modern music

“Strathroy Stories” is an immersive, spatialized sound piece that explores space and place through a series of adolescent and teenage memories of people, places, and events. This work explores the notion of memory as a dynamic, malleable construct that falls somewhere between archival and living narrative. Guided by the memories of a small town boy, the listener will explore sites and events ranging from the prosaic; swimming at the town pool and hanging out at the arcade, to the aberrant; Turkey Festival murder and an ice fishing party gone wrong. Created as a locative listening piece, the end user is encouraged to listen, as they would a music playlist, while they walk to work, ride transit, clean the house, or walk the hedgehog. This piece is intended to enable a hybrid listening experience where the listener will be at times unable to distinguish real from virtual, thus creating a sort of Schizophonic low-tech AR experience.

In the film ”when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music with electronic elements. His b/w photographs developed in the darkroom are presented in combination with words in different languages, some of them exceeded into ”letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.

The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is very open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. This is also dependent upon the language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.

when has been screened at festivals for experimental short film, so far in France, Romania, Russia and Norway.