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 come to be a very nodes 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 audiences, with the latter stressed by way of the institutes focus on children and marginal groups. Throughout the years the institute cooperated with numerous other 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 Španski borci Culture Centre, though it also produces events elsewhere, most often in Klub Menza pri koritu. The founder and director of this platform is the improvising musician and composer Tomaž Grom, an explorative contrabass player and electronics, who in the year 2007 also received the Golden Bird Award.

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

The various activities of the institute are closely knit and mutually supportive, with the participants of the workshops also releasing music on the institutes label, performing on music events, leading workshops themselves and naturally also being part of the audience for the many productions of Sploh Institute.

Music production and publishing

The many musical projects of Tomaž Grom like TILT, Alzheimer3 (one of the more succesfull label bands, renowned guest appearances at international festivals and centres), Trojnik and other, more transitory collaborations form the bulk of the label, which has in recent years nevertheless produced a number of albums. For most of these, Sploh has also taken over the production and enabled studio or live recording. Sploh also takes care for booking some of these projects.

Some of the musicians that appear on label releases were 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.

- Create a network on local, regional, national and international level - Support mobility of independent artistic creators and mobility of productions - Support artistic creativity and research - Collaborate with representatives from various creative backgrounds and fields

Music cycles and other music events

Since 2008, Zavod Sploh organises collaborations of representatives from various creative backgrounds and fields (from classical to sub-cultural, musical and literary), fusing and surpassing of musical genres (jazz, modern compositions, improvisations, and electro-acoustic) and the mixing of literary types. Recent artists who have performed on the series include: Marjan Stanić, Marko Brdnik, Lucio Capece, Toshimaru Nakamura, Cene Resnik, Aljoša Jerič, Matjaž Manček, Borut Savski, Luka Ropret, Sašo Kalan, Ana Pepelnik, Primož Čučnik, Miha Ciglar, Irena Tomažin, Tomaž Grom, Jean Phillipe Gross, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Luka Zagoričnik, Dieb 13, Michele Spanghero, Luka Juhart, Josef Klammer, Diemo Schwarz, Miller Puckette, Niko Novak, Bruno Subiotto, Marko Cicilliani, Barbara Luneburg ...

Another music cycle is Zvokotok, which is dedicated to contemporary composed music. The events take place at different venues, from Španski boprci to Kino Šiška, Cankarjev dom, Sajeta festival, Radio Slovenija and Stara mestna elektrarna.

NEFORMA - music / dance improvisations Series of improvisations allows interconnection and mutual understanding of artists in the field of contemporary music and in the field of contemporary dance. Regular improvisational performances promote verification of creation principles, confront with the other contractors, survey procedures and reflection, and at the same time familiarize the public with the creative potentials in these artistic fields. Beforehand only music and dance ensembles will be agreed, other performance will be based on improvisation and interaction. Some of the events will be completely improvised, while others will be structured combination of dance and improvised music or structured music and improvised movement. Neforma wishes to encourage the participation of different authors, and give a platform to test their procedures of creation. The programme is realized in production of Sploh Institute, with co-funding of Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia and partners En-Knap and Španski borci

In 2012 the Sploh Institute introduced the annual music festival Sound Disobedience and in

Workshops

Sploh presents various concerts and workshops within the framework of its project Maximatika, which focuses on creating sound textures and musical structures with the help of live digital sound processing. The latest of these explorations was presented in March 2010 at Stara Elektrarna - Old Power Station in the context of the Sostenuto project. Entitled Forgotten, Overlooked [Pozabljeno, prezrto] the project involved a group of children, a group of pensioners, Grega Zorc, Alja Kapun, Luka Juhart, Tomaž Grom.

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 number of other performnaces and installations. The more explicitly international ones are SOUL, NOIZE, VALVE and WIRE - concert/performance

...concert hall/street, tradition/renewal, audible/invisible, inaudible/visible, copyright/folk, live/recorded, physical/virtual, concealed/direct, spontaneous/ codified, original/reproduced, acoustics/electronics, Europe/Yugoslavia...

Original music can be dissolved in the interpretation of street musicians and then again reassembled into a new original whole. 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, but all of them carry their own story. With this project Tomaž Grom wants to erase or at least blur the boundaries, which exist in the perceptions of people. And music is precisely the medium, which has explicit potential to bring people together and provide inspiration for new visions. On stage individual stories will unite in the common music context without considering delimitations. Video and audio recordings from the streets will intervene with live performance.

The other is Visual Hallucination / Auditory Hallucination (Unrepeatable) - musical instrument

Neponovljivo (Unrepeatable) is a musical instrument, which 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. The musician can make music by selecting the source, defining volume and randomness, which generates a continuous and unrepeatable composition. "Privid, prisluh" is a continuously evolving creation, combining original and live music. 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 is a confrontation space of spontaneous solo performance and the subsequent structuring of individual musical presences, joined by a musician as a real presence in live performance.

Daichi Yoshikawa, Franz Hautzinger, Lee Patterson, Samo Kutin, Seijiro Murayama, Olivier Toulemonde, Jonas Kocher, Andrej Fon, Vitja Balžalorsky, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, Ute Kanngiesser, Jennifer Allum, Tristan Honsinger

Galerija Media Nox Maribor - 2015 Dobbia Lab Italija - 2015 Rimini, Casa Madiba Italija - 2015 Music Tech Fest Berlin Nemčija -2014 F.U.C.K. festival Novi Sad - 2014 Festival Neposlušno - 2014 Zvokotok - 2014 Festival Sonica - 2012

Sonce in sončice po vsem svetu concert for children