Danish artist SØS Gunver Ryberg‘s SPINE was an early highlight of this year – a richly-textured world of interconnected sensorial experience. She’s now building audiovisual immersion around that work, and Defasten’s visual imagination makes the pitch-perfect complement to the release’s gently-flowing synthetic dreamworlds.
As Patrick Koan / Defasten puts it, it’s “an ecosystem of (cyber)organisms unfurl their forms, pulsing to life with hypercomplexity, revealing the dynamic shapes of their intricate, mutated biomorphic designs.” (Stills below from this work.) Watch:
I wrote about the earlier video in the same series:
Our friends over at CLOT have a terrific and wide-ranging interview with the artist, where she talks about how she’s evolved and adapted through education and practice – and most recently, to attuning her work to understanding herself as what psychologists have recently described as “Highly Sensitive Person,” (HSP) in the area of neurodiversity. I imagine plenty of readers will find this resonates, in terms of understanding how to better adapt how you work – and it can even connect with how you listen to the album:
In the last few years, I reached a point where I realized it was unsustainable for me to keep working at that tempo and not take better care of my sensitivity. I’m not completely there as many projects are still on my calendar, but now I know what I’m saying yes to in the future. For me, one of the ways to achieve interconnectedness is through listening/ listening with all my senses. I hope SPINE will open up the listener and give space for imagination and visions. Music can put us in a more curious connection with our surroundings and have the potential to raise awareness, create empathy and promote action to address challenges.
“Dynamics” is the best way to describe this – which is especially impressive, as the album sounds full of energy without ever being overcluttered or feeling aggressive, a welcome change when so much music across experimental and club media can be an assault. And that’s connected with how she relates with technology. I’ll let her describe it:
I explore the dynamics. To me, industrial can sound organic and nature sounds can be raw and harsh. I remember when I made field recordings in Svalbard 15 years ago. The sounds I came home with were so noisy, raw, barren, and intense.
I’m very interested in technology development, and as Donna Haraway argues, technology isn’t neutral. It shapes how we see things and distribute power. We and technology are interconnected. It changes who we are and how we relate and influences how we experience and understand the world. These connections can help us or hold us back.
Check the full interview:
SØS GUNVER RYBERG, imagining a better, more connected future through sound [CLOT Magazine]
Do give the full album a listen. And yeah, don’t forget this one in the year-end round-ups, the writer says half to themselves…
Looks like cassettes and vinyl are available, which is a must with that gorgeous NeverEngine Labs cover. Those in the know will spot that as being the alias/project name of another major artist, Cristian Vogel.
But back to Patrick, let’s enjoy some more stills:
MIRRORED MADNESS by SØS GUNVER RYBERG [defasten.com]
