CRYSTAL SOUND PROJECT
Feat ÅSA ÖHRN
NEWS: New songs will be recorded in Paris during February 2022.
They are now ready for bookings!
LIVE & VIDEO
Åsa Öhrn is the Vocalist and Viktor Benev on piano/syntheziser percussions and together with bilyana
furnadzhieva a number of originally designed instruments some are percussive others with string each with its own name: Stringbone, Buirocordes, Tchanncelaines, Chênecelaine and singing drum (se gallery below).
Composing and constructing the musical material together is an important aspect of our collaborations. In a way, every member has to get out of his/her's comfort zone. In this "confrontation" we build a common ground, established from different opinions and ideas, which we do not prepare beforehand. In that sense, we strive to capture each individual's current state of mind, which inevitably gets altered by the joint experience of living and working together during two sessions in 2021 at the art residency Björkö Konstnod, Sweden in February 2022 the location gets changed to Paris, to explore impact of another milieu. Parts of the coming album will be released as music videos.
The sound palette draws on sounds extracted from porcelain sculptures, infused with various metal oxides. The sculptures, created by bilyana furnadzhieva, play a key role in the project.
Instruments (original design)
TOWARDS FULL ALBUM
CSP feat Åsa Öhrn is working towards a full album with a number of videos included to the material. Key feature of CSP are the self designed, original instruments.
The album is produced by enovae, an independent label founded in France 2019, not being confined to a particular musical genre, enovae publishes sounds of
a large variety. All
projects rely on strong artistic visions. Open-mindedness and
collaborative thinking are at the center of the label's activities.
The titles of the first 4 songs:
The Screen, 4:44 (with video), Language: English, Bulgarian (preview link to be below)
Abborredansen, 5:06 (with video), Language: Swedish (review link to be below)
Nocturnal Mood, 3:20 (video in progress), Language: English
Nära, 4:07 (video in progress), Language: Swedish
The Screen (Music Video), 2021
Åsa Öhrn
Åsa Öhrn, Visual artist/vocalist
based in Stockholm/Björkö, Sweden
With the appearance in CSP Öhrn re-enters the music terrain, her vocal flexibility and mature voice stretches from latino songs in to jazz, opera, rock , country, and pop. She did her first studio recordning at age 16 with legendary Swedish producer Ola Håkansson at Sonet studios. Since then she worked with a number of constellations such as The Garden, The Flying Mantovanis, The Promenads, King Mambo, Serenads Orkester, Stefan Carlsson In the 90s she also did music theatre with The livingroom. Additionally she works as narrator of texts as well as art teacher for adults and children. In the process with CSP she explores improvisation and experimental contemporary art music for the first time.
CRYSTAL SOUND PROJECT
CSP live session in Paris.
CSP is Victor Benev and Bilyana Furnadzhieva
both born in Sofia now living and working in Paris, France.
bilyana
furnadzhieva and Viktor Benev have been working on Crystal sound
project since 2016, a project that unites forms and music using
porcelain sculptures as musical instruments in order to redefine the
sound field today.
The instruments have specific capacities of
resonance, which is obtained by adding various metal oxides in the clay.
Numerous unique instruments have been created each wearing its own
name: the chênecelaine and the stringbone -string instruments and the
singing drums - percussions. A variety of sounds is produced by inducing
the resonance of the sculptures in various ways - playing with mallets
or with hands, singing or talking inside, rubbing their surface or the
strings with guitar picks. The sounds are sampled into a digital
database and partially constitutes the sonic palette that they would use
during their joint residency, given the logistical impossibility of
bringing the sculptures in Björkö.
Being
fascinated by the musicality of the languages they work with
the local singer and artist Åsa Öhrn. The Swedish language has a
specific sound that is further colored by the voice and the timber. They
would like to confront this richness with the recorded sounds of their
musical sculptures and also the languages, already used as compositional
material (Bulgarian, English, French, Finish, and Persian) in Crystal
sound project's earlier sound works.
