Reviews
“One of the more emotionally subtle new works was Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir’s a lot of ANGELS to consider, premièred on Friday night by EKKI MINNA Duo, comprising cellist Andrew Power and accordionist Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson. Adorned with cherubic wings, for all the music’s material activity it felt as if there were a stasis at its core. Accompanied by a delicately enraptured electronic soundscape, over time the players got up from their seats and began to circle round the space, initially just turning, later gyrating and dancing. Musically gorgeous and visually poignant, in ways that I couldn’t (and still can’t) quite comprehend it was surprisingly moving.”
Review of NO MORE NO LESS:
Franz Schubert's Täuschung — the "deception part" from Winterreise, where a dancing light seduces a despondent wanderer longing for distraction—gets an exclusive transformation through the new-music lens of the Copenhagen duo EKKI MINNA and sound engineer / producer Sebastian Vinther Christensen. Their humorous and stylish arrangements let Schubert's seductive light dance straight into our times.
EKKI MINNA has swapped the piano for an accordion, while Christian Winther Christensen takes a more radical approach with his characteristic and unpredictable mix of bangs, plucks, and micro-melodies from the cello, accordion—or is it a small organ? It’s a well-executed physical statement that classical instruments in our time can produce something radically different. The initial, playful, and dancing light leads us further into Mads Emil Dreyer's beautiful, calm, far more serious ambient soundscape—a soft and introspective space that invites reflection on life's undulating dissonance and consonance. Does the work manage to find harmony in the end, even as the tones repeatedly seek tension in the outermost edges?
Finally, the Anthropocene greets us rather unsettlingly with its ambient eeriness and a cyborg's voice—Mia Ghabarou’s autotuned vocals in A Lot of Angels. Yes, Schubert's wanderer exists in our time as well, and the journey’s conclusion is ominous enough to make you feel like heading home and prepping.
NO MORE NO LESS is a successful collage of humor, tension, and melancholy, whose dancing light puts both life's fragility and our musical heritage into a thought-provoking perspective.
“I also enjoy the delicate, self-consciously quirky Copenhagen-based Ekki Minna duo, British cellist Andrew Power and Icelandic accordionist Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson. Their show includes blowing on large homemade cardboard comb things; tapping and blowing at their instruments; before climaxing with both musicians setting up a continuing unfolding loop, putting on angel wings and dancing in slow-motion around the hall. This is Áslaug Rún Magnúsdóttir’s piece A Lot Of Angels To Consider, and it’s funny, camp, yet at the same time very affecting. Opened up by the context, it feels to me as if they melt us all, via choreography, into another plain altogether.”
“As is so often the case, though, the most telling performances were to be found in smaller-scale, chamber events. The most still and focused of them was Mads Emil Dreyer’s Vidder 1, receiving its first performance in Iceland by EKKI MINNA Duo. The sustained tones from accordion and cello sounded like achingly slow breathing, but with each inhalation merging into the following exhalation, and vice versa, resulting in something like an instrumental circular breathing. Slowly shifting and overlapping, always falling somewhere mysteriously between consonance and dissonance (at no point did it really feel like either), it was ravishingly beautiful.”
Photo: Niklas Ottander