The old cliché claims that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but what about using architecture as a sonic source? Norwegian architect, sound artist, and composer Gisle Nataas has been developing his project Architecture as instrument/The sound of architecture since 2016, researching how buildings sound. He makes field recordings around famous buildings and puts them together into a composition. In this way, he can “play the house”.
On Architecture as instrument/Fehn, Nataas collaborated with fellow Norwegian double bass master Håkon Thelin (of the POING trio, an associate professor of double bass and contemporary music in the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo), and used his overtone-rich double bass as an organic counterpoint to the concrete sounds of two iconic buildings by Norwegian Pritzker prize winning architect Sverre Fehn (1924-2009), whose work also inspired Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen.
Architecture as instrument/Fehn attempts to let the two buildings – The Gyldendal House
