Kent Olofsson

A Listening Room at the Threshold

ZONA – Music at the Threshold (2021–24) is a one-hour suite of 14 pieces of electroacoustic music, born within the larger artistic journey Zonen – a long-term collaboration between artist, actor, and director Nina Jeppsson and composer Kent Olofsson. Out of this wide-reaching process have emerged a stage work, musical compositions, and a feature film, Zonen.

At its origin, Zonen is guided by the poetic images of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Above all, his 1979 masterpiece Stalker has been a compass for the project. In Stalker, three figures – a professor, a writer, and their guide, the stalker – venture into the forbidden, perilous and enchanted Zone in search of a room that is said to reveal one’s innermost wish. With the film as a map, an exploration of time and space, of hidden dimensions, and of love and poetry was undertaken – moving along the threshold where matter meets spirit–Zonen to slowly emerge and take form.

Zona – Music at the Threshold is a musical diary of this passage, gathering fragments collected over years in the Zone. Its sound world draws on field recordings – brooks, grit, wind, swarming bees – interwoven with analogue modular synthesizers. Echoes of Ligeti’s musical illusions and the sacred architecture of Bach’s music reverberate within some of the pieces.

In a Listening Room at the Threshold a special listening space has been created where each of the 14 pieces of music is accompanied by its title and one image: photographs captured with Olofsson’s mobile phone during the journey – film sets, wandering walks, buildings, known and unknown landscapes. The music is presented in binaural form, inviting the listener to enter with headphones into an inner Zone of listening at the threshold.

Kent Olofsson is a composer with an extensive artistic output of over 200 works that span a broad field of genres, ensemble types and contexts, including music for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic music, music theatre, rock music, and works for dance performances and installations. In the last decade his artistic work and research have been particularly focused on exploring musical composition in experimental theatre performances. Since 2021 he has been a professor of performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Visit Ken Olofsson’s artist page – kentolofsson.com