here Samkopf derives nine sequences of 37 numbers in random order — one for each note of the three-octave vibraphone — and uses them to determine melody, rhythm, form and layer.