HENRIK MUNKEBY NØRSTEBØ

Daniel Lercher – laptop, sound files, field recordings
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø – trombone, monotron, sound files


Daniel Lercher & Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø met in 2010 as part of a large improvising orchestra, and have been collaborating as a duo ever since. With the meeting point between digital synthesis and a close mic'd acoustic instrument as the ongoing starting point, the duo produces tightly woven electroacoustic music that is both ethereal and in-your-face, often exploring the outer points of the frequency range. Their setup is occasionally expanded with additional instruments/sound material, as well as unique guest musicians like Julie Rokseth and Audrey Chen.

RELEASES

2020
THE BEST IS YET TO COME
(with guest Audrey Chen)
Listen HERE

2019
OFF THE COAST
(with guest Julie Rokseth)
Listen HERE

2014
TH_X
Listen HERE

”A natural poetry that speaks of desolate territories
that attracts with poetic magnetism.”
- Massimo Onza, Sodapop

"The bounce of strings, the subjugated pitch, and the low-to-the-ground melody is parsed with a setting that is subliminal and fatigued. (...) Farther Away offers a single swerving sound wave, filling the room with a pulse of bass lows. The more it dips the more cerebral and foreign it becomes, like a jet engine charging for fuel. Though this is atypical for anything within the field of industrial noise, it has a common thread, but its slack timing breaks the tension. The tone, now twinkling at an even higher range on the final track, Winding, is an atonal warm-up. Its cosmogonic, split-stream timbre is at the top of human range, and as it pings away draws a curvilinear shape in mid air."
- TJ Norris, Toneshift

read more reviews HERE

Liner notes for “Off the coast” (SOFA, 2019), written by HMN

Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø and Daniel Lercher met in the Czech countryside in 2010, as part of an improvising orchestra comprised of Austrian, Czech and Norwegian musicians, and started working as a duo shortly after. Finding common ground in fine grained and slow pulsed music, the duo went through a research period, striving to develop a common material void of all things unnecessary, where the impact of acoustic and electronic sound elements were truly balanced. While Nørstebø refined his arsenal of hisses, bass tones and pulsations with the use of close up amplification and physical micro adjustments, Lercher programmed a software that enabled him to analyze Nørstebø's sound spectrum in real time, processing the data through electronic synthesis-methods (sine waves, resonators, filtered noise..) to create a tightly matching output, still leaving the amplified acoustic trombone unaltered. The result was released as «TH_X» in 2014.

“Off the coast” is the duo's second album, and was produced during two intensive weeks in Norway and Austria, October 2017. Taking the chance to undertake a weeklong residency on a remote island outside of Trondheim, the duo invited harpist Julie Rokseth and headed to Sula, a tiny piece of land off the coast and in the Norwegian sea. In its heyday, a fishing community with close to 500 inhabitants, now home to around 60 permanent residents (that have a broad verbal spectrum for describing wind and its changing character). Arriving by boat with a clean slate, the duo decided to start by exploring and recording sound material from Rokseth's baroque harp, as well as researching the best way to record her “wind harp”, an instrument of nineteen strings that when held at an angle in the right amount of wind starts playing it's own spectral song.

By slowly letting the new material unfold and layering a range of sound sources in addition to the duo's regular setup, it soon became clear that the physical impact of the island's grounded people, intense weather and striking 360 degree ocean view would affect the music more than anticipated. Deciding to quite literally represent the experience by adding elemental field recordings and keeping the birds chirping along with the wind harp, the project also was fortunate to involve a surprise guest, Aksel Johansen, a man in his 80's and a “Sula original”. As people here commonly do, he stopped by unannounced several times to see what was going on. Locally well known for his good stories and honest voice, he contributed a rendition of the “Sula song”, which resonates well with the origin of the island's name, “something that's rising from the ocean”.