Duo Dan / Nie

Duo Dan/Nie:
Sofie Thorsbro Dan, violinist and performer
Fei Nie, pianist and performer

Aya Yoshida: Decode for violin and piano (2020) (10′)
“Music is the collections of the movements and so is fashion. The piece “Decode” is inspired by Danish fashion designer Lærke Valum’s collection “Decode” and its limitation of the physical movements. The fashion follows the music and music follows the fashion.”
– Aya Yoshida

James Black: Colossi for violin, piano and video (2020) (22′)
I – Now Entering
II – Liberty White
III – Another room 90#3
“Colossi was completed quite a while ago – about a month before the coronavirus pandemic first hit – so I’ve had plenty of time since then to reflect on what it contains. It is a kind of inelegant, hastily-assembled collage, encompassing gesture-music, video, storytelling, text, electronic music, and, by the end, pure instrumental playing. There is no central concept to the piece, but there are a few threads that can be teased out: size (and especially ‘bigness’), conflict, childhood, ‘det uoverskuelige’, romanticism (in the sense of extreme sentimentality), gender, play, memory, death, change, computer games, family, and Schubert (especially the G-flat major impromptu, a piece I have worked with a few times, and that I also played, inexpertly, for my grandma in 2008 while she was dying, because she loved Schubert).”
– James Black

Xavier Bonfill: 2×2 (2020)
“The line between what is organic and what is artificial has always been a great inspiration in my music. I live on Refshaleøen in Copenhagen: a place where nature and industrial surroundings meet. The reason I feel at home there is probably because it reminds me, (in a much more idyllic way) of my hometown, Granollers, an industrial suburb 30km north of Barcelona.
In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, I released the album “Refshaleøen Tapes, vol I”; a collection of improvisations and sketches on modular synthesizer. The track “four_part_drone” was later remade into a new work, “2×2″ where two performers recreate the synthesizer piece with their own choice of instruments and midi pedals that transpose their sound in real-time. The music moves, but always finds a way to make itself at home.”
– Xavier Bonfill

Bára Gisladottir: Prussian Blue for violin and piano (2017) (11′)
“The idea behind the piece is to paint a musical painting with the pigment Prussian blue. Prussian blue is a dark blue pigment with the idealised chemical formula Fe7(CN)18. The music depicts the colour itself as well as the creative process of a painting; preparation, pigment mixing, failed attempts, splashing despair, detailed manual dexterity, from unfocused overview to a focused zoom in on the finest textures, and the question of where and how to end it all.”
– Bára Gisladottir