This year my annual most memorable list of films, books, LPs and museums is over at my personal website.
Login premieres at Mercat De Les Flores, Barcelona, Dec 3rd, 2014.
Login is a contemporary dance piece dealing with our increasingly digital lives and consequences of existing in hyper-reality. What if our our digital reality breaks apart? The piece is by Catalunian choreographer Nuria Guiu Sagarra. I've created the music and sound design, and perform it live on stage. This is a continuation of our work from La Muda (2013).
The performance is at Mercat De Les Flores, a performing arts theatre in the center of Barcelona. This is part of the SALMON Festival for new European performance arts. We have two performances, Wednesday December 3rd at 19:30 and again Thursday December 4th at 19:30.
Sony's Little Big Planet 3 for the Playstion 4 is out today, Nov 18th.
The game was developed by Sumo Digital in the UK. I was commisioned to create music for one of the levels, the "old-skool russian steampunk" space-rocket level. The score is dynamically mixed and structured by the game engine depending on gameplay. Here is a 90 sec excerpt where most of the elements appear.
It's not usually this busy during gameplay but gives a sense of content and tone. After unlocking the level the music is available for use and remix in building your own levels and worlds.
Little Big Planet is out now everywhere on Big Little Planet, and of course through the Playstation store and websites.
Portal, a dance performance by Nuria Guiu with live music by GMM, premieres October 20th at Oktoberdans.
A portal is a doorway – to past, present or future worlds - to different realities - to different versions of ourselves.
Portal revolves around the themes in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now and his term digiphrenia, which tries to capture the experience of living multiple editions of ourselves simultaneously, especially in the digital world where we exist as multiple profiles. Social media changes the relationship between our body and our consciousness - and so our understanding of time and space changes.
Are we living our lives, or simulating living?
Saturday July 5th, Ugress performs live at the Bygdalarm festival.
With tractors. And Real Ones. And lasers. And beautiful Norwegian fjords. And everything at the same time. Just very, very, loud.
The tractor elements are based on the previous Tractor Symphony comission of 2010, now upgraded for a live, main-stage electro-folk experience. Also includes elements from the recent Sounds Of Hardanger.
The final part of my work in Rome, Can't Climb Your Wall, a pop-song finale. The lonely vampire Draculus is haunting an empty Rome, with his unrecruited love for the ghostly gladiatrix Moria. It's hard to be a vampire and allergic to blood.
Also available are videos of part one Rome, part two Draculus and part three Moria. Each episode introduces the various sounds and graphics. And there are reports from each of the 24 production days in the personal blog.
Rome, 2089. A new sonic universe, a lonely vampire, a pacifist gladiatrix, wild hanniphants.
Singing water fountains, metro tunnel choirs, glitchy trams, screaming bikes, lipstick clouds, auto-tuned hairdressers, distant cannons... The everyday sounds of Rome of 2014 becomes a musical expedition into a ficitional future Rome of 2089. A lonely vampire roams the empty streets, secretly in love. A gladiatrix fights to keep her sister out of human trafficking. Noisy grafitti trashes with ancient statues and modern street-art.
Norwegian composer Gisle Martens Meyer presents his work from a month's residency at Circolo Scandinavo in Rome, Italy. He records mundane and peculiar sounds from the city, turning them into expressive musical instruments. Using this "sonic orchestra" of Rome, he reveals a story of love, loneliness and survival in a strange, but recognizable city.
Sound, music, live visual graphics. Expected duration 30 minutes, free entrace, simple refreshments. The artist presents his work and methods before the performance, and there is an open dialogue after the show.
I'm staying in Rome, Italy for all of June, a residency at Circolo Scandinavo. Through the stay I will create a work, to be presented at the end. The process is documented with daily notes.
Rome was a beautiful, post-apolyptic ruin already centuries ago. Way before being abandoned was cool.
This is going to be awesome.
Parked Conversations - tiny stories happening in our pockets.
Research video experiment, using tracking and on-screen messages. I'm currently trying out various techniques for integrating and revealing digital content in the real world.
A two minute video, how I am using an electronic violin as a sound source.
With programming I can externally control the pitch of the string before post-processing, leaving me to use one hand creating source sounds on the violin, and the laptop handles pitch and processing which I can then further manipulate with another hand. I do not have any ambitions to play it traditionally, I find it more interesting as a texture source.
