Living Labyrinth immerses you in the world of Danish composer SØS Gunver Ryberg’s music. It’s a spatial experience of a flowing organic dream world of deep listening and meditative interconnectedness. And it includes both unreleased bits and portions of SPINE, one of the more notable releases of this year.
Living Labyrinth, in its spindly tendrils and prehistoric plants, pools of liquid and dense fog, encourages wandering. It’s essentially a walking simulator, but with music that unfolds interactively around you. It rewards floating around and waiting – even pausing to listen before moving. And so it’s really quite different from the experience of listening to Gunver live or in the intense, densely designed album. It’s like getting to drift off into the stems of that work and other gems from her head drive.
And this is entirely Gunver’s composition, down to the development of the engine – with a little build help and download store from Never Engine Labs. The artwork, with its fanciful, otherworldly fauna, comes from the organic mind of artist Ida Lissner.
The artworks are more than just abstraction, too – here’s Ida’s work accompanying a project on overfishing.
I loved the high-energy sonic flood of Gunver’s live show and the richly textured sounds of her album. (It’s getting to be the end of the year and I’m running out of words but – seriously, listen to it.) And this could be the kind of work we hear – and see – more of, thanks to all the possibilities of 3D engines and delivery both on this more powerful generation of PC and Mac laptops and 3D-enabled mobile devices. It feels like it could be a prelude to a new renaissance of personal multimedia composition. I remember being enamored as a high school kid with Morton Subotnick talking about the idea of multimedia “chamber music” – delivered in a way that was personal and intimate on the computer – back in his Voyager CD-ROM, All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis. After years of getting perhaps too lost in scrolling our way through social media, maybe now is an opportunity to get back to that. In your pocket is a machine with capabilities that early 90s Performa could only have imagined.
And there’s more than escapism in this impulse. In challenging and dark times, meditation and reflection can be a matter of survival. They can recalibrate our bodies on what’s important. As Gunver writes:
“Sound shapes reality”
Let sound become your guide.
As you move deeper, music weaves itself around you
and changes depending on your location.Slow Down.
Breathe Deeply.
Listen.You influence the music.
“Music flows through you”A sustainable future
requires understanding
the sense of interconnectedness
in all things.An active listening state,
can be a powerful tool for change.Our most creative technologies
could be a portal or bridge connecting us
with natural forms we may have long forgotten.
And do listen to SPINE. It has a divine sense of feeling; it flows with color and emotion that spills out over any sense of nostalgia or pastiche or genre. Each listening opens up something new, like a return to a garden. (The artwork, in case you hadn’t guessed, is again Ida Lissner.)
And provided you have a decent PC or Mac, I think it’s worth a few bucks more for the full immersive experience.
https://sosgunverryberg.com/LIVING-LABYRINTH
Previously:
Plus on the topic of Never Engine Labs – and the meeting point of 3D and music: