Stephan Meidell is defending his PhD in artistic research at the University of Bergen with the project “Sound~Currents.”
In the artistic research project Sound~Currents (2020–2025), guitarist and composer Stephan Meidell has immersed himself in the phenomenon of resonance, exploring its artistic potential through playful experimentation.
Improvisation lies at the core of Meidell’s practice, meaning this has been anything but dusty desk exercise. Through releases such as Erlend Apneseth Trio’s Lokk, the collaboration with Bergen Barokk on Temporal Gardening, and Re~Percussion at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, the project has been an active participant in the experimental music and performing arts field. Circus, dance, theatre, performance, club culture, folk music, contemporary composition, and electronica have been woven together in inventive and surprising combinations.
With wide open ears, Meidell has listened deeply into his own practice and uncovered a fascinating and elusive logic that offers new insight into the field of improvised music: a world where parasitism and symbiosis emerge as conditions for artistic creation — a fungal like behaviour that leads the way toward resonance. A sonic sociology has taken shape, and through Meidell’s research we gain a new perspective on the German philosopher and sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance. The processes and music that have emerged reveal how resonance is everywhere. In music, it creates a complex, inseparable network between people, spaces, and instruments.
The methods used in Sound~Currents amplify relationships and make audible the improvising musician’s deep dependence on community. By using vibrating speakers mounted inside the instruments, the interaction between performers becomes intensified and more intimate — musicians can literally sense each other’s sound through the instruments they play. The audience is enveloped in sound and becomes participants themselves. Familiar instruments suddenly gain new potential, and hybrids emerge: a guitar resonates through a piano and becomes a guitariano. An old harpeleik transforms into a techno machine.
Research Catalogue
See the exposision in Research Catalogue: «Sound~Currents».
About the Candidate
Stephan Meidell (b. 1982) is a guitarist, composer, and researcher who for the past twenty years has been unsettling the boundaries between improvised music, contemporary composition, and electronic practice. Meidell synthesises diverse styles and modes of expression, creating music in which genres dissolve and reassemble in new constellations. Working with electronic, acoustic, and electromechanical instruments, he recontextualises sonic elements into detailed and distinctive landscapes with traces of minimalism, early music, and experimental electronica. The doctoral work was carried out at the Grieg Academy – Department of Music, under the supervision of Trond Lossius and Cathy van Eck.
The assessment committee consists of:
Associate Professor Thomas Dahl, University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Chair of the committee
Dr. Professor Simon Emmerson, First member, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, first member
Dr. Professor Heather Frasch, NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, second member