(I forgot to mention in the video; of course on stage or in recordings you don't hear the original pitch of the acoustic string vibrating, as you do in the room in the video.)
I started using the violin for last years Nebular Spool project, where it mostly worked as an offline sound source for creating sounds for further processing. But I really liked playing on it, and for the Jeanne D Arc silent movie performances I brought it on stage with me. It takes a bit of planning and progamming, but once all is set up I can concentrate on dynamics and texture and realtime manipulation of my own playing.
Here's a pop-surrealist example of a track using only the violin, a B4 plugin, beats and voice processing.
This one was done with an acoustic violin last summer. I would prefer to use an acoustic violin, the sound possibilities are so great, the wooden body is highly sensitive, every part of the violin can be touched/manipulated and used for live sound creation, but for the same reason, the sensitive body is really loud by itself, and also easily picks up other sounds on a stage, the electric version is a bit more practical to "hide" the original source sonically.
I am also (ab)using the violin for an upcoming project with Portuguese choreographer Gui Garrido, you can see it in action in this video report from our recent work in Lisbon.
A one minute music and video report from work with portuguese choreograph Gui Garrido in Lisbon, March 2014.
We’re working on a top secret project for 2015, the concept of realtime music videos.
Live on stage, we want to recreating the eternal surfing of Youtube music video experience, CLICK and you are somewhere else, with ourselves as the performing band and the Youtube video-makers at the same time.
We spent two weeks writing music, recording tracks, trying out various techniques, ideas, prototypes for stage performance. We now have a bunch of great tracks with various themes and concepts for performing, and currently working on raising funding.
Only Connect is a sci-fi music festival in Oslo inspired by the ideas and the universe of the influential British author J.G. Ballard. This year's festival is dedicated to Jon Bing (1944-2014), author, professor and science fiction enthusiast who got J.G. Ballard translated to Norwegian. Mr Bing was instrumental in creating this years festival but sadly passed away earlier this year.
I'm supposed to be a hermit composing in a bubble right now, not performing, but Mr Bing is one of my childhood heroes, I still want to live aboard the library solar-sail spaceship Alexandria. And Mr. Ballard one of my favorite authors. (I don't want to live in his high-rise.)
And also, actually, exposing children to the possible technological mayhem of machines taking control and making us dance is a hard job but somebody's got to do it.
There is the intriguing festival programme.
Expedition time. March 22nd I perform the comissioned work "The sound of Hardanger" at Oslo Konserthus.
For the constitutional anniversary I did a musical work based on everyday sounds from the Hardanger region in Western Norway. I spent some time in the region last summer recording sounds, and then building a digital orchestra representing the sounds to compose a work. This was presented as online music videos back in January, and this Saturday I will perform a live visual version, as part of the anniversary opening galla.
For more information see the Hardanger 2014 website.
The song that never dies is in a zombie film.
Loungemeister is in the second Dead Snow film of the bloody brilliant Tommy Wirkola.
In cinemas now. Trailer. Happy Valentines.
Lyden Av Hardanger - a musical sound expedition report.
2014 is the 200th year anniversary of the Norwegian constitution of 1814. The western Norwegian fjord region of Hardanger asked me to create a sound report from the region, to be presented online as a clip, and as a live performance in Oslo Konserthus in March. The digital version is now ready, in two video formats: The Expedition Report (above), and a Research Report.
This second video documents the sources and themes of the sounds in a slightly more detailed manner.
The sounds from the region were recorded during a highly dangerous field expedition in June 2013. We barely survived glaciers, tents, rocks, ferries, teenagers. Then I catalogued all the takes, cleaned the sounds, found their musical pitch or rhythmical essence, and built expressive, performative digital instruments from them. These are then used to write and build the composition, and will also be used for the live performance in March.
More information (in Norwegian) at official website Hardanger 2014.
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Cinema electronica. For the screen inside your head. Made by GMM. We have a Twitter. And Tumblr and Instagram. |
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Latest full album Pushwagner. Listen to the whole album right here, and buy digital or physical copy directly from me. |
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Planet U, the latest Ugress project. EPs are continuously released. EP1: Planetfall EP2: Lost Ruins EP3: Wulfhoken EP4: Luftslott EP5: Time Machine EP6: Another Planet |
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