We're Pleased To Meet Us

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” - George Orwell (published in 1944, in an essay entitled ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’)

We're Pleased To Meet Us oscillates between music theatre scenes and self-reflexive documentary footage. The investigative core of the work is EKKI MINNA Duo itself, as distinct individuals and as two halves of a whole. EKKI MINNA approached composer Matthew Grouse in 2021 and proposed a collaboration based on egalitarian working methods, where roles such a ‘performer’ and ‘composer’ were cast aside in favour of a blurrier, co-authored expression. 4 years later, the project is under-funded, they've hit various impasses and they're out of ideas about how to bridge their creative differences. 

At the beginning of the process, in an attempt at radical honesty, they asked each other a series of questions and recorded vlog-style answers. These questions include: ‘What would be the most frightening thing to reveal about yourself in front of an audience?’ and ‘What are the biggest challenges in working with your duo partner that you haven't aired before?’. These answers underpin various strands of enquiry that unravel during the performance, namely, the subjectivity of shared experience, the fine lines between persona and the ‘authentic self’, and the inherently problematic notion of truthful auto-biographical representation.

Matthew Grouse - I’m a composer, performer and organiser originally from Yorkshire (UK), currently living and working in Copenhagen (DK). I work at an intersection between music for instruments and voices; electronic sound; text; video; and performance. My music regularly engages with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, and automatic, repetitive behaviours to reveal the latently musical in the familiar or even mundane. Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; audience participation; repetition; music-theatre; hold-music; gamification and quotation.

EKKI MINNA [Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson and Andrew Power] performs, curates and collaborates. Through 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 plane altogether”, they consciously expand the accordion and 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 media such as documentation, multimedia, dance, choreography, and light design, they often compose interludes curating an overarching audio-visual experience.

Credits:

Matthew Grouse, Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson, Andrew Power (concept, composition, and performance)

Commissioned by EKKI MINNA with support from KODA and realised with support from the DKF/IAC Make Sound Residency.