Johannes Bergmark

Soundfishing - Kapsylparken
Play the Bridge for the Fish! - Biblioteksbron
An Acoustic Study of the Ocean II - Biblioteksbron




‘Soundfishing’
Kapsylparken



‘Play the Bridge for the Fish!’
Biblioteksbron

The bridge you are standing on is full of strings! Play them for the fish in Nissan, who can hear your music through an underwater loudspeaker in the water below you!

‘An Acoustic Study of the Ocean II’
Biblioteksbron

Listen to the fish!



The Stringed Stirrups - Kran 1, Söder

Research photos, click here!

Biography

Johannes Bergmark makes, among many other things, surrealist musical object theatre with an evolutionary meta-instrument or amplified stage called the Platform. With his main activity as an improvising musician, experimental musical instruments-, sound sculptures/-installations/-environments maker, writer and electroacoustic- and text-sound-composer, he has developed over butoh, sound poetry, jester theatre and performance art into a kind of audiovisual object theatre performed as a concert but with a setting as a surrealist puppet play of toys, tools, kitchen utensils, materials, weird and kitsch decorative things and junk found on streets and flea markets.

The objects bring their history and connotations as well as their often microscopic sound potentials on the little stage, made from a cupboard door with a hidden contact microphone under the floor (usually amplified without any electronic treatments), suspended over the table with a clamp like a springboard into a poor man's utopia where the junk will dance it's own dance.

JB has been an increasingly touring free lance musician since he graduated as a piano builder in 1996. He also lectures, makes pedagogical projects and workshops, usually focusing on untraditional acoustics, using also traditional crafts and basic sound technology, hoping to unfold a world where knowledge, skill, inspiration and surprise can meet and develop together and to inspire people to create their own poor man's utopias out of available resources. In his attitude a surrealist as well as a skeptic, rather than an artist.

He resides in Stockholm, where he is an active member of the association for radical and experimental art, Fylkingen (chairman twice), at the Electronic Music Studio, in the swedish skeptics' association Vetenskap och Folkbildning and The Surrealist Group in Stockholm.

http://bergmark.org

Excerpt from BESTRÄNGADE STIGBYGLAR (STRINGED STIRRUPS)
Johannes Bergmark at BZZZ! International Sound Art Festival
Harp Art Lab, Harplinge Windmill, Sweden, 2016

"The Stringed Stirrups is literally walking on a vertical tightrope. I am playing two piano strings that are suspended from the ceiling, with me hanging in the lower end. The strings go through loops on a resonator that is tied around my chest. I give tension to the strings with my weight between the feet that stand in stirrups attached in the lower end of the strings. It is played with two bows and specially made wooden beaters. Sometimes the longitudinal vibrations of the strings are excited. It is amplified with a contact microphone."

From the performance of Besträngade Stigbyglar at BZZZ!, Harp Art Lab 2016

From the performance of Plattform/Surrealistisk Teater För Förstärkta Objekt at BZZZ! 2016.


SOUND AT NISSAN
Nissan, Halmstad, Sweden
Sept 9-11, 2016