Trondheim Voices & Eirik Hegdal
Biography Trondheim Voices & Eirik Hegdal
Trondheim Voices
is a groundbreaking Norwegian ensemble of improvising vocalists, constantly challenging and changing the framework for how a vocal ensemble can produce sound art. Since 2001, they have made solid statements as developers within vocal and improvised music, expanding the traditional concert format, searching for new music in the interaction between the singers, the audience, the surroundings and new technology.
Through their many collaborations with cutting edge composers and stage artists, and especially through their collaboration with sound designer Asle Karstad, Trondheim Voices has reached a whole new level of improvising, with both music, movement, new technology, space, and time. The subtle interaction between the singers, the sound-designer, the audience, and the moment, is their point of navigation – making new music through listening and letting go.
These voices are like no choir you ever heard. They can form pale clouds of sound, or pools of glowing light, or bright shafts of pure sound. Phrases can soar before suddenly reversing direction and travelling backwards, but along a different tangent. Rising from the luminous sound beds — sometimes lush, sometimes austere – float a disembodied melody from an ancient world, an overheard conversation, a whisper from the past, the rumblings of a distant storm, the babble of children, or something that sounds like the ambient chatter of an asteroid belt. The individual strands cluster, entwine, swell, and then disperse, perhaps to leave a single voice exposed in all its natural beauty before others return to take up its cues and head off in a new direction. (Richard Williams, music publicist and former director, Jazzfest Berlin)
