Last week, we welcomed the fabulous Danish composer Ejnar Kanding.
Met Live Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Instruments and electronic layers and effects mix and blend in equal measure, the latter often being initiated by the former… Transparent, nuanced, full of variation, with a tight structure and plenty of skilled musicianship, this is the kind of piece which keeps the imagination awake from beginning to end.
Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International
The result includes some strikingly dark, tense, and obscure cinematic pieces.
Headphone Commute
The instruments are sliding smoothly into Kanding’s electronically manipulated dream landscapes. The opening number is a relaxed tour down into the blue, under the water, on a journey down, towards total rest. Exhausted by sorrow. Maybe.
Thomas Michelsen, Politiken
The music does not sound much like separate pieces in the traditional sense, but more like one long sequence, in which the instruments, electronical impulses and sound surfaces, calm meditative and more progressive passages slide into each other.
Jakob Levinsen, Berlingske
All these pieces by Ejnar Kanding are marked by a vigorous fantasy and by a firm composer skill, which creates long, exciting sequences without idleness. Here is another testimony of the endless possibilities, which lie in the interaction between instruments and electronics, when one knows how to make use of it. And here this is done without the slightest sign of using the technique only for the sake of the technique. On the contrary, you here find poetic musical pictures, which are evoked by the use of technical possibilities in a way that they are ignored as technique and heard as colours, which makes the musical forms stand out firm and shining.
Jørgen Lekfeldt, Danish Music Review
Resulting in a kind of music, in which the powerfully gestical is mixed with almost meditative moments… there is constantly something disquieting at play even in those passages where the music is more passive in its character. Under the surface, new movements are squeezing in, and suddenly the abscess is bursting and the music is compressed into complex structures. To violent eruptions from an Icelandic volcano.
Steen Chr. Steensen, Berlingske