★Sofa
Spektralmaskin
"Spektralmaskin, a collaborative album by the Norwegian musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne and Peder Simonsen, owes its name to a sort of prospecting: the process of sliding e-bows—small magnetic motors of adjustable speeds used to sustain sounds, here of Lysne’s own design—along guitar strings to produce harmonics. As these harmonics can occur erratically, the technique rewards the musician patient enough to scoot the e-bow about the string, waiting for the delicate sounds to crest. The duo’s fasci…
en
Tip! Sofa is thrilled to present the beautiful music of the Dutch snare drum player Etienne Nillesen with his new album “en.” With a snare drum only, Etienne explores simplicity of setup, movements, and material, developing music that is full of complexity and depth.
Etienne’s technique is highly original, involving the use of a thin drum stick against the surface of a granular drum skin, which produces sustained pitches and harmonic layers. The product of his own groundbreaking research into th…
Àlea
"Sofa is delighted to announce the Italian musician and composer Andrea Giordano (b. 1995)’s Àlea, a suite for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Dedicated to Giordano’s friend and mentor, the Italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandra Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020, Àlea is at once a lament and testament to Giordano’s multifarious musicianship. In dense, rending orchestration, the artist shows us the multidimensionality of gr…
How Forests Think
Vilde&Inga's How Forests Think is the third album of this extraordinary duo. The album explores four completely different places in the Oslo area, letting the acoustic conditions and the poetic meanings of each place become an essential part of the music making. The pieces stem from recordings in Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum, the Newtone studio, by a lake in the forest outside of Oslo and at the harbour in the city center of Oslo. This double album is a deep and beautiful journey into a new chapte…
Ephimeral
SOFA is proud to have discovered a great jewel in Spanish music. The Madrid based soundartist and composer Miguel Angel Tolosa has during the last five years become a special member of the SOFA family, having contributed on several SOFA albums both as an artist and as a recording and mastering engineer. Now, on "Ephimeral" we hear him all alone. Tolosa says about his music that it's not meant to convey extramusical contents, such as philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda or adver…
Mille Feuille
Mille Feuille was recorded during three days at Flerbruket, an old school builiding at Hemnes which now is a workplace for artists of all sorts. OWL (Signe Emmeluth & Karl Bjorå) worked here together with sound technician Magnus Nergaard with recordings that later would turn into the duo’s debut album. The music is the result of a couple of years working with different ideas of improvisation and composition. Both musicians have their opinions on how much or little control you bring into the musi…
Shapes & Phases
shapes & phases is the debut release of the duo vertex, consisting of Petter Vågan (lapsteel, acoustic guitar, electronics) and Tor Haugerud (percussion, signal generator, field recordings). Together they have delved into their own blend of electro-acoustic improvisation, with elements ranging from lowercase electronic drones, via country/folk-influenced minimalism, to distorted industrial walls of sound. Vertex manage to move between these diverse sources without losing touch of their own sound…
House of Gold
Sofa is proud to announce the debut album of Montreal-based band House of Gold, a very special group playing American composer Isaiah Ceccarelli’s songs and compositions. House of Gold is a quartet that blends quiet melodies and songwriting, chamber music, minimalist folk song, improvisation, jazz harmony, and early music influences into an immersive and embracing sonic experience. Composer, drummer, and singer Isaiah Ceccarelli has built a repertoire of songs around his original texts and intim…
Triple Music
In the spring of 2020, Muddersten did not go to Japan. Nor did the trio collaborate with alive painting artist Akiko Nakayama as planned before the global lockdown. Instead, a video triptych was made by Akiko and sent to the trio serving as a score for a musical performance. The piece was commissioned by Muddersten and had its first performance at the Periferien Festival in Oslo, in August 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic. On this release the trio uses sonic ready-mades as a method for i…
Alloy
In 2015, Lemur started a collaboration with German pianist Reinhold Friedl. Friedl is the leader of the international ensemble Zeitkratzer, working at the intersection of improvisation and composition. In this respect, Friedl's experience and working method have much in common with the ideas and working methods Lemur uses. Not least through an interchange between work with large and small ensembles.In collaboration with Reinhold Friedl, we focus on the use of extended playing techniques, form ex…
