Popping!

For this new piece, Norwegian Composer Jon Øivind Ness has been inspired by the The Residents’ album The Tunes of Two Cities, David Byrne & Brian Eno’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts; surreal comedy series The Mighty Boosh; the fictional groups Chubs and Moles; and supposedly futuristic music from movies like Blade Runner, The Fifth Elementand Starship Troopers. The result is popular music from different fictional cultures – perhaps popular music in a broad sense, as an equivalent to folk music, jazz or light music. But everything is filtered through Ness’s contemporary classical sensibilities.

In Popping, music is kidnapped by an evil sorcerer, the rodent-like Harry Lemen, and locked up in a dark thought prison. Here we can hear depressive versions of, among others, Diana Ross’s ‘Upside Down’and the guitar solo from Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Eventually, Karol Szymanowski’s ghost gives the sorcerer a lesson he will never forget and sets the music free. With humour and a cosmopolitan awareness of diverse genres, Ness has created a little artistic fable about what happens when music is held hostage by philosophers.

Produced by Cikada.