Low frequencies, music that is as much silences as it is sounds. Someone breathing into a trombone mouthpiece, sparsely scattered piano tones lingering like smoke. The music of Rasmus Borg & Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø exists in an almost Lynchian world where shadows move in the corner of your eye and where nothing is what it seems.
Rasmus and Henrik met as students at the academy of music in Gothenburg in 2010 and started to play together based on a common interest in composers like John Cage, Anthony Braxton and Morton Feldman. Starting off with a spontaneous high-energy approach, the duo played music based on fast interaction and big gestures. 2012 brought a dramatic downscaling of the musical material and a focus on low frequencies and long durations within a narrow tonal and dynamic range. The cd 120112 was released in April on Edition Wandelweiser records, and is the result of this process. This is the long distance meeting of two ongoing solo projects that shifts between melting together and creating dynamic contrasts.
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø lives in Oslo, where he is currently doing a masters degree in improvised music. An ongoing love/hate relationship with the trombone has led him to explore both the boisterous and brassy side of the instrument, as well as it’s microscopic and ‘electronic’ sound possibilities. His varying interests come to play in projects ranging from so-called reductionism and free improv to free jazz and contemporary composed music.
Rasmus Borg is a pianist and composer originally from Sweden. After studies in piano & improvisation at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and a bachelor’s degree in composition at the Academy of music and drama in Gothenburg. As a pianist he is involved in several ongoing projects and as a composer he is interested in instrumental (and vocal) music. His musical conception oscillates between a kind of metrical music, and music that grows from silence.
Rasmus Borg & Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø is presented in collaboration with Brötz.