★Sofa
Six Moving Guitars
Sofa is very proud to release the outstanding debut record of composer / guitarist Fredrik Rasten. In Six Moving Guitars, the stable sounds of justly tuned consonances are being «activated» by the different qualities of the movements of the guitars. The piece came out of the collaborative work between three dancers and three musicians. The group’s goal was to work with choreography and sound as a unity, erasing the functional differences between dancer and musician and focusing solely on the son…
Off the Coast
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø and Daniel Lercher met in the Czech country side in 2010, as part of an improvising orchestra comprised of Austrian, Czech and Norwegian musicians, and started working as a duo shortly after. Finding common ground in fine grained and slow pulsed music, the duo went through a research period, striving to develop a common material void of all things unnecessary, where the impact of acoustic and electronic sound elements were truly balanced. While Nørstebø refined his arsena…
Silfr
Sofa has been following Vilde&Inga since they started playing together back in 2010 and when they contacted us with the music from Silfr, there was no doubt in our minds. On Silfr they continue to develop the remarkable interplay from their first album, Makrofauna (ECM), but this time they turn the level up a couple of notches. On Silfr Vilde&Inga presents chamber music of international caliber. Each piece on the album dives into a microclimate which eventually reveals small musical pearls. The …
Space Happy
In the first episode of the new Twin Peaks series, a man - a security guard or janitor kind of guy - is staring intensely into a human sized glass compartment. There is nothing Inside it but the image of his own reflection, but the intensity of the scene and the man’s gaze is high, as if a monster could appear inside the compartment at any time. We get the feeling this box is a portal to another dimension. Space Happy sounds like this kind of mysterious box or portal. Several pieces are built ar…
Like Driving
Streifenjunko has taken a shift towards electronic sounds. Their previous albums "No Longer Burning" (SOFA 2009) and "Sval Torv" (SOFA 2012) was remarkable in the magnificent sound achieved only with a saxophone and trumpet. With the seemingly endless possibilities of electronic instruments their strategy of finding simple tasks has been put to the test, and in the making of this album Streifenjunko was put back to the starting position to re-discover their focus and recognisable simplicity. The…
Cinder : Ember : Ashes
Stunning solo debut albumfrom Melbourne based musician Aviva Endean. Aviva is a clarinet player, improviser, composer and performance-maker. Her work with sound spans a wide variety of performance contexts including experimental and improvised music, creating immersive sonic environments, new chamber music, band projects, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo release and marks a move towards a more introspective sound. A collection of both composed a…
Before Nightfall One
Sofa is proud to present this new collaboration with the labels own Ingar Zach together with the critically acclaimed contemporary ensemble Speak Percussion from Melbourne, Australia. Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott in Speak Percussion invited Ingar Zach for the first concert in their series named Before Nightfall One. The idea behind this concert series is to experience and document the result of one single day of collaboration, culminating in a concert in a carefully chosen space in …
Sissel
John Tilbury and Keith Rowe have performed together within the legendary improvising ensemble AMM, as well as in numerous other contexts over the years. Duos for Doris (2003) was their first meeting as a duo, E.E. Tension and Circumstance (2010) was the second before the 4CD box on SOFA, enough still not to know, was released in 2015. enough still not to know also introduces the norwegian video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen as a collaborator, in this case as the producer of the album. Bjørgee…
Playmates
Muddersten was established as a trio in 2015, and released their first album, Karpatklokke, on SOFA in January 2017. Their highly unique trio have been presented at festivals like Le Guess Who? and All Ears. While the music from their first album was developed during a tour in Russia in February 2016, the music on Playmates was recorded during four intense days at the SOFA studio in Oslo in September 2017. The front cover of the Scandinavian trio Mudderstens new release “Playmates” give as…
Husene våre er museer
Oker is an acoustic improvising quartet based in Oslo, consisting of Adrian Fiskum Myhr on bass, Jan Martin Gismervik on drums, Torstein Lavik Larsen on trumpet and Fredrik Rasten on guitar. The music combines material from expanded instrumental techniques with open tonalities and deconstructed grooves. It can be described as rich textures in gradual change, but also as responsive and spontaneous. The ensemble balances between airy gestures and dense collective blocks of sound.
