Örjan Sandred

String Quartet and live electronics

Sketches of Shifting Landscapes

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York provided me with a unique opportunity to work on a composition for stringquartet and live electronics where I collaborated with the Stenhammar Stringquartet at several stages during the creative process.  The ½-hour long composition was premiered at a live@CIRMMT concert in Montreal, and then later at a Ground Swell concert in Winnipeg. Several performances are planned in Europe during 2025.

New video

Extending percussion.

Composed during the pandemic, "Mimétisme" for percussion, live electronics and live video processing explores how visual cues can be integrated into a musical idea. It was written for two percussionists to be performe at their locations: Victoria Sparks in Canada and Jonny Axelsson in Sweden. Click the video to the right to see Jonny Axelsson's interpretation.

To be premiered

The climate crisis in a piano format.

"Footprints", composed for pianist Megumi Masaki, is a composition for piano and live electronics where I attempt to express the process of climate change in music. Through detection and A.I. algorithms, the electronic part slowly learns the gestures the pianist is playing during a performance. It uses this information to build its response – at first it is a very rough and poor attempt to imitation, but successively it becomes better until it will turn obsessive and destructive.

Voice and electronics

A song about alienation.

My art song "A Ghazal" for soprano and live electronics will be back on the concert stage in 2024. Gustaf Frödings powerful poem from 1891 paints a beautiful landscape experienced by someone suffering from alhoholism and mental illness. The short extract from the 17-minute composition in the video to the right features soprano Sarah Jo Kirsch.

Installation

The abandoned city.

“Sonic Trails : Lockdown” is a multimedia installation reflecting on a city in Covid-19 lockdown. Using algorithms for Artificial Intelligence, a visitor is transferred between concrete and abstract experiences in a 3-dimensional world created through projections on semi-transparent screens and a multi-channel loudspeaker system. Visitors are immersed in various events in the lockdown city occurring regardless of their presence. Using multiple audio-visual samples of these urban phenomena, the installation creates a new place for visitors to inhabit.  

The installation was created in close collaboration with Max Sandred.