Hereafter
Sofa is proud to mark its 100th release with the stunningly beautiful double album Hereafter, a new major work from guitarist/composer Kim Myhr, written for the 15-piece Stavanger-based ensemble Kitchen Orchestra. “Hereafter can be seen as a meditation on mortality and transience”, Myhr explains. “It was written at a time where the prime minister of Norway told the country’s population that ‘you have to be prepared to lose someone dear to you’. It was like taken out of Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice”. T…
Fear Of The Object
Tip! These 4 CDs comprise a three-year time span of work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and percussionist Chris Cogburn. The initial concept informing the project is to examine the differences between the resonant frequencies and wild harmonics of physical objects and the exactness of sine tones and just-intonation. An additional layer of video is produced live using audio signals as raw video voltages, thereby transforming sound into video in ways far beyond the classic parameters of vo…
Lineaments
Tip Tip!! 140gram LP with printed inner sleeve. Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diver…
Trending
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to welcome a new project on board. It’s Propan, a duo comprising the two Norwegian vocalists; Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen. On their second album Propan continues its research within the frameworks of the song form and presents a psychedelic, and more delirious landscape than on its first, somewhat more electroacoustic album, Baby. The duo explores the meeting point between improvised music and studio production, and builds the album around Propan's well-estab…
Out of the Playground
Sofa Music is proud to add the powerhouse flutist Alessandra Rombolà to its ranks with Out of the Playground, documenting Rombolà’s latest commissions and collaborations for solo flute and electronics with composers Daniela Terranova, Jan Martin Smørdal, Ingar Zach, and Lasse Marhaug. The album’s five contributions, drawing on Rombolà’s polyvalent musical background, are united in their mission to venture “out of the playground” of scenes and genres, as Rombolà puts it. Across these incisive, ex…
Musica Liquida
*In process of stocking* Ingar Zach’s new album Musica Liquida is the first audio document of his ongoing artistic research project at the Academy of Music in Oslo. The project is called The Vibrating Drum and focus on vibration of the membrane, activated by vibrating speakers in contact with the drumskin. Musica Liquida is Ingar Zach’s 7th solo album, and we find him diving into an ocean of sound and orchestrating the complexity of interfolded layers in the impressive acoustics of Emanuel Vigel…
Kraftbalanse
*In process of stocking* Sofa Music continues to release the work of the extraordinary Norwegian composer Jan Martin Smørdal. Recently he was awarded the prestigious Arne Nordheim Composers Prize for his creative work. Kraftbalanse is a a composition for piano, alternating current and strings, written by Smørdal in collaboration with artist Øystein Wyller Odden. The piece is based on Wyller Oddens prior investigations on the sound of the electrical grid and was part of Oslobiennalen First Editio…
Threads
The new solo album, threads by the California-based trombone player Mattie Barbier is a multilayered personal investigation. It was recorded in The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangley, Colorado in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
a feeling of place. a calm space to be present in during a space of chaos. of quarantining in a very conservative place as a non-binary person where your welcomeness is tenuous. of uncertainty of where non-binaryness fits as a parent- of still being a dad? or treat…
Swagger
Limited LP edition. In their new composition, Swagger, Oslo-based vocal duo Propan augment their customary sound palate with the aid of an eight-strong ensemble of strings, winds, percussion, voices, and electronics - an ensemble by the name Propanions. Combining pre-scored and improvised content, Swagger moves between the soft sound of tuning forks, odd beats, curious text, playful melodies and textural noise, resulting in an eccentric piece of definite character - an eclectic manifestation of …
Second Room
Limted LP edition. Second Room is Martin Taxt’s second album in a series of works investigating possible relations between music and architecture. In this work written for alto saxophone, two microtonal tubas, double bass, church organ, hand bells and modular synthesizers he is inspired by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and his ideas on different concepts of living. In a lecture at the Harvard University in 2011, Fujimoto sets up a comparison between the nest and the cave, as two fundament…