Sigurd Berge - Playful Systems (2025) [Hi-Res]

The double album Playful Systems contains most of Sigurd Berge’s electronic compositions. The music was composed over a period of three to four years, offering a glimpse into a short but significant phase of his work as a composer, while also showcasing the sound qualities that could be created with the tools available at the time. Berge, especially after an extended study trip in 1968, was well informed about the analog techniques of the 1940s and 50s as well as the use of computers in music also emerging in Europe.

The first album, The Gaze, contains the music and spoken poems of the installation piece Blikk; a collaboration between Irma Salo Jæger, Jan Erik Vold and Sigurd Berge. The work was commissioned by the Henie Onstad Art Centre and was performed for two weeks during the end of April and beginning of May 1970. Since the opening of the new National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in 2022, the installation has been part of the permanent exhibition and can be experienced in a reconstructed version that closely resembles the original from 1970. Blikk is a multimedia work — as it was called at the time — and each performance lasted approximately 83 minutes.

The second album, Electronic Works, contains most of Berge’s electronic compositions not included in Blikk. Sigurd Berge’s music appears on many releases, but works from his electronic output are found on only two: Contemporary Music from Norway (1973) and Early Electronic Works (2010).

Berge primarily composed for ensembles, orchestras and voices, but his use of tone color and texture in electronic music is also recognizable in his acoustic works — just as his use of melodic lines in acoustic music can be heard in his electroacoustic compositions.

Berge was one of the first in Norway to use electronic tools to realize musical ideas, and Playful Systemspresents several previously unreleased works. The project contributes significantly to the documentation of the first golden age of electronic music in Norwegian musical life.