Artist : Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir
[ concert ]
Time :
Sat • 19:30 - 20:12
Location : Åbne Scene, Godsbanen
Performance by : Apparat
A long-form work for brass quartet, thundersheets, and live electronics. The ensemble is a fragile ecosystem operating close to collapse, attempting to sustain activity under conditions that are possibly unsupportable.
Info about the piece
Intraloper is a long-form work for brass quartet, thundersheets, and live electronics that treats the ensemble as a fragile ecosystem held in unstable equilibrium. The quartet functions as a living system operating close to collapse, attempting to sustain activity under conditions that are possibly unsupportable. The piece was developed through workshops and dialogue with the members of Apparat.
Musical material circulates through the ensemble in continuous processes of simulacrum, refraction, and displacement. Gestures pass from instrument to instrument, copied, distorted, and reabsorbed. Lines fold back onto themselves or reappear in altered form, forming chains of imitation reminiscent of molecular mimicry and biological evolution. Within this confined sonic environment, the distinction between individual voices becomes increasingly unstable. Sound propagates across the quartet as a shared field rather than as discrete instrumental lines. Growth persists, but only through mutation, interference, and accumulation.
Thundersheets and live electronics extend the ensemble’s ecology outward. They introduce external pressures that disturb the internal balance of the quartet, producing zones of resonance and reflection through which the instruments must renegotiate their position. The work also draws on aspirational prayers in The TibetanBook of the Dead, texts intended to guide the deceased through the intermediate state between death and rebirth. Unconcluded in language, the beginnings of two new invocations occur throughout the piece:
“O, as I roam in cyclic existence driven by deep-seated reflection…” – “O, as I roam in cyclic existence driven by deep-seated infection…”
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Web: www.bergrun.com
Icelandic composer Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir (1987) follows her inner logic in her approach to composition, sometimes integrating sound and other phenomena into an indivisible whole – creating mutable, breathing, living structures through experimental performance practices and notation.
Within her research, Snæbjörnsdóttir finds the topic of control to be the richest area of inquiry: How to engineer an environment that demarcates more or less space for individual personalities and opinions to enter, and how to elicit responses that will surround the desired outcomes in varying performance environments.
Her works have been commissioned by some of the world’s leading ensembles, festivals, and venues – including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, INA GRM, National Sawdust, Prototype Festival, Sequences Art Biennal, Tectonics Festival, Nordic Music Days and Klang Festival, among others.
Festivals and ensembles that have presented Snæbjörnsdóttir’s music include the Oslo Philharmonic, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Nordic Affect, Cikada, KNM Berlin, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart, Warsaw Autumn, ISCM’s World New Music Days, Ultima Festival, Only Connect, Heroines of Sound, Sound of Stockholm, and more. Snæbjörnsdóttir holds a master’s degree in composition from Mills College, California, where she studied with the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Zeena Parkins, and Fred Frith, and she currently resides in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Her first full length LP Skinweeper was released earlier this year on Smekkleysa Records, and upcoming projects include a concert length work for viibra flute septet choreographed by Margrét Bjarnadóttir, to be premiered at Reykjavík Arts Festival.
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Apparat is a Berlin-based brass ensemble dedicated to contemporary music. Rooted in a core quartet, the ensemble collaborates with composers, sound-artists, improvisers, and a cohort of unique Berlin-based brass instrumentalists in the presentation of work ranging widely in scale and format.
Having presented programs in venues such as the Philharmonie Luxembourg and Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, since 2024 the ensemble appeared at a series of festivals including the Ultraschall Festival (Berlin), Eclat Festival (Stuttgart), KLANG (Copenhagen), and Dark Music Days (Reykjavík), alongside concluding an eight-concert series at Berlin’s KM28.
In the context of EnsembleKollektiv Berlin, the ensemble has appeared in Musikfest and Maerzmusik of the Berliner Festspiele.
Mathilde Conley, trumpet
Samuel Stoll, horn
Weston Olencki, trombone
Max Murray, tuba
