Hans Fjellestad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hans Jorgen Fjellestad (born 2 May 1968) is a musician and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A classically trained pianist, he studied music composition and improvisation at University of California, San Diego. Fjellestad has composed for film, video, theater, dance and has toured with his music and film work throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Mexico, and Brazil.

Fjellestad co-founded the Trummerflora Collective, and has worked as a curator/producer for the international art initiative, inSite 05. He was artist-in-residence at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood 2008-2011, curating and hosting the monthly live music series ResBox.


Film career

Fjellestad directed the documentary Sunset Strip, which premiered at SXSW 2012 and was broadcast on Showtime.[1] The Hollywood Reporter describes it as "entertaining almost to a fault, this color-packed doc boasts a lifetime's worth of glamour and sleaze"[2] featuring Mickey Rourke, Johnny Depp, Ozzy Osbourne, Keanu Reeves, Sofia Coppola, Hugh Hefner, Sharon Stone, Courtney Love, among others.

He premiered his previous film about Depression-era life and art, When The World Breaks, at the 2010 Doc Edge Festival in New Zealand. He was also writer and producer for the 2009 music documentary The Heart Is A Drum Machine with Juliette Lewis, Elijah Wood, John Frusciante, and Jason Schwartzman.

Fjellestad is probably best known as the director of Moog, the feature-length documentary about music synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, which premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2004.

Fjellestad's debut film Frontier Life (2002) explores Tijuana, Mexico, with a focus on the local underground electronic music scene.

He is directing a new documentary about the offshore radio outfit Radio Caroline, currently shooting in London and planned for 2014 release.

Music career

Fjellestad has an extensive discography both as a solo artist and in collaboration with many musicians in the international experimental music scene including Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Peter Kowald, Lé Quan Ninh, Lisle Ellis, Haco, Miya Masaoka, Money Mark, Yoshimi P-We, Thomas Dimuzio, G.E. Stinson, Damon Holzborn (with whom he forms the duo Donkey),[3] Tetsu Saitoh, David Slusser, Baiyon, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Jakob Riis, P.O. Jørgens, Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Mike Keneally, Nortec Collective, among many others. His music is available on Hollywood Records, Accretions Records, Circumvention Music, Brain Escape Sandwich, Barely Auditable Records, Pan Handler and Vinyl Communications.

He usually records and performs under his own name, but has sporadically employed his alter-ego 33, as with performances at The Roxy in Prague and Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco. His track "Abominatron" on the Moog original film soundtrack (Hollywood Records) is credited as 33. Strangely, 33 is also the title of Fjellestad's 2003 solo cd (Accretions Records), making the artist's intentions behind the moniker somewhat unclear.

He began playing the piano in 1973, at age 5. He first encountered the synthesizer (a Minimoog model D) three years later and has been fascinated by both instruments ever since. His music is often characterized as experimental, avant-garde, free jazz or outside electronica.

Kobe Live House (Accretions Records) was released in February 2006 and is a prime example of how the keyboardist approaches his unconventional mix of acoustic and electronic sounds. Recorded live on October 17, 2003, at Big Apple (a jazz club in Chūō-ku, Kobe, Japan) the concert was part of the club's 14th Anniversary Special Concert Series. Both sets are unedited and appear as they did the night of the show in Kobe, performed with a grand piano, Nord Lead 3 synthesizer and a custom software instrument programmed in MaxMSP.

More recently, Fjellestad's music projects in the studio and on the stage are produced entirely on analog electronic instruments (mainly Moog) as with his 2007 release snails r sexy.

References

  1. ↑ "Showtime "Sunset Strip" movie listing". 
  2. ↑ "2012 THR Sunset Strip movie review". 
  3. ↑ "2003 interview on Outsight Radio Hours". Archive.org. Retrieved 30 August 2013. 

External links

Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.