Only Connect: ‘Welcome to Mars’ Live In Oslo

Yeah…I know, I have been neglecting this blog shamefully all year – blame a very hectic schedule, even by my standards, plus a determined effort to finish The Bright Labyrinth, my next book for Strange Attractor Press – more on that in the coming weeks. I hope to catch up on my blogging duties over the summer, so bear with me just a little longer while I sort out the backlog. In the meantime, anyone in or around Oslo this weekend may wish to drop by the Caféteatret at 20.00hrs (local time) on Saturday June 9, when I will be sharing the bill with Julia Holter and Felix Kubin as part of Only Connect: A Tonal View Of Times Tomorrow, a festival debut from Ny Musikk. Here is some information on the event’s theme:

Only Connect, Oslo’s newest festival of adventurous music and sound, taking place in June 2012. The theme of this year’s event is ‘A Tonal View Of Times Tomorrow’ (the title taken from a tune by Sun Ra), and the diverse range of artists have been chosen to explore aspects of Time. In a world of social networking, Twitter and 24–7 commerce, Time has become a premium commodity as businesses compete for chunks of our attention. At the same time, the incredible availability of music and footage online has opened up a wider cultural horizon than ever before, allowing artists and listeners access to an enormous historical span of creativity, which in turn inspires and feeds into the music being produced – a music often soaked in references to the past. In a musical context, Time can simply refer to the aspects of duration, rhythm and interval intrinsic to the composition and performance of music. But composers and musicians also explore ideas of time travel, journeys between past, present and future, representations of eternity and micro-events, artistic visions of the future and creative responses to retro styles and the ‘lost futures’ of history.

All these aspects are reflected in the diverse mix of musics, new commissions and performers at Only Connect. The festival features a wide range of experimental composers and performers from the international scene, from Norway, UK, Germany, USA, Belgium and more. The events include concerts, live film soundtracks, improvisations alongside sound art installations, multimedia presentations and talks, and culminates with an exclusive ‘séance performance’ by minimalist pioneer Charlemagne Palestine in the haunting surroundings of the Emanuel Vigelands Mausoleum. Only Connect is curated by Anne Hilde Neset, Artistic Director of Ny Musikk, and Rob Young, music writer and Contributing Editor of the internationally respected magazine The Wire.

I will be reading extracts from Welcome to Mars to an audiovisual accompaniment. This may be one of the last times to catch this performance before the new book comes out, so I hope to see you there.

Pictured above: what you get by feeding ‘A Tonal View of Times Tomorrow’ into Google Images. The Only Connect website had nothing that would upload effectively onto this site. Great design but no sticking power - this is the future.