BJ Nilsen is a Swedish composer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. His work primarily focuses on the sounds of nature and how they affect humans. Recent work has explored the urban acoustic realm and industrial geography and mining in the Arctic region of Norway and Russia. His original scores and soundtracks have featured in theatre, dance performances and film.
Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Melbourne, Australia, now based in Berlin. Her performance practice stretches across various genres encompassing elements of improvised, contemporary classical, experimental, and popular music. She has studied contemporary classical repertoire with renowned cellists including Charles Curtis and Séverine Ballon, and developed a strong practice in improvisation and sonic arts through collaborative projects both in Australia and internationally.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is an Icelandic musician, painter, sound- and performance artist and founding member of Stilluppsteypa. He studied sound art in Hannover, Germany from 1998 to 2003, where he is currently living. His musical output has been variously described as collage, quiet drone manipulations, and calm and minimal, which offers a range of still, contemplative momants, contrasted with more discordant (though not necessarily noisy) ones.
Heiligenstadt is the documentation of an encounter of the three artists in 2018.
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Released in an edition of 300 copies
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Fragment Factory, 2021
Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts), and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.
In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, and actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement.
Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which has sometimes included people like Marja Ahti, Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and La Monte Young. Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Longform Editions. Judith is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart 2021-22 and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is an visual, sound and performance artist born in Akureyri, Iceland in 1977. He studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory Den Haag, Holland in 1997 to 1998, and received MFA at Fachochshcule fur bilende kunst Hannover, Germany in 2004. Sigmarsson exhibits his paintings & drawings internationally but is probably most known for his energetic performances at a wide array of venues.
His approach is that of the trembling artist, struggling to make sense and direction out of a creative impulse. Regardless of the medium, there is a continuous search for order and chaos throughout his body of work. For some time he has been releasing solo recordings with albums on Trente Oiseaux, ERS, Helen Scarsdale, Fire Inc., Hanson Records, Bawag Contemporary Vienna, Korm Plastics, Bottrop Boy, Ultra Eczema and De Player.
