Stephan Meidell & Bergen Barokk - Temporal Gardening
Aurora Records proudly presents Temporal Gardening, featuring composer and performer Stephan Meidell and the baroque ensemble Bergen Barokk. This album will be available on vinyl and digital platforms on September 15th 2023, and is their first release on Aurora Records. The album will be celebrated with a concert in Bergen on the 16th of September.
Temporal Gardening was originally a commission written in 2020 for Bergen Barokk. The idea was to explore using early music instrumentation in dialogue with new electro-acoustic technology. The unique and remarkable ecology grew from pseudo-baroque music playfully reimagined, reinterpreted, disassembled, remixed, and resampled.
The trio has been expanded with drums, functioning as speakers for the electronic manipulations of the ensemble. A double-bass recorder vibrates, a sub-woofer speaker is mounted inside a bass drum, and a live sampled harpsichord sounds through cymbals, gongs, and a snare drum. Meidell himself takes part as a musician in the performance, doing live sampling and electronic contributions.
Biographies
Musician-composer Stephan Meidell is a musical adventurer who, in a nomadic fashion, improvises his way through a plentitude of styles. Meidell's music exists where genres dissolve into fragments that can be picked apart and combined in new ways. He frequently combines sounds from electronic, acoustic, and electromechanical instruments and machines and then recontextualizes them with his finely tuned intuition and sense of detail. Meidell has done several relesses and commissions, including with Erlend Apneseth Trio, Strings & Timpani, Cakewalk, and TRIGGER on labels such as Hubro, Clean Feed, Playdate, and Ideophone.
Bergen Barokk was established in 1994 and is today one of Norway's leading early-music ensembles. The group has concertized and appeared in radio broadcasts in Europe, Russia and USA. Their recordings on Simax Classics, BIS, Bergen Digital Studio and Toccata Classics include German, English, Italian and French repertoire. Bergen Barokk has collaborated with several ensembles through the recent years, some of them are Pratum Integrum (Moscow), Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and Barokksolistene (Norway). Bergen Barokk has performed in festivals like Festspillene i Bergen, Bach Festival of Philadelphia, Moscow Early Music Festival and Janácek International Music Festival (Czech Republic).