Stian Westerhus
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Novelty and reverberation: audio-visual premiere in a monumental stone setting.
There is a persistent belief that the expressive possibilities of the electric guitar have been exhausted in the 21st century and lost in an endless loop of redundancy. But Stian Westerhus proves us wrong.
The Norwegian electric guitarist is regarded as a musical innovator and icon of his instrument. With a wide range of effects and soundscapes, he regularly puts his audience into a kind of trance that is hard to escape. He builds dense, massive walls of sound, only to bring them down again the next moment in favor of fragile, intimate sound miniatures.
The cool atmosphere of black metal and post-rock have left their mark on his playing, as have the complex harmonies of jazz, the warm tones of ambient music and the anarchic joy of Jimi Hendrix. Over the years, he has played in numerous projects and bands and his discography is difficult to keep track of. A central work to date is the album "The Matriarch and the wrong kind of flowers", released in 2012, which was recorded in an Oslo mausoleum with an above-average reverberation time.
Comparable conditions can also be found in Leipzig's Völkerschlachtdenkmal due to the architectural similarity - the natural reverb here is 10 seconds. It was therefore only logical to invite Westerhus to the monumental stone backdrop of the trade fair city. Together with the live mapping by video art luminary Frieder Weiss, the concert will be both a novelty and an experiment - and its conceptual uniqueness can only be experienced on this evening.
Trigger warning: Use of fog.
