Borealis Avgarde Extreme

Borealis 2011 is over. The hardest working musicians the last day of the festival must have been Le Jury: Ricardo Odriozola (violin), Jostein Stalheim (accordion) and Einar Røttingen (piano), who improvised for twelve hours during the Borealis Avgarde Extreme happening (Avgarde being the organization of new music in Bergen). The guys had short breaks to order food  and have necessary timeouts, but most of the time all three were playing.
The musicians had electrodes attached to their scalps, and we were able to see the EEG, a graphical representation of electrical activity in the brain. The signals were also used by electronic media artist Trond Lossius, creating a live visual display.

I visited five or six times during the performance, and was impressed by the energy! The video in this post was filmed when they had been playing for eleven hours, and the violin player had recently been dancing so hard that he pulled out all the wires!
Towards the end they had burnt most of the fuel, and I guess it was just as good that the brain activity was not monitored then.

Take a look at another video filmed after one hour of playing, and this one filmed after five hours of playing, and my pictures from Borealis Avgarde Extreme, and other Borealis concerts, on Flickr.