Stian Westerhus "Stian Westerhus Trio"

Thursday, June 23, 2022, at 10.30 p.m.

Stian Westerhus
Stian Westerhus © Anne Valeur for Monheim Triennale

For his Signature Project of the Monheim Triennale 2022, Norwegian experimental guitarist, composer and singer Stian Westerhus and his trio of outstanding representatives of the current Norwegian music scene combined jazz, rock, electronics and noise to create an extraordinary sound experience.

Swirling industrial sounds, in which melodic structures slowly and dimly became visible like pillars in the fog. A kind of unreal folk music, like campfire melodies in the shadow of big factories and warehouses, urban fringes. The energy of punk amplified in the agitated sound planes of free jazz into a psychoacoustic, condensed experience.

Raised on a range of music from mainstream to heavy rock and metal to prog and British psychedelia, Westerhus first studied jazz in London and Trondheim until he found his own signature by combining the sound aesthetics of sixties and seventies free jazz with punk, noise and electronic distortion.

For Westerhus, the expressive element that emerges during collective improvisation is political music. The detachment from expectations gave him the feeling of complete freedom that gave rise to his solo projects, which would be "in the middle of punk." "For me," Westerhus says, "it's almost anti-music, it's anti-establishment in a way."

The material he was working on and which he presented as a Signature Project at the Monheim Triennale, was the conclusion of one of his conceptual album trilogy, following "Amputation" and "Redundance." At the same time, with the fanned-out sound architecture of Ståle Storløkken's electric keyboard and Erland Dahlen's percussive deep drills, the space of possibilities of the electro-acoustic and energetic sound spectrum opened wide and presented for the first time in Monheim am Rhein.

Stian Westerhus "Stian Westerhus Trio"

Stian Westerhus (git, voc), Ståle Storløkken (keyb, electronics), Erland Dahlen (dr, electronics)