Both bilyana and Viktor draw
inspiration from Nature for their personal artistic works. During their
residency they plan collecting various objects from the environment -
stones, leaves, branches, minerals, but also the sound that those
objects might create by interaction. This process would further
underline the artists' will to communicate with the space around Björkö
Konstnod. They plan on experimenting with different acoustic
possibilities and record the resulting sounds, in order to eventually
release the music later on on the label enovae.
/vb & bf, Paris, France, March 15th, 2021
CSP first album released March 28, 2018 >>>
With suppport from: Foundation Nguyen Thien Dao & Björkö Konstnod.
Prior to our arrival, we had the desire of working on videos. Once the music was ready, we worked on two scenarios, respectively inspired by the Danish "painter of light" Vilhelm Hammershøi and the American film director Terrence Malick, both of them being for us a reference to the fragility of human existence and "capturing the present".
For the first residency BKN in April-May 2021 we started a collaboration with the artist and singer Åsa Öhrn. The workflow came easily as we found out we have many common musical and visual references. Having the needed time and space to experiment, to improvise, we managed to capture elements from Nature and topics related to our personal experience of being in Sweden and that specific area of the archipelago. The sessions in the Björkö Kyrka were particularly prolific, as they helped us compose and record two songs – Abborredansen and The Screen.
In Abborredansen and The Screen, Viktor played and recorded the piano in the church. Prior to the recording sessions there, Viktor had time to experiment using an old detuned Eisenberg piano located in one of the rooms at the school. The mechanical and intonation "flaws" make this instrument unique. As a historical heritage of the school, we didn't want to tune it. Instead, we wanted to keep its sound as authentic as possible as a reference to the elapsed time during which it was used as a teaching tool. As a result, we decided to explore its potential during our next residency. In our daily explorations in the surroundings we got inspired by the radiant spring light and fragments of rural everyday life. The two musical compositions had captured different vibes of the place.
The Screen was created as a dialogue in two languages between two characters located in different spaces. Åsa Öhrn wrote English lyrics based on the topics of isolation, solitude and imprisonment. As a response, bilyana wrote a poem in Bulgarian, the subject of which is the loneliness and longing for comfort and presence in an outdoor wild, hostile environment. The shots in the video play with the antonyms : inside – outside, presence – absence. The alternation of black frames, views through windows and outdoor shots place the spectator inside the narrative.
CPS's second residency at BKN took place in September 2021 continuing working Åsa Öhrn we recorded three new compositions including one instrumental the other to Nocturnal Mood and Nära.
We had three days of recording in church at Björkö, during which we aimed at recording most of the vocal parts and some instrumental ones to make use of the magestic acoustics of the space. Having more time to work in BKN allowed us to feature the old Eisenberg piano, which is used entirely in the third song we've written – Nocturnal Mood.
Nocturnal Mood is an English translation of a Bulgarian poem by Maria Aglikina. It speaks of the fragility of the human existence. The poem is inspired by two figures, a male and a female, both searching for the light. Icarus and Anna Karenina are symbols of freedom in a tragic decor.
Nära is an original song in Swedish with lyrics by Åsa Öhrn. It's an introvert reflection on the struggle of comprehension between lovers. The main character makes a parralel between his poetic, emotional attitude and the stereotyped obligations of human beings. The composition's development follows the story's contrasting images and metaphores.
As with CPC's first album, we wanted to curate the musical material, so that all the pieces create an entity or what's called a "concept album". Alike the storyboards in cinema, we strive to achieve an integrity and continuity of the compositions featured in the album and take advantage of the engineering possibilities of recorded material to create an exclusive discographic work. We realise song by song towards a full album.
/vb & bf, Björkö, Sweden, Sept 18th 202
Footnote:
Artist Residency at BKN: April 2021 (3 weeks) and September, 2021 (3 weeks)
Artist Residency at BKN or bilyana furnadzhieva October 2020 (4 weeks), where she met with BKN in-house artist Åsa Öhrn
The three artists makes session in Paris, Feb 2022
. . .