Oker is ma…
Lieber Heiland, laß uns sterben
In Martin Küchen own words: Poetry and reality. The music goes in and out of, and away from, and into again. Reality and poetry. The music is uninterested in genre denominations and ideological markers. Music grows and is shaped by and out of realities, living and artistic. Sound is an audible reflection of you. Even you in silence. And you from sound, from the particular music that invaded your way of life; the ever-increasing global audible pressure chamber in which your spirit falls aga…
Cut Air
Jim Denley has been playing flute since 1969 - after 50 years of a curious love/hate relationship with the instrument this is his first solo flute-only recording. He aims to situate this music within a global outlook, with a pacific perspective. Being from a continent, Australia, where there is no flute tradition, he’s taken cues and elements from flute traditions that still have power and currency — the European flute with it’s purity, brilliance and dexterity, the earthy simplicity of bamboos …
A Pond in My Livingroom
A pond in my living room’ is the second solo album of Montréal-based sound artist and wind player Philippe Lauzier, and his debut album for SOFA. On this record Lauzier is using multiple tracks of bass clarinet to create a luxuriant field of overtones and meticulous micropolyphonies. The result is a beautiful record with overlapping and long mesmeric sequences of sound.
Philippe Lauzier (b. 1977) is an active musician from Montreal, Canada. Working with several projects, Lauzier has been touring…
On the silver globe
Sofa is proud to release “On The Silver Globe” – the debut album of the duo of Kim Myhr and Lasse Marhaug. The album originated as a commission from the MetaMorf art biennale in Trondheim for the two musicians to collaborate on a 8-channel piece for the 2016 edition. The morphing of Myhr and Marhaug proved to be a good match, the two had known each other for years but never worked together, and in the process of making “On The Silver Globe” found this collaboration should be more than a one-off.…
Karpatklokke
Henrik Olsson, objects, friction, piezo. Martin Taxt, microtonal tuba, electronics. Håvard Volden, guitar, tape-loop.Muddersten is a type of mudrock whose original constituents were clays. It looks like hardened mud and, depending upon the circumstances under which it was formed, it may show cracks or fissures, like a sun-baked clay deposit. Fertile clay and fat soil, compressed, dried out and turned into stone. Still delicate flowers will find their way through its cracks and fissures, prosper …
Bite of the Orange
Robin Hayward, Microtonal F-tuba. Peder Simonsen, Microtonal C-tuba. Martin Taxt, microtonal C-tuba. Bite of the Orange is Microtub’s third album on SOFA. On ‘Bite of the Orange’ the three tuba players dig deeper into the sphere of just intonation. Robin Hayward has composed two new pieces for the group focusing on the 11th and 13th harmonics, resulting in a strong microtonal character. The canadian music critic Stuart Broomer picked Microtub as one of the highlights of the FIMAV festival inVict…
Le Stanze
It's been 6 years since Ingar Zachs critically acclaimed solo album; M.O.S. (SOFA 532). On his 5th album, Le Stanze, Ingar Zach continues to develop his unique, personal music, also this time with percussion and electronics. The four compositions show an highly original artist who constantly finds new surprising possibilities in the world of percussion. The music is recorded in a small church in Urueña in Spain and in his studio in Madrid. The result is a brilliant refined album which again c…
Advances and Delays
Circadia might be your favorite new experimental psych-impro-folk band. With the stellar line-up of guitarists David Stackenäs and Kim Myhr, bassist Joe Williamson and drummer Tony Buck from The Necks, Circadia releases their debut recording on SOFA in July 2016. While the pared-down acoustic instrumentation may seem to be some kind of “back to basics” tip of the hat to folk styles, the music is much more than that. A tight rhythmic drive coupled with a nuanced concern for timbre, texture and dy…
Silent Night at the Crooked Forest
Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. Kari Ronnekleiv, violin. Sheriffs of Nothingness is a stringduo consisting of two of Norway's most distinguished artists in contemporary music: Ronnekleiv as a performer and Moe mostly as a composer. Moe and Ronnekleiv won the Norwegian Grammy for best contemporary album in 2007, and in 2011 Moe was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Award.Sheriffs of Nothingness interplay is remarkable. They move inside their music like one organism with all kinds of materials and pas…
Melting into foreground
Henrik Munkeby Norstebo, trombone, half clarinet, electronics.Melting into foreground is the second solo album from trombone player Henrik Munkeby Norstebo, and his debut on the SOFA label. The first track is solo trombone. No effects. He is using the whole spectre of his instrument, from pure tones to noise and the barely audible, in an attempt to find the balance between the intuitive and the strictly constructed. About the second part, Henrik says that all the electronic sounds stems from one…