Artist : Mike Sheridan
[ concert ]
Time :
Wed • 21:00 - 21:50
Location : turkis
Mike Sheridan turns towards the theme of touch in a performance with the rare French instrument Cristal Baschet and an analog synthesizer. He traces the heightened state where presence and perception converge in an exploration of the tension between control and surrender. What resonates, and what slips beneath the surface?
Info about the piece
Mike Sheridan turns towards the theme of touch – the heightened state where presence and perception converge in an exploration of the tension between control and surrender. What resonates, and what slips beneath the surface? Sheridan has found inspiration to investigate his own experience with dyscalculia: How does one’s work project itself when conventional music theory remains a black box? It came as a powerful reflection that his difficulties with numbers may have had a much greater influence on his music than he had previously thought.
Touch has been the title of Sheridans work over the past year. Sheridan is one of only a very small number of instrumentalists in the world who perform on the rare French Cristal Baschet. The sound sculpture consists of metallic tones that are set into vibration when the mounted glass rods are bowed with wet hands. The instrument has its roots back to the pioneering concrete music of the 1950s and 1960s. He works with few, but rather distinctive sound sources.
The Cristal is an extraordinary timbral instrument that is entirely acoustic. His synthesizer is a 1960’s electronic music studio in a suitcase. It contains the essential electronic building blocks that he then combines, and he is fascinated by instruments from the very earliest era of electronic music. The quality of sound and instrumental response plays a big role. The Cristal is a dream for him to play, and it has allowed him to develop acoustic means of expression over the past 15 years. He comes from a background in 100% digital electronic music, but his work gradually progressed into analog or physical realms.
The combination between the analog synthesizer and the sound sculpture could in principle have happened already in the mid-50’s and 60’s, yet what feels natural for him to pursue in terms of sensibility and aesthetics, emerges from the perspective that he inhabits today – not from nostalgia. Performing live, he attempts to trace his active listening through his own intuitive space, and to seize the moments. It manifests as shifting structures in blocks of ambiance.
Credit: André Hansen
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Mike Sheridan (1991) is an artist who is easily fascinated. Sound sculptures, music machines, and sample manipulations come together in his music, which carries a curious, shifting tonal language between electronica and experimental music.
His first album I Syv Sind (2008) crossed into the Danish mainstream with its ambient starting point being a Nordic, crackling tone. Since then, his career has traced a unique path through both theatre and film music, as a DJ, and through a wide range of artistic collaborations and concerts with, among others, Palle Mikkelborg, Marilyn Mazur, August Rosenbaum, Jakob Bro, The Danish Youth Ensemble, Garth Knox, Fred Frith, Janus Rasmussen, and Kölsch.
As one of very few instrumentalists in the world, he plays the rare French Cristal Baschet glass instrument. This sculptural instrument consists of metal rods that are set into vibration when the mounted glass rods are rubbed with wet hands. The instrument was invented in the 1950’s by the two Frenchmen Bernard and François Baschet as an acoustic counterpart to the groundbreaking musique concrète of the time. Sheridan’s music is currently moving toward an expression centered on touch – more specifically, the state in which presence in the moment intensifies and the senses sharpen in the act of discovery itself.
At the concert at SPOR, Sheridan performs on his instruments, Cristal and synthesizer, in an exploration of the immediate – of that which necessarily exists beneath the surface from the very first contact of touch. Sheridan spans musical traditions and personal expression – in a search for new sonic spaces filled with associations and impressions.