For the first time: premiere of Anders Stochholm’s solo-project in Your Rainbow Panorama – in an extraordinary collaboration between ARoS and SPOT.

The ground is prepared for a special experience on Friday 2 May, when Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular work of art, Your Rainbow Panorama at the top of the museum ARoS will be the frame of a first performance during SPOT:

ARoS and SPOT Festival has joined forces to present the musical project ”The Portuguese Man of War” in the large rainbow and will thereby send pacific streams around the grand construction. An extraordinary event – and not a problem-free task.

It’s Under Byen-musician Anders Stochholm who is the originator of the electro-music. Recorded on and inspired by a stay at a southern Japanese pacific island last winter. Thereof both the name of the project and the title of the album, “Girl From The Pacific” (which is released just before SPOT).

Stochholm calls his music pacific electro, and the plot is a robinsonade, a story about existing alone and on your own, separated from the life you come from: – It’s for this purpose, that I have invented two characters, and between them the robinsonade plays out. The songs are about loneliness, isolation – and lust.

While the music is supposed to go on tour after SPOT, the first performances will be two 25-minute shows at ARoS in an exclusive production – and for a limited audience of 150 per concert which is the rainbow’s limit.

Sound-heavy combination
SPOT has joined forces with the “sound-professor” of Aarhus, Sorten Muld’s Henrik Munch to be in charge of the technical aspect – because it takes skills, when the frame consist solely of the most sound-hostile material there is: plastic and metal. Everything is reflected.

Aros og "Your Rainbow Panorama" by night, her set fra Vester Allé- It couldn’t have been a worse combination, Henrik Munch says, who has been calculating around and across the 152 meter long and three meter wide construction to create the ideal sound-experience for the audience. Hard rock, techno or anything else with strong rhythmics would be impossible to control and end up as cacophonic noise. But even Stochholm’s electronic expression takes work.

– The rainbow is a very special room. With around 150 people that is 9 cubic metres of hard surface per audience member, so sound-wise it will be better with more “flesh and textile” to absorb, he smiles. – To not create an unfortunate echo-effect, we will put up speakers every 19 metre. Calculated by the speed of sound, this means that the audience will not experience echo and delay, no matter where they stand, Henrik Munch explains.

And then both Stochholm and Munch focus on, that it takes a special kind of respect to approach this task: Because you cannot believe that art and music will be equals in this case:

– I am both happy and honoured and anxious about the task. I see it as an opportunity to make a temporary commentary-track for a giant work of art, more than an actual concert, Anders Stochholm says:- The task is somewhere between exciting and too exciting, he smiles…

“Walking concert”
Moreover, you are supposed to walk around the rainbow to the music. Anders Stochholm and his brother Søren Stochholm will be separated by a screen in the walking area and can be seen through the coloured glass inside the rainbow. The intention is that one should enjoy the view of the city to the ambiance of the music. Or feel how the music seems different depending on, whether you are experiencing it in the cold blue section or the warm red-orange. Or…

Access:
Access: ”The Portuguese Man of War” is performed Friday 2 May at 19.00 and 20:00 in ARoS’ Your Rainbow Panorama. It requires special ticket to get in.

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Photo top – Anders Stochholm and Henrik Munch preparing the concert inside the Rainbow: Henrik Friis
Photo of ARoS and the Rainbow: Axel Schütt