Studio recording with Karin Hellqvist

For: violin and electronics

Down (2012) [new mix] for violin and electronics. Performed by Karin Hellqvist

Improvised musical performance art with amplified objects and instrument inventions.

Johannes Bergmark makes, among many other things, surrealist musical object theatre with an evolutionary meta-instrument or amplified stage called the Platform. With his main activity as an improvising musician, experimental musical instruments, sound sculptures/-installations/-environments maker and electroacoustic- and text-sound-composer, he has developed over butoh, jester theatre and performance art into a kind of audiovisual object theatre performed as a concert but with a setting as a surrealist puppet play of toys, tools, kitchen utensils, materials, weird and kitch decorative things and junk found on streets and flea markets. The objects bring their history and connotations as well as their often microscopic sound potentials on the little stage, made from a cupboard door with a hidden contact microphone under the floor (usually amplification without any electronic treatments), suspended over the table with a clamp like a springboard into a poor man's utopia where the junk dances the funk on its own terms!
JB has been an increasingly touring free lance musician since he graduated as a piano builder 1996. He also lectures, makes pedagogical projects and workshops, usually focusing on untraditional acoustics, traditional crafts and basic sound technology, hoping to unfold a world where knowledge, skill, inspiration and surprise can meet and develop together and to inspire people to create their own poor man's utopias out of available resources.

In his attitude a skeptic as well as a surrealist, not an artist.

He resides in Stockholm, where he is active in the association for radical and experimental art, Fylkingen (chairman twice), at the Electronic Music Studio, in the swedish skeptics' association Vetenskap och Folkbildning and The Surrealist Group in Stockholm.

Check out my web site for a proper presentation, with texts of all kinds, lots of pictures, film and sound, and all other info that doesn't fit into the format here.

From May 2025 most of my official releases will only be found on Bandcamp and other streaming services. This Soundcloud page will be used mainly for unreleased tracks and demo-recordings.

Down (2012) [new mix] for violin and electronics. Performed by Karin Hellqvist

Johan Svensson