Sploh Institute

Double bass player Tomaž Grom of Sploh Institute has contributed greatly to the improvised music scene.

Sploh Institute is a non-for-profit cultural organisation, established in 1999, which engages in music and performing arts production, publishing and education. With its wide variety of activities, the institute has become an important local node for research, networking, collaborations, education and creativity not only in the field of music but also in dance, poetry, theatre and multimedia arts. It supports the development of young artists and also different audiences, with the latter stressed by way of the institutes focus on children and marginal groups. Throughout the years the institute cooperated with numerous producers from Slovenia, from Glej Theatre and Šerpa Literary Art Association to En-Knap Productions, Via Negativa, Bunker Institute, Sonica International Festival of Transitory Art and others. Through its various programmes, the Institute produced a local, regional and international network.

Its main centre of activities is Španski borci Culture Centre, though lots of its productions take place elsewhere, the most often in Klub Menza pri koritu. The founder and director of this platform is the improvising musician and composer Tomaž Grom, whose exploits earned him the Golden Bird Award in 2007.

Duša, šum, ventil in žica - trailer by tomaz grom on YouTube

Programme

The many projects of the institute are closely knit and mutually supportive, with the participants of the workshops also releasing music on the label, performing at the festival, leading workshops themselves and naturally also being part of the audience.

Music production and publishing

Though musical enterprises of Tomaž Grom such as TILT, Alzheimer3, Trojnik and other, more transitory collaborations, form the bulk of the Sploh Inst, itute label, there are also various other releases. Some of the musicians that appear on the label are Vid Drašler, Tao G. Vrhovec, Seijiro Murayama, Ljuka Juhart and Jonas Kocher. One of the released projects has also been Sonce in sončice po vsem svetu, a live-recording of the concert series for children and families by various performers, based on poetry for children written by award-winning Slovene poet Tone Pavček.

For most of its releases, Sploh has also taken over the production and enabled studio or live recording, and sometimes also cared for international booking.

Music cycles and other music events

Since 2007, Zavod Sploh organises the music cycle Con-Fine Aperto (which was, at the start, done as a bridging of poetry and lectures with music). This cycle is now more active as a way of bridging various musical genres like jazz, modern compositions, improvisations, and electro-acoustic). Some of the artists who have performed on the series include Okkyung Lee, Doug Hammond, Seymour Wright, Li Tiequiao, Lucio Capece, Toshimaru Nakamura, Guillaume Viltard, Paul Abbott, Cene Resnik, Irena Tomažin, Marjan Stanić, Borut Savski, Incurabili, Bratko Bibič, Kaja Draksler and also the poets Ana Pepelnik and Primož Čučnik (both of them longtime collaborators of Sploh Institute).

Another music cycle is Zvokotok, which is dedicated to contemporary composed music, played by for example Luka Juhart, Miha Ciglar and Theremidi Orchestra. The events take place at different venues, from Španski boprci to Kino Šiška, Cankarjev dom, Sajeta festival, Radio Slovenija and Stara mestna elektrarna.

The third regular cycle, done in collaboration with En Knap, is Neforma, a series of improvisations that feature artists from the fields of contemporary music and contemporary dance. And, also, in 2012 the Sploh Institute introduced the annual music festival Sound Disobedience.

Workshops

Sploh used to presents various concerts and workshops within the framework of its project Maximatika, which focused on creating sound textures and musical structures with the help of live digital sound processing. The on-going workshop series Search and Reflect, inspired by English percussionist Eddie Prévost's didactic methods, is dedicated to musical improvisation, listening practices, and various modes of musical expression.

International activities

Besides the above mentioned stuff, there was a huge number of other performances and installations. Of them, one can mention the two that are more explicitly international. One is Soul, noise, valve and wire, a concert/performance that features video and audio recordings from the streets, where Tomaž Grom went to Balkan city streets and offered his original music to interpretation by street musicians from Priština, Novi Sad, Tuzla, Maribor, Tetovo and Zagreb. These musicians usually happen to be immigrants who were forced to leave their homes for political or economic reasons. Some of them are homeless and beggars, self-taught or academically educated musicians; and intervenes them with live performance.

The other is project is called Visual Hallucination / Auditory Hallucination (Unrepeatable). It is some sort of a multimedia musical instrument that consists of recorded musical sequences performed by different musicians developing their individual musical language. It is a derivative of a music group which appeared for the first time under the name of "Privid, prisluh" (Audiovisual illusion) and is now continuously multiplying and among others features Daichi Yoshikawa, Franz Hautzinger, Lee Patterson, Olivier Toulemonde, Jonas Kocher, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, Ute Kanngiesser, Jennifer Allum and Tristan Honsinger. It is taking place at the intersection of technologically processed contemporary sonority and the elementarity of digitized clean sounds. It is a meeting place of the absent technologically reproduced performers and the immediate presence of the live musician in a concert context. It was presented at Dobbia Lab Italija, Casa Madiba (IT), Music Tech Fest Berlin Nemčija, F.U.C.K. festival Novi Sad, Galerija Media Nox Maribor and some other events.

Sonce in sončice po vsem svetu concert for children