Sound travelling across continents and timezones, through different musical perspectives and ideas, transplanted from one place to another and finally crystallising in an all–day sound performance bringing together in Bergen some of the most inventive musicians and composers from Norway and East Asia. 

For this new collaboration, dreamed up before the global pandemic and shaped by our new international realities, Ensemble neoN will join forces with master sound manipulator Lasse Marhaug to meet the distinctive sound world of improvising ensemble FEN (Far East Network). Yan Jun, Otomo Yoshihide, Yuen Chee Wai and Ryu Hankil are four musicians from Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul, each with a unique sonic fingerprint, who come together in this pan-Asian ensemble to embrace local and individual sounds in a new collective structure. 

Together, in the months preceding the festival, neoN, Marhaug and FEN will be exchanging sounds, ideas and processes to create a new set of musical structures and material to occupy the Slettebakken Church in Bergen, whose dramatic architecture in concrete was inspired by the iconic Kenzo Tange who designed St Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo.

Drawing on diverse musical worlds and channelling various performance practices, the work will haunt the modernist architecture of the church, channeling various presences and absences, through new collaborative composing.