We’re Pleased To Meet Us / Make Sound Residency
8 to 14 March 2024
With composer Matthew Grouse in a quasi-documentarian role, the investigative core of music-theatre work ‘We’re Pleased To Meet Us’ is EKKI MINNA Duo itself, as distinct individuals and as two halves of a whole. The trio committed to a radically egalitarian creative process, which itself becomes the primary focus of the performed work, with all its flaws and foibles.
Introspective narrative is woven from elements of documentary-style footage of the collaborative process, musical commentary, electro-acoustic collaging of voices, and the choreographic potential in our individual physical mannerisms.
Matthew Grouse is a composer, originally from Yorkshire (UK), currently living in Copenhagen, and studying in Aarhus (DK). He often works at an intersection between music for instruments and voices; electronic sound; text; video; and performance. His work regularly engages with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, and automatic, repetitive behaviours to reveal the latently musical in the banal.
Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; self-reflexivity; audience participation; repetition; custom-built, tactile electronic instruments; YouTube comments sung by a choir and virtual singer soloist; and spatialised orchestral music performed on top of mountains, in train stations, in swimming pools, and in remote communities.
Read more about Matthew Grouse – matthewgrousemusic.com
EKKI MINNA performs, curates, and collaborates. Via their multifaceted interdisciplinary approach, they discover and share genre-fluid avenues of expression and communication. Described as “self-consciously quirky” and “melt[ing] us all, via choreography, into another plain altogether”, they consciously expand the accordion & cello formation beyond instrumentation into something introspective and conscious.
Through their collaborative compositional methodology, the duo takes a hands-on approach to co-creation with composers and artists, from conception to realisation, often with a loose determination and a raw experimentalism free from boundaries. Combining mediums such as documentation, multimedia, dance, choreography and light design, they often compose interludes curating an overarching audio-visual experience.