Alejandra and Aeron
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Alejandra and Aeron are Alejandra Salinas (Spanish, born La Rioja 1977) and Aeron Bergman, (American, born Detroit 1971), artists based in Oslo, Norway. They specialize in sound art and installations, although also work in other mediums such as video art.
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[edit] Sound art
Alejandra and Aeron's audio works are genre crossing projects based on the documentary and electroacoustic traditions using a subtle design aesthetic. For example, the 2005 album Be Mine consists of fragments of conversations with various people talking about love, occasionally juxtaposed with various sounds, and the 1999 Children's Record has a similar principle, working with various documentary material related to children. Alejandra and Aeron's early works are among the first experiments with folk and electronic music. This is especially noted in Ruinas Encantadas (winner of an honorary mention in Prix Ars Electronica 2001) and Porto: Folklore Fragments Volume 2. The track Water Jota in 1213442 from the former consists almost entirely of water drop sounds, arranged according to the structure of a folk dance; the artists themselves comment on such concepts that the record "considers the past, while not repeating it."[1]
In 2002 the duo won an Award of Distinction in Digital Music for their audio installation "Revisionland" from the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. They have released 12 critically acclaimed full length audio CDs on labels such as Orthlorng Musork, Fat Cat, Tomlab and their own label, Lucky Kitchen.
[edit] Visual Art
Alejandra and Aeron have shown in solo and group exhibitions in museums and art centers around the world such as the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Santa Monica, both in Barcelona. As with their sound projects, the artists have been developing a complex body of work blending installation, graphic and video work based on the the construction and personal interpretation of documentary processes. There is little place for irony in projects such as "Wildflowers" (shown in the Shrinking Cities exhibition in Detroit MOCAD 2007 and in Gothenberg, Sweden, also 2007), where interviews with individuals working in grassroots organizations in Detroit are distilled for both aesthetic and political urgency.
[edit] Lucky Kitchen
In addition to their own work, Alejandra and Aeron have run the independent audio publisher Lucky Kitchen since 1997. The label has published work by some of the most inspiring sound artists of the decade. Some of the artists published on Lucky Kitchen are Stephen Vitiello, Tetsu Inoue, Matmos, Joshua Abrams and Liz Payne (from Town and Country) Stephan Mathieu, (Wired magazine called him "one of the most important laptop musicians nowadays.") and Halvorson Pavone (who the New York Times described in 2006 as having "experimental instincts, sharpened by an affiliation with Anthony Braxton," their sounds "commingle with a folksy lyricism".[citation needed])
[edit] Discography
- Bostonpopsonreverbformydeadgrandpa (1997)
- Children's Record (1999)
- The Tale of the Unhappy American (2000)
- Home Tapes (2000)
- Ruinas Encantadas (2001)
- La Rioja (2001)
- Underwater Villages (2001)
- The Tale of Pip (2001)
- Bousha Blue Blazes (2003)
- Scotch Monsters (2002/3)
- Lost Cat (2004)
- Be Mine (2005)
- Porto (2005)
- Billowy Mass (2007)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf, Christian Schrenk. Cyberarts 2001, p. 179. Birkhäuser, 2001. ISBN 3211836284
