Difference between revisions of "Sploh Institute"

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

Sploh Institute is a non-for-profit arts 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 internationally minded 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. Its main centre of activities is Španski borci Culture Centre, though lots of its productions take place elsewhere, 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 Institute label, there are also various other releases. Some of the musicians that appear on the label are Vid Drašler, Tao G. Vrhovec, Seijiro Murayama, Luka Juhart and Jonas Kocher. One of the released projects has also been 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 offers its studio, handles the post-production and sometimes also manages international booking.

Music cycles and other music events

Since 2007, Zavod Sploh organises the music cycle Con-Fine Aperto. At the start, it functioned primarily as a merging of poetry and lectures with music, but later the series more or less focused on presenting and 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, Paul Abbott, Cene Resnik, Irena Tomažin, Marjan Stanić, Borut Savski, 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 for example by Luka Juhart, Miha Ciglar and Theremidi Orchestra. The events take place at different venues, from Španski borci Culture Centre to Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Cankarjev dom, Sajeta Creative Camp, Radio Slovenia and Stara Elektrarna - Old Power Station.

The third regular cycle, done in collaboration with En-Knap Productions, is Neforma, a series of improvisations that features artists from the fields of contemporary music and contemporary dance. Some of the dancers and performers who were a part of it are Dragana Alfirević, Loup Abramovici, Radharani Pernarčič, Teja Reba, Tina Janežič, Leja Jurišič and Dejan Srhoj.

The annual music festival Sound Disobedience, introduced in 2012, is in a way a culmination of all these programmes.

Workshops, performances and international activities

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 the famous English percussionist Eddie Prévost's didactic methods, is dedicated to musical improvisation, listening practices, and various modes of musical expression.

Among the numerous other performances and installations, one can mention the concert/performance Soul, noise, valve and wire. It is a live performance interspersed with video and audio recordings from the streets of various Balkan cities, where Tomaž Grom offered his original music to interpretation by street musicians (often immigrants or homeless) from Priština, Novi Sad, Tuzla, Maribor, Tetovo and Zagreb.

Another curious project is called Visual Hallucination / Auditory Hallucination (Unrepeatable). It is some sort of a multimedia musical instrument that consists of recorded solo musical sequences performed by a continuously growing number of different musicians like Daichi Yoshikawa, Franz Hautzinger, Lee Patterson, Olivier Toulemonde, Ute Kanngiesser, Jennifer Allum and Tristan Honsinger. The project was presented at Media Nox Gallery, Dobbia Lab (IT), Casa Madiba (IT), Music Tech Fest (DE), F.U.C.K. festival (SR), and some other events.

Sonce in sončice po vsem svetu concert for children

External links

Sploh Institute website

Gallery

Alzheimer3, experimental live improvisation concert, Cobbler's Bridge in Ljubljana Old Town, 2006

Ana Kravanja and Marko Karlovčec, CD Neposlušno presentation at the Sound Disobedience festival in 2012, produced by Sploh Institute

Neža Naglič and Jošt Drašler at the Sound Disobedience festival in 2012

Irena Tomažin and Christof Kurzmann at the Sound Disobedience festival in 2013