The Ephemeral City: Songs for the Ghost Quarters. Electroacoustic Installations.

”Only the ephemeral is of lasting value” – Ionesco

I have been engaged in a PhD project since 2015, with the idea that the imaginary cities we create in the course of our daily lives are ephemeral, but deeply abiding, places, rich with memory, stories, histories and alternative futures. When places change and disappear by virtue of massive physical, social and economic forces, these ephemeral places we imagine remain always our own, in community and solitude alike.. Since I live here, the project is focused on Stockholm. I have made a great many compositions and installations for it, with multi-channel arrays, field recordings, pipe organs, modular synthesizers, hurdy-gurdies, consumer grade speakers and electronics, nyckelharpa and, violin. Over the next and final year of the project, I will be presenting some of these works in the city they are made for.

After listening so many times to Dan Fröberg’s record twentytwo equals twentytwo, and because I can think of few places more unique to Stockholm, I asked Rönnell’s first. And so! – there will be two radiophonic text works, Skogen är bäst på bild and Värt ska dom ta vägen nu?, and one more varied electroacoustic work, Vädersolsmodernitet, playing in a larger multi-channel system as installations. There will also be a new, smaller sound installation in progress playing in another area of the shop. And there will be headphone stations with Orogenesis and Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda two of the larger scale, multichannel works from the project that are more intense and immersive.

PLEASE NOTE! This is not a concert, and hence there will not be chairs; rather, you may walk around the shop as you would on an ordinary day. While here contemplating the city, you may also contemplate the wares of this city’s marvelous ”antikvariat”, which I hope you will support!

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Katt Hernandez