On the album Almost in G, Scenatet are playing a diverse selection of pieces by the Danish experimental composer Christian Winther Christensen. Christensen is one of the ensemble’s recurring collaborators and for good reason: “Scenatet are an ensemble particularly well suited to my music: a close-knit group with enough time to go into detail, and musicians who thrive on a challenge”, he has said.

The pieces on Almost in G were carefully selected for Scenatet. The compositions manage to put the full range of the ensemble’s expertise to use: their technical mastery of the instruments, of course, but also their fearlessness in regard to leaving the safe hiding places behind their instruments in order to explore radically unorthodox techniques. Take for instance the album’s titular piece: a small, detailed work, constantly circling about the tonality of G, where, in the beginning, the strings of the piano are completely covered in tape, which is then gradually removed as the piece continues.

The result is a piece that, as the daily newspaper Politiken wrote in a highly positive review, “sounds like a craftsman making sequences of sounds at his planing bench”. In that sense, the piece is an example of Christensen and Scenatet’s penchant for challenging the divide between the familiar and the unfamiliar: a wildly unfamiliar technique can suddenly produce sounds that resemble the sounds of our everyday life, while a familiar instrumental palette can lead to sounds that appear strange and even alienating.

In 2019, the album was nominated for the German Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in the category Contemporary Classical Music.

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The album was very well received by listeners:

“There is an urgent originality at work here that absolutely sparkles next to less daring new classical recordings. Comparisons aside, it is a thrilling hour of compositions expertly performed by the SCENATET Ensemble for Art & Music,”
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Toneshift.net calls Christian Winther Christensen a thoughtful and enigmatic composer “showing us the entire construction process in a manneristic fashion, and giving himself the time to invent and alchemically morph materials into other states of being to juxtapose them in a schematic and very interesting way.”

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“…vivid, emotional, modern, luminous and filled with colourful contrasts and stunning surprises.”
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Composed by Christian Winther Christensen
All tracks is performed by Scenatet 
Recorded at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, August 2017
Recording producer and sound engineer: Peter Barnow
Editing and mixing: Peter Barnow and Christian Winther Christensen
Mastering: Peter Barnow

Danish Composer’s Society, Solistforeningen, the Danish Conductors Association and DJBFA – Composer and Songwriters’ Production Pool and Koda’s Cultural Funds.

Throughout the last decade, Angel View has gone through several iterations. Beginning in 2014 as a performance piece created by British composer Juliana Hodkinson in collaboration with the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet, who commissioned the work along with SPOR Festival and MaerzMusik/Berliner Festspiele, the piece was performed at several festivals before being turned into a cinematic work directed by filmmaker Michael Madsen in 2018. Then three years later, in 2021, Angel View was finally recorded and released as a studio album by the Vienna and Innsbruck-based label col legno.

Even stripped of its visual components, Angel View is permeated by a striking sense of place: every sound seems to suggest incredibly specific tactile experiences inherent to our modern industrial environment – chiseling cement, scraping cutlery, breaking glass, criss-crossing cables, squealing tram-wheels. Described by The Journal of Music as “boundless”, Angel View is an assemblage of urban and musical debris made up of over twenty parts, each designed to overlap. The work’s architecture is full of non-sequiturs and arbitrary cross-relations between imagined streets intersecting and running parallel, reflecting the surrealism at the core of everyday life.

Released December 2021 at col legno.

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Conversion is, in the most literal sense of the word, an album of conversions. The two pieces that makes up the album were originally envisioned as pieces of musique concrète based on sound recordings made by the composer Jakob Kierkegaard – an artist for whom the foregrounding of the scientific and technical aspects of music is a crucial aesthetic device. It was only many years later that the pieces were reimagined for classical instruments in collaboration with Scenatet.

The first piece, ‘Labyrinthitis’, was commissioned by Medical Museion, a museum presenting the history of medical science, and the connection between the unnerving soundscape and medicine is evident: the name refers to an inner ear infection and the original piece consisted of oto-acoustic tones generated by the artist’s own ears. The second piece, ‘Church’, originally consisted of ambient recordings of an abandoned church inside the radioactive zone in Chernobyl.

In an interview with the music magazine Seismograf, speaking of the difference between the original compositions and the converted ones made with Scenatet, Kirkegaard said: “I think [the pieces] comes alive. Living dead. The Chernobyl piece is something beyond – a sound arose here that does not sound like anything created by humans. […] Somehow, those sounds are some sort of ghostly being that is just there. I hear that in the new work, too – but I can also hear the people playing it”.

