COPENHAGEN DJ KATRINE RING'S 'HAND FOR HOLMBOE'

I have just  listened to Katrine Ring's A Hand for Holmboe - a set of deconstructions of the classical music of the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe - which was released just now.  It is BRILLIANT!

Ring is a Danish DJ, and resident at the Yellow Lounge in Copenhagen.  She's been DJing since 1992 and has been working with classical music since 2006.  She has also just curated an exhibition of Danish street art, which published in the book Walk This Way.

Holmboe (1909-1996) was a leading symphonist and composer of chamber music.  He was also interested in street culture, and in 1988 published a book analysing the music of Danish street cries.  I was not aware of Holmboe's work, and it was helpful that the Dacapo CD release of A Hand for Holmboe includes orchestral performances of the original scores that Ring has sampled.  These are Holmboe's chamber concertos, and Ring has used loops and signal processing, and chopped up pieces of the orchestral work, then dropped in incidentals like a laugh, a child's voice, an engine - and so on.  I love this sort of thing - finding something new from manipulating (sampling) another work. 

For me, one of the iconic pieces of visual art that also did this was Tom Phillips's Humument project, which was started in the 1960s.  Phillips set himself the challenge of 'treating' the first book he could lay his hands on for 3 old pence.  It turned out to be W H Mallock's pompous Human Document of 1892.  Phillips then worked on it page by page, discovering a parallel text unknown to Mallock which centered around a new protagonist called Bill Toge.  I have treasured an original edition of this, but the work has been constantly revised, and is now even available as a phone app.  The parallels between this early work of Phillips and the early looped sample of the composer Steve Reich (Come Out, 1966) are remarkable, and I think can be regarded as the foundation for this new work by Ring, nearly 50 years later.

I have said this to justify my choice of the standout track from the CD, the full title of which is Undervejs (Ongoing) (After V. Holmboe's Chamber Concerto No. 7, Op. 37: II.  Allegretto con moto).  It is a 5 minute timpani loop with some sparse excerpts from the sampled work.  It is the ambiguity of the offered translation of the title Undervejs that interests me: I am not a Danish speaker, but I think as well as 'Ongoing' we might think of 'undervejs' as 'underway', as of a ship.  The loop then makes perfect sense, as do the samples: it is the rhythmically constant but interrupted music of a sea passage, in which interfering sounds such as the rattle of ill-fitting pieces of cabin furniture, or the harsh announcements on a tannoy, or the pitching of the screw in and out of the water, augment and cancel each other.   

So you see, the maritime can be re-imaged, both graphically, and musically.

This material copyright Thom Gorst 2012.