Danish/German Mathias Monrad Møller (b. 1988) works at the intersection of ideas and music as a way to try to capture the complexities of contemporary life. His compositions show a distinct interest in the conceptual staging of political, philosophical or poetic thoughts through music and are characterized by tensions between musical form and content, between ideas and their framing and between abstract sound as supertext and political reality as subtext. In subtle ways his works expose the infinitely layered and paradoxical space inbetween provocation, theatricality and pathos in ways that resonate deeply with today’s listeners.
Being trained as both a composer and a singer, he often explores the distinct characteristics of the voice as a prolongation of the human that is ‘in here’ while also being ‘out there’ – body and language as both deeply individual and expressly instrumental. Through using novel techniques of rehearsing and scoring, he strives to preserve the musicians’ spontaneity and fresh relation to the material – as a way of generating and enabling complex and living expressions that show how things can exist differently and sometimes in contrast to our habitual ways of understanding our world.
At the upcoming SPOR Festival in Aarhus, Ensemble Garage will perform two of Monrad Møller’s works on Wednesday 14 May. The Funny Sad of Your Life™® asks the question, “Do you, too, enjoy the benefits of capitalism, but feel a pang of guilt, when you think about it more deeply?” Mathias Monrad Møller and Ensemble Garage use this dilemma of late-capitalist affluent societies as the starting point for a series of ironic love songs. These love songs are based on poems that Møller compiled from advertising slogans – cheap poetry transformed into ironic hymns to capitalism.
Møller’s dystopian songs echo back to us from a future, where capitalism no longer exists, but is nostalgically longed for – because you’re worth it! A time we enjoyed, albeit with a guilty conscience. We went further, obeyed the thirst. The Funny Sad of Your Life™® is paired with the Danish premiere of Møller’s Fruits, a cycle of works for piano and MIDI files, in which the pianist is invited to freely select MIDI samples, envisioning MIDI as interpretable material.
Read more about Mathias Monrad Møller and his works here.
Find more information about the performance at SPOR Festival here.