Shadow Move documents the second collaboration between two idiosyncratic Danish sonic explorers, composers, and improvisers – vocal artist Randi Pontoppidan and pianist Christian Rønn, following Head Space (Chant, 2020). Their artistic connection began almost by chance. They were invited by multi-artist Jørgen Teller to perform his piece City Size at Copenhagen Jazzhouse alongside Fast Forward and Rhys Chatham, and later reconnected at the Jyderup Akkordeon Træf symposium with Roscoe Mitchell. Shadow Move was inspired by Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s influential essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, and like the essay, the ten spontaneous, intimate, sensual, and genre-defying duets evoke stillness, space, and slowness.
But the deep, stimulating synergy of Pontoppidan and Rønn also explores playfully and imaginatively highly expressive, extended vocal techniques, distinctive use of live electronics and processed vocals, with the unpredictable, manipulated, prepared grand piano, all melt into a singular, rich, organic whole that embraces the art of the moment. The ever-adventurous and curious Pontoppidan and Rønn are not shy of sounding eccentric, abstract, or otherworldly. Often, this free improvising duo sounds as if it captured the transformative sensation of a poetic, vivid, dream-like state of mind, and at other times, as George Platts observed in his liner notes (written at 05:00 a.m. in Vancouver), it drifts gently and patiently through the outer edge of the stratosphere, where time dissolves and gravity disappears. Platts incorporated this beautiful album into his early morning routine as a meditative, deep listening ritual. A most promising, inspiring way to open your days.
Pontoppidan belongs to the Copenhagen experimental vocal quintet IKI, featuring Danish Anna Mose. Polish Kamilla Kovacs, Norwegian Guro Tveitnes, and Finnish Johanna Sulkunen, all using live electronics. IKI’s fifth album, BODY, is the most personal album of the ensemble so far. It explores the female human body – biologically, spiritually, and socially, while embracing its imperfections, through naked, fragmented voices, processed electronic sounds, and as a sensual sonic ritual (or out-of-body listening experience). IKI has developed in the last fifteen years its unique ethos of a unified organism – one body – which explores the delicate interplay between the organic and mechanical, the spontaneous and the analytical, the improvised and the composed. BODY realizes this ethos in an insightful, inspiring manner.
BODY is conceived as a continuous, cyclical movement that can be listened to repeatedly, without a defined beginning or end. The fourteen short soundscapes investigate the tempo and pulse that resonate with the body during various physical actions (run, dance, breathe, awake, walk, float, wander, explode, and remember), with a recurring acoustic motif, which offers reflective pauses throughout the album. This piece is concluded with the «Circuit» question, «Are you gone when your body is not breathing?», which embodies the cyclical nature of BODY, of life itself, and of life that extends beyond our body, before the suggestive vocals of IKI dissolve into an ethereal, seductive atmosphere.
Eyal Hareuveni
Randi Pontoppidan (vocals, live electronics), Christian Rønn (prepared grand piano), Anna Mose (vocals, live electronics), Guro Tveitnes (vocals, live electronics), Kamilla Kovacs (vocals, live electronics), Johanna Sulkunen (vocals, live electronics)
