1. Cut-up techniques, as in “live musique concrète”.
2. Scandinavian folk music, dark and melancholic.
3. Classical music.
4. Improvisational “jazz” attitude.
5. Psalms with a northern vibe.
But I will also go to Paris already in mid-February for just a few concerts. The idea first came up when my beloved Charlotte Riessen was invited to display her visual art at Grand Palais, Salon Dessin. I have loved her art from the first painting I saw, experiencing each piece as a portal offering a look into a parallel world. And of course, the temptation to make myself a transponder for each world’s natural sound environment soon grew massive! So I suggested coming along to play music around the exhibition. The idea caught on well with the Swedish pavilion admin and I started to book other concerts in Paris for the rest of the week (gotta eat n sleep indoors, you know :-).
I will play at the Grand Palais, by the Swedish booth, on Thursday 15th at 15:00.
Two other concerts are due on February 17 (Espace en Cours, 56 Rue de la Réunion, 19:00) and on February 18 (Église suédoise de Paris, 9 Rue Médéric, 17:00).
At Espace en Cours, on the 17th, experimentation is a keyword for the entire event. Several acts will perform during the night. Formally, it is a teaser for the upcoming Spring Loops #2 Festival, but I will attend as part of a collaborative installation with Charlotte Riessen. Her Dollhouse images and my live noise may breed or clash on stage and, hopefully, the audience will be led through many exciting portals that night.
At Église Suédoise, five o’clock on Sunday 18the February, there will be me, and my Chapman Stick, performing the church music program that has grown popular in Swedish summer church music programming.
With the Alto Flute and Chapman Stick in focus, Boysen performs simultaneously playing the self-designed electronic meta-instrument that allows instant found-sound cut-up, bringing the classic Musique Concrète methods into the digital era.
The 36″ scaled Stick has been around since the early seventies and often used for bass parts on records (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson…). But this little 26,5″ scaled two-handed fretboard tapping instrument offers a rather different tone. My gratitude reaches out to Emmett Chapman for inventing the Stick in the sixties and for putting down the hard labor to develop and manufacture it all since 1974. Check out Stick Enterprises at 
This low price cello model was designed by Ned Steinberger, that used to make guitars before. It doesn’t use electro magnetic pickups, like the Stick and electric guitars do, but some other construction that offers the player to flip a switch to optimise the tone pickup for bowing vs finger plucking. I use both ways of playing in these recordings. My NS cello is the five-stringed model.
This is a wonderful music tool! A fretless ebony board neck with six strings and also six freely twanging harp strings. Both 6-strings groups have EMG electro magnetic pickups and may drive two different amplification rigs, if you like it that way. The harp side does in fact have one “fret”; if moving away your left hand from the fretless neck you can push down any harp strings towards the fret to raise the pitch by a half note. What makes this harp guitar different from traditional harp guitars is that the harp- and neck string groups are tuned in the same octave (traditionally harp guitar’s harp strings are bass strings). Doubling notes for a unison sound or plucking close clusters are techniques I love also on the Stick Guitar.
Mine is the Dusenberg Fairytale lap steel model that has two levers that will let you soar into those classical country licks without having to deal with the monstrous pedal steel guitar machinery. I use a heavy steel on the strings which initially felt a bit awkward compared to the feather light glass-slide-on-finger treatment I’m used to give my vintage style Stratocaster.
It also offers great classic effects and best of all: it will let you patch up different components into a combined amp-cab-effects rig system and develop your own custom patches for instant control of live electronics. Took me about a year of intensive use to get into all of its virtues. Can’t hail this box enough, it is almost too good to be true. What a sound! What a great vibe to play through it! It not just makes all my electric instruments sound good, this amp also maximises the dynamic feel in physically playing string instruments. I’d say that the experience of playing through the AxeFx is that you suddenly gain access to a much wider spectrum for expression! Small moves on the strings makes a bigger difference sonically. 