According to legend, the Sami people, who live mainly in northern Scandinavia, received the tradition of joik singing in pre-Christian times from Arctic elves and fairies. These days, Ánde Somby attempts to make contact with the spirits through improvised joik pieces to inquire about their well-being.
By the mid-1970s, the hippie spirit had faded in California. However, with the Los Angeles Free Music Society, pioneers of the DIY aesthetic were already waiting in the wings. Its members liked the absurd and were inspired by the idea of a non-musical approach to music.
Soliman Gamil was unimpressed by the artistic possibilities of tape recording when he studied in Paris in the early 1950s. At that time, Musique Concrète was emerging there thanks to the new technology. But Gamil was only in the city to learn about Western composition from Nadia Boulanger.
For American composer Laurie Spiegel, music is a way of expressing the conscious experience of existence. When she was confined to bed with a viral infection in 1990, she decided to translate her illness into sound.
The desire to find a partner outside of real life is nothing new. A look back at the United States shows how the approach, but also expectations, have changed over time. In 1966, beatnik and singer Tuli Kupferberg took texts from advertisements in newspapers and magazines as source material for new intonations.
‘We wanted to abandon a language that had been devastated and rendered impossible by journalism!’ This is how Hugo Ball described the Dadaists' motivation for leaving words behind at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire. Many artists began experimenting with the possibilities of phonetic poetry, based solely on the musical expression of the voice.
