Monday 20 January 2025, 7.30pm
Mappa will bring the most interesting music from Central and Eastern Europe. Aldana Duoraan will play traditional Siberian khomus, Tomáš Niesner will perform guitar primitivism muddied by Czech soundscapes. Antalová and Myhr will present hybrid Norwegian-Slovak folk music, the sound of the fujara and seljefløyte. Michaela Turcerová will make the saxophone a percussion instrument and Line Gate will perform a hurdy-gurdy meditation for Vojtěch Havel.
Growing up in the Sakha Republic, one of the indigenous autonomies in Eastern Siberia, Aldana Duoraan was drawn to the traditions of her people. She began playing the khomus — a sort of mouth harp — at age six, and graduated from musical school majoring in the traditional folklore of the Sakha people. Basing her practice and performance around different types of khomus, Duoraan creates waves of reflective tones and overtones. The resulting compositions retain the feel of minimalist modular experiments, introspective and deep. Now based in Prague, Duoraan will play in duo with Tomáš Niesner.
https://rehole.bandcamp.com/album/s-kut
Tomáš Niesner is a Czech sound artist and guitarist. His soundscapes are full of echoes of American primitivism, hazy ambient surfaces, field recordings and emotional reflections of the surrounding landscape. Niesner combining elements of fingerstyle guitar, musique concrète and drone, it's an elemental tapestry of enveloping textures, shimmering guitar motifs and soaring synth sounds. He also plays in the duo Šimanský Niesner, which drew inspiration from the roots of 1950s classic country blues or American folk songs. But also the cross section of the Mississippi Delta and the Appalachian Mountains' traditional music informed by atonal elements of the European avant-garde.
Slovakian flautist Michaela Antalová and Norwegian double bassist Adrian Myhr blend traditional folk musics from their respective countries with field recordings to compose new hybrid soundscapes. The Oslo-based couple have a background in avant-garde, contemporary, improv and jazz music and recorded a debut album together at their home during the Covid-19 lockdown. The meditative Zvony (Bells) featured harmonium, field recordings of crickets and a Slovak male choir. This year’s follow up, Sing Nightingale, released by Slovakian label mappa (2024), is an intoxicating folk record. Featuring a field recording of a nocturnal nightingale, the album experiments with instruments from around the world, with the duo exploring their rich tonal textures. Myhr plays harmonium and double bass. Antalová plays drums, Slovakian fujara (a tall, upright wooden bass flute originally played by shepherds) and a Norwegian seljefløyte (a traditional flute very similar to the Slovak overtone flute koncovka). Their music finds a strange, soothing universality in the folk sounds of different countries.
Michaela Turcerová is a musician and composer from Slovakia, currently living in Copenhagen. She plays alto/soprano saxophone and bass clarinet and composes in the realm of partly open scores, (un)conventional notations, conceptual ideas, minimalism, and often explores the use of physical space. She leads her own bands, doudouči ensemble and ensemble šum.um, and is working on her solo project for modified alto saxophone, IN FLUX. She is also a member and part-composer of the band ALAWARI and Wolfskin Ensemble. Turcerová is an excavator, always looking for new worlds hidden within her saxophone. In OTO she will present her still fresh solo album alene et (mappa, 2024).
As a project, Line Gate has been undergoing a slow, steady transformation, much like the longform drone works that have come to characterise it. What began as a band in 2010 and last appeared as the resonance of a lone hurdy-gurdy on "Den" in 2017 has now blossomed into gradually unfolding meditations. The gently modulating drone of the hurdy-gurdy remains present during the first piece, along with its very characteristic (almost psychedelic) resonances and overtones. However, the listener's ear is almost immediately drawn to another sound source - the human voice. Apex and Trap (mappa, 2020, 2024) presents an interplay between these two instruments, which, strangely enough, are positioned in a similar space on the frequency spectrum. The result is a mind-bending interplay between the hurdy-gurdy and the voice. More than ever, Line Gate's music resonates not just in sonic terms, but also in its deep humanity and social relevance.
