Category Archives: Media Coverage

2nd Video Album

I decided to release a second album following my Video Music concept. This means that every track on the album originally was conceptualized as a music video. With these videos I want to show how all the instruments, heard in the music, actually are played.
Myself, I enjoy it so much more to watch music being performed on the actual instruments, compared to just hearing an audio recording, and I also want others to experience this wonderful aspect of life.
Here’s one such video:

Prize Winner track: “Yin and Yang at Dusk” for OddGrooves Lockdown Song Contest

In early May 2020 OddGrooves.com shared a generous gift with the worldwide musician’s community, the Lockdown Grooves Pack. A free pack of drum kit performances by master drummer Magnus Brandell. Being a long-time OddGroves fan I grabbed the download right away and found this pack-of-drummings extremely inspiring for a song idea I was working on. I had already been using OddGrooves for some time, and this pack locked in so nicely with this Phrygian mode instrumental piece. Magnus Brandell plays the drums with a deep understanding of the story-telling aspects of musical performance. Ghost hits, fills, and transitions are not just thrown in at specific points, they are all parts of a continuously evolving rhythm vibe through-out the long drum kit performance. Exactly the type of drumming that inspires me as a player and composer. I felt how my sax and guitar improvisations along this track in C Phrygian came out like “standing on the shoulders of giants”… he, he… in this case the shoulders of Drummer Giant Brandell :-)  Thank you, Magnus. Good job! 

OddGrooves announced a contest, “to support musicians around the world to go creative during the Corona Lockdown”, and I submitted this instrumental track. A week later I was informed that my piece had won the contest, sharing the highest rank prize with three other submissions.

Link:
https://www.oddgrooves.com/winners-of-the-oddgrooves-lockdown-song-contest/

The Phrygian mode has a certain evil side to it, that I like. Neither minor nor major, it stays in a grey zone that you normally just pass by on your way somewhere else. Much like dusk, the shortly flickering passage between day and night. But Phrygia nails you to the coffin while the same notes keep coming back in ever-shifting series of various configurations. And Phrygian can be extremely dissonant. I think listeners may instinctively experience these characteristics as an instant threat, thus causing the well-known “flavor of evil” we know Phrygian for.

In this track, I’m playing my EWI loaded with a SWAM tenor sax patch by AudioModeling and my 8-stringed *strandberg guitar with a slightly rough flintstone pick through an Axe-Fx-III. I also played the eighth notes based bass line with this guitar. The spiccato strings are from Spitfire Audio’s sampler library Symphonic Chamber Strings. Finally, the virtual drum kit I slapped maestro Magnus Brandell’s MIDI files over is the Superior Drummer 3 from Toontrack.

Filmed with a Sony A6500 hybrid camera. The panning background loop was filmed with a GoPro8.

Software used: VEGAS Pro 17, Sound Forge 12, Cubase 10.5.

My YouTube channel is about original music performed from heart to heart, and the instruments I prefer to play are:

– The Guitar (6-stringed, 7-stringed, 8-stringed, fretless, harp guitar, acoustic)
– The Chapman Stick Guitar SG-12 (26,5″ scale)
– The Chapman Stick Grand (12-stringed, 36″ scale)
– The EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument)
– The Electric Cello
– The Tenor Saxophone
– The Alto Traverse Flute
– The Sitar
– The Electric Fretless Harp Guitar by Tim Donahue

Live video from Présences Electronique 2011


Erdem HELVACIOGLU + Per BOYSEN Présences… by inagrm
This gig was performed in octophonics. At the soundcheck we were told they
actually had set up two circles of eight speakers system. One big
circle with the big speakers surrounding the audience and one inner circle… or
should I rather call it “inner exploding core”? We decided to use
both. I had re-routed my laptop outputs for octaphonic treatments and
Erdem used his rack devices through a borrowed stage mixer to address
the surround system. On stage we had a stereo mix of all eight
surround channels, so the monitoring sound were rather flat.

If you click the source link there are more videos of many other artists. Among them many of my own favorites, like for example Biosphère and Supersilent.

Guitar Player Magazine: Editor’s Top Three CDs


Sub City 2064 was among Editor’s Top Three CDs in Guitar Player magazine’s september issue of 2010. It’s a big honor to be mentioned together with icons like Stockhausen, Hassell, Eno, NIN and Pink Floyd!

I made this music because Erdem inspired me in our collaborative duet experiment and also because I’ve always wanted music like this; music that doesn’t restrict itself by a particular “style”, “instrument” or “scene”, music that exists for no other reason than that someone actually loved it enough to make a recording so that other people may enjoy the same experience.

CDM covers one of my electronic instrument designs!

Wow, what an honor only to be mentioned by such a great webzine as CDM, Create Digital Music! “Dreams of a Musical Future: Digitópia Winners’ Wondrous Creations”.

As a matter of fact I did use my Steppophononic Looperformer at one track on the recently released duo album Sub City 2064 with Erdem Helvacıoğlu. Here’s a link to a track where I use that electronic design to play both the flute pads and the synth sequence simultaneously.

Musical instrument of three dimensional performance

Note how three musical lines are created at the same time; (1) flute melodies, (2) chords layered by livelooping overdubbed long flute notes and (3) matching arpeggios (instantly snagged flute sample, live sequenced and sent through beat synced filters). All three parts following my harmonic on-the-fly improvisation.

Sharing my vision according to Creative Commons

This version of my Steppohonic Looperformer is like a pilot test. I mocked it up with Plogue Bidule and Expert Sleeper’s Crossfade Loop Synth Effect. Not technically optimal, but musically it worked well enough to be used on this record. I published the functionality design idea under a CC license so if you are a programmer you are allowed to steal the idea to create a plugin or whatever. Here is the link to my presentation.

First reviews of Sub City 2064

Psychemusic.org is putting our album on this weekends radio playlist called “PIONEERS AND CREATIVE VISIONARIES: MASTER PIECES OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC, TAPE MUSIC & ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC MUSIC & COMPUTER MUSIC“.

Review:
Live electronics has been used more and more not only as a tool to chose some new effects or distortions on the instrument, but also a real instrument with its own pallet of programmed changes. Turkish born Erdem Helvacıoğlu and Swedish Per Boysen both have experience in this field. Erdem uses the guitar, the cello guitar and a drum machine as his main instruments for additional filters, programming and electronic processing. Per plays flute and some tenor sax and horns and uses EWI, and his ‘step-o-phonic looperformer’ meta instrument, fretless bass and live electronics. This way improvisations between two artists start from a wide and colorful pallet, where the guitars are not only used as live melodic playing, but also for all sorts of guitar strings reverberations, from fast to slow, sometimes used with overlaps so that there is an orchestral feeling moving and somewhat evolving into space consisting of a near ambient setting of sound-paint and drones, mixed with a few different rhythmic but colorful variations. The strangest sounds come from the cello guitar, which sound like a balloon performance on one occasion (track 5). Overlaps, loops, effects and textures are also used in the mix. The horns are a few times a great extension of an effect in the bass parts. Interesting!stalker trainer Prada Silver Fringe Handbag cole haan pump tortoise
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