Conversion, then, is a testament to what happens when the strange and alienating beyond is suddenly subjected to a human touch.

Vinyl release from TOUCH, March 2013.

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Fish & Fowl is an experimental sound piece by British composer Juliana Hodkinson and danish composer Niels Rønsholdt. A remix of sorts, the piece has been woven together from thousands of disparate audio recordings performed by the music- and art ensemble Scenatet. Given this highly unusual origin story, it is remarkable how balanced and cohesive the aesthetic and the dramaturgy of the piece appears.

Described as a journey through an intimate and violent universe, Fish & Fowl conveys images of decadent eroticism and depraved romance. The soft, aerial beauty of the subtly creepy instrumental arrangement is constantly contrasted with the raw physicality of the cracking of a leather whip, the slapping of skin, the heavy breathing of a woman, moans of pleasure, and high heeled shoes running across asphalt. The mysterious atmosphere is akin to peeping through a keyhole into a room bathed in velvety red light. You know something is going on there even if you can’t really see it.

“The half-hour-long work is a psychological portrait in the form of a sound piece with noir associations of rainy weather, sex, and city-spleen. It is impossible not to imagine a story about this woman while listening to the work”, wrote the daily newspaper Politiken.

Released January 2011 at Dacapo.

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Composed by Juliana Hodkinson and Niels Rønsholdt with text from Ursula Andkjær Olsen
All tracks is performed by Scenatet
Recorded at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Studio 2, in January and February 2010
Mixed and recomposed in Berlin by Juliana Hodkinson and Niels Rønsholdt
Recording producer: Peter Barnow
Sound engineers: Peter Barnow and Martin Gru
Executive producer: Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Editing by Juliana Hodkinson, Niels Rønsholdt and Peter Barnow
Mastering: Peter Barnow

Danish composer Niels Rønsholdt’s song cycle Me Quitte is an ode to love at its most excruciatingly, devastatingly painful and bleak. Written to be performed by the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet along with the Faroese singer Anna Katrin Øssursdóttir Egilstrøð and Rønsholdt himself, the work was first premiered at SPOR Festival in 2013 and then released as a studio album by the esteemed record label Dacapo in 2016.

Taking as its point of departure one of the most iconic love songs of all time, Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, the surreal, eleven-part song cycle distorts the legendary chanson like a series of fun house mirrors: pulling the lyrics apart and singing them – literally – in reverse. More than an interpretation of Brel’s ballad, ‘Me Quitte’ appears to be haunted by the song, condemned to forever wander through the increasingly mysterious maze of its lyrics.

Upon the release of the album, the Danish daily newspaper Information praised the work and wrote: “Me Quitte is the bearer of a rare beauty. With the gibberish of inversion, it speaks directly to the soul. Sends small grey arrows into the heart. Into solar plexus. It pierces our conception, and it leaves us both cleansed and confused.”

Released May 2016 at Dacapo.

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Songs & Movements is a portrait album curated by the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet celebrating the music of the Danish composer Jeppe Just Christensen, a composer with a penchant for homemade and prepared instruments, toys, kitchen utensils, and other everyday objects, as wells as for compositions that seem as inspired by sea shanties, drinking songs, children’s rhymes, lullabies, and street corner organ grinders as by the canonical tradition of western classical music.

The pieces on Songs & Movements are performed by Scenatet alongside the composer’s usual “band”, Jeppe Just Insituttet, who can be heard playing egg slicer, coffee grinder, toy piano and melodica among other things. Together, the two ensembles create a unique and idiosyncratic world of sound that encapsulates not only the strange and whimsical quaintness of Just’s music but also its gripping beauty. Songs & Movements is a reminder that all music originates from the capacity to be moved by the sounds that inhabit our world.

“[Songs & Movements] is strongly anti-aesthetic and gives new meaning to the old Viennese phenomenon Schrammelmusik. But it’s also a piece of modern, sustainable urban culture that sounds really funny. The soundscape is unique, and I can honestly recommend this meeting with a composer who returns to his childhood and rummages with the remnants of the 1980s sounds he grew up with”, wrote the magazine Klassisk.

Released October 2015 at Dacapo.

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Composed by Jeppe Just Christensen
All tracks is performed by Scenatet & Jeppe Just Institutet
Recorded at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen
Recording producer: Peter Barnow
Sound engineer: Peter Barnow and Renato Vieira
Editing by Jeppe Just Christensen and Peter Barnow
Mix and mastering: Peter Barnow