Icelandic compositional auteur Daníel Bjarnason always has an eye for the subtle, succinct, and shocking. As it is evident of his work previously with Sinfonietta Cracovia (especially during Unsound Festival 2010 in Krakow), the composer pushes boundaries sonically by creating an alluding atmosphere that mangles emotions and evokes a rich experience to anyone who comes across his performances. Bjarnason spoke with URB briefly about his upcoming performance at Alice Tully Hall for Unsound Festival New York’s 2011 opening night. Check out the interview, along with an exclusive MP3 after the jump.
DOWNLOAD “Sorrow Conquers Happiness” HERE
URB: Can you tell us briefly about your background in music leading up to your recent album for Bedroom Community ?
DANIEL BJARNASON : My background is in classical music having studied piano, composition and conducting. However I have always been interested in broad spectrum of music and I am lucky enough to have been able to collaborate with with some very different musicians from different musical backgrounds. For my last album “Processions” I worked closely with Valgeir Sigurdsson during the recording and post-production and that also opened my eyes in a new way to the possibilities of the recording studio as a creative factor in my music.
URB: What was the process of composing Music for Solaris and collaborating with Ben Frost and Sinfonietta Cracovia like ?
DB: The music was composed through improvisation as me and Ben watched through Tarkovsky’s Solaris a couple of times and recorded what we played. That was the only time in the whole process that we watched the film. I played prepared piano and Ben played processed guitar. We then chose the best bits of the improv sessions and started glueing it together and also using a program called Melodyne to give us some pitch info on the sound clouds Ben was making and the quirky piano notes from the prepared piano. I then wrote alot of the music out for strings and we did a workshop with the Sinfonietta in Krakow a few months prior to the premiere. Much of the string writing is actually an interpretation of what Ben was producing on his giutars with all the delays and stuff, so it was a really interesting challenge to write that out for the strings and percussion.
URB: How will the New York performance compare with the Krakow premiere last year ?
DB: The piece is quite open and free in many ways so I think that every time we play the piece it will be different. Also for the New York show we have some local string players from New York joining the Sinfonietta, and the percussionists will also be local, so that will be an interesting fusion.
URB: What are you working on now and planning for the future ?
DB: Me and Ben are working on finishing Solaris as an album and it should be out this year. Then I am also working on my next solo album which will be out late this year or early 2012. Both albums will come out on Bedroom Community. Besides that I’m playing some concerts and working on different kinds of projects, one of the more recent ones is a collaboration with the danish band Efterklang.
Music for Solaris with Ben Frost, Daníel Bjarnason, and Sinfonietta Cracovia plus visuals by Brian Eno & Nick Robertson will make it’s North American debut Wednesday April 6th as part of Unsound Festival New York’s official opening night at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Alice Tully Hall.
Unsound Festival New York is presented by Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York. This event is presented with the SACRUM PROFANUM festival, and co-organized with the Krakow Festival Office and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Buy Tickets – http://www.lincolncenter.org/show_events_list.asp?eventcode=30389
Unsound Festival – http://unsound.pl/en/festival/program/special-projects-exhibitions/unsound-festival-new-york-2011
Special thanks to Gamall Awad.
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