Maja Ratkje

Italian airship engineer Umberto Nobile enjoys a quiet life with his beloved dog Titina. One day, Norwegian explorer superstar Roald Amundsen contacts him and orders an airship to conquer The North Pole.

This album interleaves the composer’s own voice as a performer with the ensemble sound of CIKADA and Oslo Sinfonietta. In “And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep” the voice is pre-recorded, and the sound files are played through loudspeakers placed among the musicians. In Concerto for Voice (moods IIIb) the composer is performing live a solo part for amplified voice, using much wider dynamics and improvisation. While performing has influenced and inspired Maja S. K. Ratkje’s composing, the opposite is also true – even though it’s too simple to say that she improvises like a composer and composes like an improvising musician: “The process of composition is primarily about mastering form and contextualising elements – both the actual sounds and the formal units – musically,” she says.

Nor Noise is the first norwegian documentary about noise music. Movie Maker Tom Hovinbøle has from the start in 2001 interviewed a number of artists in the noise genre. The artists relay their thoughts on the phenomenon of noise music - what is it, where does it come from, what is the trade off when replacing traditional harmony and melody for pure audio experience, which possibilities can be explored? The movie explains the historical context of the genre, from the movement of Futurism and Luigi Russolo from before WWI to electronic experiments in the fifties, avantgarde in the sixties, industry and punk in the seventies to the final establishment of the noise genre at the end of the seventies in Japan. Adding to the flavour are concert performances.