Edvard H. Valberg: Will to Chaos

Field of study: Artistic Research

This research aims to develop knowledge and strategies for liminal and radically relational music practices. Such ambition has made its mark on the history of aesthetics and art from the ancient Greek theatre festivals, through medieval carnivals, to avant-garde movements in the 20th century and the contemporary musical practices this project will revolve around: the band Honningbarna, its place in the punk scene, and raves.

What is it about these chaotic art events that have appealed to us for thousands of years? How do these practices sound today? What is their potential for new ways of making, listening, and performing music?

Basis for the project: Honningbarna

A Honningbarna concert unfolds as a ritual that frames and welcomes a creative chaos where liminal experiences take place. This applies to exceeding the areas for stage and hall, producer and consumer and other occasionally daring gestures such as moshpits or stage dives. Considered musical and performative techniques together form a special aesthetic from musicians in search of optimal musical solutions when the goal is to produce unpredictable, life-affirming, and liminal experiences. The form and content of the music (the "Work") is not the endpoint, it is the beginning – a form of music made to evoke the type of transformative experiences and practices we refer to as art.

By examining his practice through agential cuts, "inhabiting" other similar practices and examining the field of practice in which this project is located, Valberg will conceptualize and explore which musical possibilities, expertise and ethical judgment must underlie such practices. With the concert and the studio as laboratories, the band will experiment with how to start, or stop, chaotic and affirmative experiences.

The project's theoretical framework will be linked to post structuralist and post-humanist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz.

Experiences of chaos at concerts can seem threatening, but in such unfamiliar and unpredictable situations transformation, play and a “lust for life” also interact. This is a field of practice which, throughout much of its long history, has found place outside or in the outskirts of the institutions, as it still does. I hope that this project will be able to shed light on a field, and tradition, rarely investigated, reduce the distance between institutional and non-institutional milieus and experiences, and thereby perhaps create a framework for further investigations.

Edvard Valberg is the vocalist, cellist, and songwriter in the band Honningbarna.