Immersive. Imaginative. Transcendental. Mari Garrigue is a composer, digital luthier, sound designer, and vocalist based in Iceland. Her portfolio work incorporates a rich palate of hidden soundscapes explored and collected during her travels. The tapestry of her work derives from the natural landscape, electromagnetic fields, traditional instruments, and sound synthesis, which are used in tandem. Mari’s blend of the organic with the artificial produces rich, breathing textures which flow elegantly between the boundaries of reality and surreality.
Mari's research explores the role of bodily movement and its translation into sonic applications. Her whole body transforms into an almost transcendentally powerful instrument that creates and sculpts the sonic world around the audience. The bodily gestures not only trigger and manipulate sound, they also tell a story.
Mari’s research and portfolio work has been selected and supported by Icelandic Student Innovation Fund, Hunter’s Fund, and Composer's Fund.
"Gestural controllers became an inseparable part of my music. The more I use this technology, the more integrated and the less intrusive its presence becomes. By engaging the body through natural gestures, the artist pays less attention to technology. A gestural controller is an expressive tool that gradually becomes a part of your body. It blends in and you no more think of it as a separate entity. The gestural controller becomes a translator of human movement and the artist can determine the language and the style of the speech."
Mari’s collected and curated sound library forms a building foundation for her compositions and designed instruments. Her work utilizes sounds which often get unnoticed and underappreciated, allowing everyday noises to stimulate raw, sensory memories in the listener. Her music takes you through the haunting industrial soundscapes of machinery, found sounds hidden between the walls of abandoned places, textures of volcanic rocks, sand, and other natural elements being closely extracted and transformed into their new forms.
"Performing with the Blue Lantern feels like a dialogue. I can lead the discussion and suggest the resonating tones with my voice and by varying position of the actuators and microphones but I cannot precisely predict its response. This aspect of unpredictability triggers my curiosity and creates a strong sense of presence and deep listening in the interaction with the instrument."
The instrument Blue Lantern is a feedback instrument created from a discarded metal object resembling an old industrial lantern. The choice of every used material including resonator, actuator and pickup matters as each one of them has a unique voice moulding the resonance and the overall sound of the instrument. In this piece, I am leaning towards the use of old materials as their age leaves behind beautiful sonic artifacts. The condition and the imperfections of the used materials colour the vibrations and the timbre of the resonance.
The pertinent theme of this instrument is the appreciation of the material and its imperfections.
Inner Outer Ocean is an evolving collaborative performance which has been created by Mari Garrigue and Laura Guarch during their recent collaboration in Catalonia, north of Spain.
The essential elements of this piece are transformation and connection. Their two singing voices and moving bodies transit together through different states of water. Their body movement is enhanced through wearable sensors which shape and sculpt their voices and the sounds of their field recordings from Icelandic rivers, glaciers, and snow storms. From fog to ice, river to sea, body to spirit, the Inner Outer Ocean embraces water as a primordial matter both on the Earth and in the human body. In the Inner Outer Ocean, the element of water is experienced always in movement, in continuous transformation, as a breathing vessel for holding and releasing emotional landscapes and as the source enabling all life forms.