OPTION presents: Sonja Labianca & Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen

This week Option features Sonja Labianca and Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen. As an extension of the regular Monday night concert series, Option curators invite artists to perform, improvise and discuss their work on the Quarantine Concerts stage.

"We are excited to welcome Danish Saxophonist Sonja Labianca and visual artist, musician, and composer Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen for the first time on the Option stage. They will perform two compositions including: "right now, an almost perfect circular orbit" for saxophone and rotating sound sculpture as well a perform as "SOLW"  their duo for amplified guitar and amplified saxophone. I look forward to discussing these works with them both as well as ideas behind solo composition, sculpture, and the parallels between visual and sound art. Don't miss your chance to hear two of the most cutting edge artists working in the fields of sound and visual art as part of the Experimental Sound Studio Quarantine concert series." - Tim Daisy, Option curator

Sonja LaBianca is Danish/American saxophone-wielding linchpin in a Copenhagen collective of women improvisers and experimentalists dubbed Eget Vaerelse, a reference to Virginia Wolfs’ canonical essay, ’A Room of One’s Own.’ Many of Eget Vaerelse’s members play together in rotating projects - most notably Selvhenter, a democratic and border-crashing quintet that pits floating modern composition against twisting free jazz, gamelan coruscating against gothic bedlam.

In 2017, LaBianca explored multiple rooms of her own on her striking, award-winning, and sublime solo debut, About Room/Room to Be/Rooms. Recorded in spaces as variable as a studio and a silo, a garage and a bell tower, Rooms allows LaBianca to push her saxophone against the walls of distinct spaces, to fill them with sound and let them echo back. A saxophonist curious about the acoustic context of her instrument, LaBianca makes each room her own filling the air with radiant musical lines.

Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen is a Danish visual artist, musician, and composer, who works with video and sculpture in site-specific installations as well as music, sound, and performance. Heine’s art often incorporates and combines formal humor, bleak conceptualism, social investigations, and auditory explorations. He utilizes elements of scenography, sometimes layering abstract forms with industrially manufactured elements. In installations of sound Heine attempts to activate the exhibition space to a site for social, historical, and emotional considerations. In a way, his practice positions itself between reflection and presence and can be seen as a sort of 'shape-shifting', in which he undertakes and mimes various discourses in an attempt to activate, vitalize and record meaning into the works, the site and the experience of sound as such.

Tune in to the conversation at: ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts