Camille Norment

Toll, 2011 - present
Performance

Camille Norment (glass armonica), Håvard Skaset (electric guitar), Vegar Vårdal (hardingfele)

Camille Norment - Toll PRISMACD717

Releasedate: September 9th 2013
Distributed through Musikkoperatørene, Forced Exposure, F-Minor, iTunes and Spotify

Toll presents an ensemble consisting of electric guitar, Norwegian hardingfele, and the rare glass armonica to explore the instruments’ collective sensual and contextual psychoacoustics. Toll resonates through a tantalizing union of its instruments’ voices and their often paradoxical cultural histories.

Each of the instruments were simultaneously revered and feared or even outlawed at various points in their histories. In a slipstream of warping time and abrasive textures, the music levels ‘beauty’ with ‘noise’, and the consonant with the dissonant, as it embraces scratches, squeals, and taunting microtones as equals to purest of tones. Forming earworms and wooing songs, simple melodic phrases reference one another throughout the tracks - the echo is like the conjuring and re-forming of a memory that is at once psychological and somatic.

Toll was recorded at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway during the crystalline resonance of 18-21 February 2013. Besides Camille Norment the album feature the musicians Håvard Skaset and Vegard Vårdal.

The aesthetic motifs of resonance, feedback, and melodic drone complement trajectories in minimalist music, while offering a unique approach that is firmly situated in the contemporary. Tension and release, abrasion and delicacy intersect the psychological and somatic meeting points of noise, rock, improvisational, folk, and experimental music in a manipulation of both formal and cultural psychoacoustics.

Glare
22 April 2012
Henie Onstad Art Center
22 min

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. 


Performance Excerpts (83 MB):

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

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.


Performance Excerpts (18MB):