video only (version with live musicians possible)

Premiere: February 27, 2021, Stereo video recording: Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques 2021: La Grande Nuit 2021 — Au-delà de la notation, Montréal (Québec)

Virelai Chakra (Circle of Virelais) is dedicated to nine wonderful musicians from Oslo: we had been working together when Corona struck. This video was made in June 2020 as a backup-contribution to Ultima Festival Oslo — just in case the September festival could only take place online. But, in the end, we could perform our concert — and so this video was never streamed until now. Each of the musicians recorded 4 short musical clips — two of them reacting to short pieces I sent them, two of them reacting to one of the other musicians — always reframing another musical style in their own language. In a complex and intertwined circle choreography, they were each filmed alone, one after the other, on one day in June at Sentralen Oslo. In our Berlin studio afterwards, Lutz Glandien and I composed these clips. It was a delight to sense how well all the fragments complemented each other musically, and to find the right visual arrangement for the little floating windows we all know too well by now. In its recursive form, it is indeed a virelai, a medieval repetitive song form. “Lai” means “Song” — a virus song in which every musician’s music infects the other’s playing.