Beam Splitter is the Berlin-based duo of American vocal artist and electronics player Audrey Chen and Norwegian trombonist and electronics player Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, who are also partners in life, and since 2015 have been touring globally and building a stunning vocabulary together. Split Jaw is the sophomore album of the duo, following Rough Tounge (corvo, 2017), and is released as a limited edition of 100 cassettes and a download option.
Split Jaw offers three pieces from two performances. The first piece, «Purple Mouth» was recorded at Studio Boerne in Berlin in February 2021, and later edited by Nørstebø. This piece suggests Beam Splitter in its most extreme, otherworldly mode. Chen and Nørstebø create a dense and volatile, amplified storm of crafted sputter, heavily processed voices and breaths and unsettling, raw glitches compacted into a magnetic tape loop that mid-piece shifts suddenly to deafening silence and then to introspective, innocent and intimate talk.
The following pieces «Breastbone» and «Down To Rock and Up To Fire» takes the hyper-extended physical dynamics of Beam Splitter into more intimate and emotional depths, even sensual ones on the latter piece, but no less intense than «Purple Mouth». These pieces were recorded at the Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria, where the audience and the duo alike were staged at the center of the room, with no distance between them. In this performance, you could sense up close – literally – how Beam Splitter uses its augmented setup of simple analog electronics to push their profound and telepathic interplay into new, naked emotional territories, and this rare feeling was captured faithfully in Split Jaw. Chen and Nørstebø weave abstract and orchestrate intuitive and eccentric ideas and spontaneous streams of vocalizations into intricate and poetic textures, full of rich and insightful sonic imagination.
Eyal Hareuveni
Audrey Chen (amplified v, analog elec), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (amplified tb, analog elec, feedback, sound files)
