instrumentation ensemble

 

Camille Norment Trio

Vegar Vårdal - Norwegian Hardanger fiddle
Håvard Skaset - Electric guitar
Camille Norment - Glass armonica, electronics, voice

 

 

The Camille Norment Trio’s performance credits include the Venice Biennial of Art (2015); The Kitchen, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; Ultima New Music Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and the Henie Onstad Art Center.

Reviews include The Wire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Aftenposten, Kunstkritikk, and Nordische Musik.

 

This unique trio of voices investigates the visceral qualities of resonance, noise, and overtone, creating music that enacts and deconstructs cultural and historical positions relevant to each of the instruments. Their performance is an organic movement between the composed and the improvised, creating a dynamic soundscape that defies a fixed genre reference. Their mysterious sonic environoments hover at the meeting points of folk, rock, classical, experimental music, and more.

The trio’s music levels beauty with noise, and the consonant with the dissonant, as it embraces scratches, squeels, feedback, and taunting microtones as equals to purest of tones. It becomes like a slipstream of warping time and abrasive textures, often forming earworms and wooing songs. Simple melodic phrases reference one another forming of a memory that is at once psychological and somatic. It cycles the listener through lulling and abrasive textures inspired in part by the instruments’ relationships to ideas of magic and the uncanny, hypnosis and trance, and noise as a psychological atmosphere. The soundscape is enveloping, and the visualization is a captivating fulfillment of the hybrid world of art and music.
Each of the instruments was simultaneously revered and feared or even outlawed at various points in their histories. The sonic worlds they create resonate through a tantalizing union of the instruments’ voices and their often paradoxical cultural histories.

Toll cd

Camille Norment - Toll PRISMACD717
Distributed through Musikkoperatørene, Forced Exposure, F-Minor, iTunes and Spotify

shadow puppets

excerpts from Blue Line and Lyst
17 December 2013
The Kitchen, New York


Performance Excerpts from The Kitchen

Premiered at The Kitchen, this performance features the ghostly appearance of two-time Bessie Award winner actress Okwui Okpokwasili rhythmic shadow dance of music light and spoken word. The dizzying hard-edged tale she tells is matched by the hypnotic dopler-effect swirl of the master fiddler's sound and his looming spinning shadow.

Selected audio samples are also available at
http://www.soundcloud.com/ravenhouse.

excerpts from Glare
22 April 2012
Henie Onstad Art Center


Performance Excerpts from Glare


Glare cycles the listener through lulling and abrasive textures inspired in part by the instruments’ relationships to ideas of magic and the uncanny, hypnosis and trance, and noise as a psychological atmosphere.  In addition to formally manipulating consonant and dissonant tonalities, Glare makes use of simple repetitive musical phrases; fragments that are reminiscent of lullabies, wooing songs, and earworms. 

Toll
11 September 2011
Ultima New Music Festival
Henie Onstad Art Center


Performance Excerpts from Glare

The first in the series of the Henie Onstad Art Center performances, Toll references Arvo Pärt’s Fratres in its musical investigation of the visceral qualities of sound through the seductive voices and cultural codes of the electric guitar, the hardingfele, and the glass armonica. Toll’s incarnation of Pärt’s “sonorous overtone of bells” is formed from a resonant ambience that includes ‘noise’, feedback, and dissonant/consonant tensions, creating a mysterious beauty that itself resonates through the psychological and somatic. This work is also a commemoration of the the tragic events that took place on 11 September 2001 in New York and 22 July 2011 in Oslo, as well as a celebration of the birthday of Arvo Pärt.

 

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