Alexander Rishaug

How does the silence sound after a bomb? For his project, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” Ø), Rishaug has conducted field recordings in the Norwegian Government Quarter. The result is a sonic portrait of the abandoned building’s current state of haunted emptiness, revealing how the absence evoked by this vacancy connects to events of July 22, 2011.

Biography

Alexander Rishaug (b. 1974, Oslo, Norway) is a sound artist and composer working in the field between art and experimental music. Rishaug creates site-specific sound projects that investigate time, memory, space/place and acoustics through the use of extended field recording techniques and advanced speaker technology, analogue synthesizers, computers and generative sound manipulations. As an active solo artist and frequent collaborator, this has led to numerous performances and projects within the field of sound art, contemporary music, visual art, film, dance and theatre.

Click here to read more about the project.

Alexander Rishaug on a press tour inside the Government Highrise. Photo: Kyrre Lien

Essay

Tore Stavlund is a literary scholar and project manager at Aschehoug Undervisning. He has written about music and literature in a variety of magazines, anthologies and catalogues. His latest book was Melk. En romodyssé (Milk. A Space Odyssey), Cappelen Damm, 2016.

Read the essay here:
THE HAUNTED EMPTINESS OF ABSENCE - A SONIC PORTRAIT OF HØYBLOKKA