Mesmer is the Danish experimental electroacoustic trio featuring long-time comrades – trumpeter-synth, electronics player Emil Jensen, drummer-percussionist Victor Dybbroe, and synth and keyboard player Anders Filipsen. The trio is fascinated by how sound (and its absence) influences its musicians – and us, the listeners- and how the different natural and cultural environments create different sonic scenarios. Mesmer’s debut album, Terrain Vague arbitrary, 2023), with a title referring to the indeterminate transitional zones with open potential, reflected a two-year-long, methodical sonic research inspired by field trips to the outskirts of Copenhagen and by the aural landscapes of places where nature and culture meet.
Terrain Vague II suggests a further development of Mesmer’s aesthetics. It emerged from site-specific and spatial direction, field recordings made in Læsø, Frederikshavn, and Aalborg in Denmark, using environmental sounds from harbors, coastlines, and the cities’ outskirts. These field recordings were considered carriers of social, historical, and sensory traces, an image of society in motion, and Mesmer has used them as the album’s architectural foundation. Terrain Vague II is realized as an album, a concert series, and an installation.
Mesmer allowed the specific, peaceful Danish geographies to structure the nature of Terrain Vague II, but with more intricate, layered, and suggestive compositional forms and a free improvised approach. The trio wanted to suggest an open-to-interpretation cycle of imaginative and deeply lyrical soundscapes to stress the contrast and tension between the environmental sounds and the trio’s electroacoustic architectures, and dissolve the boundaries between the composed and the improvised, the controlled and the free.
Terrain Vague II is a personal and collective, sensuous, and reflective sonic journey. The album offers an immersive sonic haven, a space for dream-like slow contemplation and deep listening within a distressful present, as well as an immersive listening experience that offers an opportunity to reconnect with place, presence, and community.
Eyal Hareuveni
Emil Jensen (trumpet, modular synthesizer, sequencer), Anders Filipsen (synthesizers), Victor Dybbroe (drums, percussion, drum pads)
