Eveeu 1 - 4 for Baroque Fiddle and Electronics

«Eveeu 1 - 4». Released on Rune Rebne «Venom» on Aurora Records 2025,

Composed in collaboration with Ludig Elblaus

The work is founded on the idea that, through its use of recomposed traditional musical material and real-time electronic co-creation, it explores both the music’s and the listener’s memory by way of shadowing, mirroring, deconstruction, and temporal displacements. It relies on specially developed techniques and custom-made software. Traditional and alternative playing techniques are set in contrast to the cleaner sound ideals of the Baroque, acquiring new meaning through ornamentation, deconstruction, mirroring, and sound processing.

Old and new music, past time and present time, meet and blend across their temporal boundaries. The work consists of four parts, the first three of which are recomposed extracts of Johnson’s favorite pieces by Sainte Colombe, Marais, and Dowland. In each part, the filtered material from the older works forms the basis for the electronic layer, which is generated from live recordings of Johnson’s Baroque violin. The musical material is deconstructed and reconstructed either by the electronics or by the violinist in different ways across the four sections. Through ornamentation, sweetness, and elasticity of the old pieces, the past is brought into dialogue with the immediacy and emotional intensity of live electronics.

In the final part, Johnson encounters fragments of his earlier playing through the electronics, using his memory of what has been played to create a fleeting and immediate expression together with the electronics—where nothing remains except memory once the music falls silent. The piece thus begins by retrieving the past through the violin material, while the electronics throughout the work recall and shift the material in dialogue with, or as a proposition to, what Johnson plays. The electronics embody the idea of time woven around Johnson’s intense, quiet, and tender playing, and the work comes to rest in an ephemeral simultaneity of memories and improvisations.

The sections of Eveeu are:

Eveeu 1 - Pleeu: Baroque violin and electronics, based on Sainte Colombe: Les pleurs

Eveeu 2 - Doow_so: Baroque violin solo, based on Dowland: Lachrimae

Eveeu 3 - Maara: Baroque violin and electronics, based on Marais: La Rêveuse

Eveeui 4 - Een: Baroque violin improvising with fragments from the first three parts, together with the electronics, which continue their recomposition and gradually absorb what is improvised by the violin

Victoria Johnson - Baroque Violin and Electronics live at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo, 2025,

«Eveeu 1 - Pleeu» 

«Eveeu 2 - Doow_so»