Lone Wolf Runner documents the collaborative work of Greenlandic performance artist-poet-visual artist Jessie Kleemann and Danish pianist-electronics player-composer Søren Gemmer (who describes himself as «balancing the awe of Dmitri S.(hostakovich) with the love of rampant machines»), exploring how post-colonial critique sound as music. The album expands the themes presented at the performance series Lone Wolf Runner, centered on a gigantic futuristic sled installation and a soundscape, that took place in an exhibition at SMK – National Gallery of Denmark in 2023. Kleemann images in this work the act of running, and running as a performance, struggle and exhaustion, or more philosophically, as a meditative practice associated with freedom, cleansing, and oblivion.
In this work, Kleemann addressed painful pasts and uncertain futures related to the decolonial situation that is at the center of her agenda, and resonating with themes of belonging, colonial exchange and visual disturbances, traumas from violations and abuse of power in terms of class and gender. She introduced an exquisite sense of universal metaphors anchored in the body, and the idea of carrying a heavy load is crucial for the narrative of the performance. She cleverly twisted the title of Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem «The White Man’s Burden» (1899), originally an expression of the obligation to colonize, into a bold image of the burdening work of decolonization, presented as a shared responsibility.
This work contrasts and often collides the Western cultural musical, with Gemmer’s grand piano, forever associated with the classical music tradition and more curiously to the ivory import to Europe, together with more modern and experimental glitchy beats, analog synths and digital sampling, with the field recordings from the Arctic Greenland, and the guttural voice sounds and the poetry of Kleemann that always has the Arctic within itself (taken from the collection Arkhticós Dolorôs, (Arctic Pain), Arena, 2021), recited in the Greenlandic language, Danish and in English, and conjuring emotions of fear and disgust, but also love and compassion. This collaboration began without set plans and instead took form from wordless dance-like and musical improvisations that morphed into detailed and layered, aural architectures.
Lone Wolf Runner offers evocative and poetic images and sounds of shamanic rites and operatic Arctic arias. Kleemann and Gemmer sound as if haunted and possessed by these mysterious and powerful soundscapes.
Eyal Hareuveni
Søren Gemmer (piano, percussion, synthesizers, drum machines, Elektron Octatrack, field recordings), Jessie Kleemann (speech, vocal sounds, field recordings)
