Janne Eraker - Movements for Listening (2023) Hi Res

This groundbreaking tap dance album is a wild exploration of sound by Janne Eraker and friends, with borderless worlds of music, widening the horizon and moving outside of all boxes. The ambition of the project was to find ways to use tap dance as percussion in a variety of musical styles, genres and collaborations, and to make a state of the art album recording of this.

Eraker went to extremes to try different sounds, textures, material, shoes, dynamics, concepts and, of course, rhythms! Sometimes it’ll be hard to know what’s tap dance and what’s not, because the players get so close in timbre, texture and sound. There’s both composed and improvised music, and music that is based on a standard jazz tune, score, groove or melody. There’s tap dance on wood, metal, bubble wrap, sand, in water, with different types of shoes and with bare feet. Eraker plays on a collection of taps hanging from a rack, like a percussionist playing a carillon, and wooden taps bound together in her hands, like a flamenco dancer playing castanets.

Eraker has a group of stellar musicians with her on this project: Knut Reiersrud, Ivar Grydeland, Michaela Antalová, Harald Fetveit, Anders Kregnes Hansen, Hans Martin Rundberg Austestad, Juliana Venter, David Skinner, Roger Arntzen, Vegar Vårdal and Kristoffer Lislegaard. This resulted in 10 recordings with 9 duets and 1 trio.

All of this is also documented in a series of videos, to make it possible to see how the music was created. Together with the videos, the ten digital singles that make up the album will be released monthly, starting with the first on January 6th 2023. The double vinyl record will be out at the end of all this, in fall 2023.

Daan Botlek is a visual artist from the Netherlands. He created the cover of the double vinyl record and the ten digital singles. These are all unique murals made in his atelier in Rotterdam, as a part of his artistic project called Primitive Practice.

Janne Eraker is a tap dancer based in Norway. She has roots in many places; born in Germany, raised in Norway, educated and started a family in the Netherlands. Also her dancing has many roots, starting with Balkan folk dances, swinging by competition dancing, musicals, contemporary and modern dance, and now fermenting all of it into her tap dancing. Eraker is fascinated by the sound of tap dance, and has worked a long time to create all kinds of music with it. Her work spans from improvised concerts to choreographed dance pieces, collaborating with a wide range of artists. In 2022 she released her first album Gol Variations with the trio One Small Step. As a performer she also dances in the Sebastian Weber Dance Company in Germany.