OJP022 : Mimosa / Mimosa

Friday, 24 November 2017

OJP022 : Mimosa / Mimosa

Art cover by Mimosa

OJP022 : Mimosa / Mimosa

Mimosa explores through their unique instrumentation, keyboard, vibraphone, and voice with processing, various paths of improvised music.

Touching on classical, jazz, noise and ambient musical styles, this trio always performs at a high energy, feeding the ears with rich textures, harmony, and crashing tension, sucking anybody into their journey. The keys of Rieko create repetitive patterns putting the listener in a trance state using the extreme ends of the sonic range. While Els occupies the middle frequencies on the Vibraphone creating the texture that could be mistaken for electronics. Then the vocals of Natalie fit like a puzzle piece to lay noise, and melody with the right amount of electronic manipulation.

This recipe makes for a stellar and highly addicting music.

You can discover more music at their Bandcamp.

Members:

Natalie Sandtorv – vocal, electronics, wikipedia, Soundcloud.

Els Vandeweyer – vibraphone, elsvandeweyer.com

Rieko Okuda – keys, website.

Els, Rieko and Natalie

Members‘ Biography:

Els Vandeweyer is a Belgian vibraphonist, percussionist, and composer currently living in Berlin. After studying classical percussion in Antwerp and jazz vibraphone in Brussels and Oslo, Els co-founded the IMI Kollektief, whose critically acclaimed album Snug as a Gun was released on Clean Feed in 2006. Today, Els plays regularly in Berlin, including solo performance, group improvisation, and contemporary music (including a performance of Xenakis’s Rebonds b at the A L'ARME! Festival in Berlin). Recently, her composition Landscape, a 25-meter-long textile that functions as a mobile graphic score, was performed in Berlin as part of the Kontraklang series on contemporary music. Current projects include a duo with Fred Van Hove, Quat (with Fred Van Hove, Paul Lovens, and Martin Blume); Mimosa (with Rieko Okuda and Natalie Sandtorv); Metal Illusion (a shadow play with Rieko Okuda), Spin Track (with Olaf Rupp and DJ Illvibe), and participation in two orchestras (Pascal Niggenkemper´s Vision 7 and the Serenus Zeitblom Oktett).

Rieko Okuda is a pianist and a composer. She began with Classical music from the age of 3, in Japan. In her young age, she attended to Kaizuka city Piano Competition, and got the first prize. Later then moved to USA to study and learn Jazz music. She fell right into the Jazz scene in USA, performing with some of the great American Jazz musicians (Bob Mintzer, Jon Faddis, John Fedchock etc.) Also, she got interested in Free Jazz and Improvised music scene while she was in Phliladelphia. She performed with the great improvisers includes Marshall Allen (from San Ra Orchestra), Elliott Levine (recorded with Cecil Taylor), and Calvin Weston (recorded with Ornette Coleman). She has performed in Jazz Festivals throughout her stay in USA. Her interests in Improvised music led her to move to Berlin and perform with various musicians. Currently, she performs with Audrey Chen, Els Vendaweyer, Susanne Zapf (from Sonar Quartet), Yuko Kaseki, Axel Dörner, ect. She also performs at several experimental festivals: XChange Festival, Experymental Festival, and Art-Sound Festival to name a few.In 2014, she got to work with Japanese Pop Artist, YUZU. She arranged the song called “Amenochi Hareruya,“ which awarded Japan Record Award 2014.

Sandtorv studied jazz, improvisational music and electronics at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and at Griegakademiet in Bergen. She is known for her exploration of different expressions within improvisational music in solo projects and with various ensembles. Sandtorv bring the experimental concept of improvised meetings between innovative vocal artists. In 2015 she released her first solo album Pieces Of Solitude. She performed a duoproject in 2015 together with the British multi instrumentalist Steve Beresford at the Blow Out! festival in Oslo, Norway. Sandtorv is the initiator of the concert series Playdate in Bergen and Jugendjazz in Ålesund. In November 2015, she released her first solo album Pieces Of Solitude on the Va Fongool label.