The contradiction contained in the title of Serene Din is sustained across its 25 minutes. Oslo-based composers Mariam Gviniashvili and Hilde Marie Holsen approach sound from different directions: Gviniashvili gravitates towards its harsher reaches, while Holsen’s trumpet can bring an almost disarming calm. Neither has to surrender much territory for the two to coexist.
The collaboration began after Gviniashvili heard Holsen experimenting with spatialisation and ambisonics in concert. An early experiment involved Holsen using a clarinet mouthpiece with her trumpet, producing unusually dark tones that became a starting point for further investigation. The resulting piece was commissioned by INA GRM and premiered on the Acousmonium at Radio France, with its spatial movement mapped in advance through a graphical score. The version presented here retains something of that architectural conception even in stereo: sounds continually change position and perspective, coming forward, retreating or being pushed towards the edges.
Serene Din opens in darkness. The initial tones slowly accumulate until electronics begin to splutter, gurgle and regurgitate, gathering force towards an eruption around the six-minute mark. By the middle of the piece the structure seems to have collapsed under its own weight. Holsen finds a way out of the wreckage with a pacifying but still uncompromising melodic line, while Gviniashvili’s intricate electronic murmurs bubble underneath, escaping through whatever sonic nooks and crevices remain open.
What follows is particularly effective because the music never establishes a simple opposition between noise and melody. Holsen herself describes noise as something that places her “on edge” and creates a need to find some form of resolution, while Gviniashvili hears the trumpet cutting through her denser material and providing a point of stillness inside it. On the recording, those positions continually overlap. Trumpet and electronics converge, splinter and reassemble, with each repeatedly altering the weight, texture and direction of the other.
That ambiguity comes partly from the trust established between them. The piece has a fixed architecture and approximate durations, but within it both musicians retain considerable freedom. Holsen can pursue her more melodic instincts without having to generate every surrounding texture herself, while Gviniashvili can concentrate on electronic transformation and sound diffusion. Perspectives consequently keep shifting as different elements come to the foreground, slip sideways or disappear beneath something else — “away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad”, to borrow form Laurence Sterne.
After displaying considerable muscular strength, Serene Din proves equally capable of tenderness. Its fault lines gradually close and something resembling tranquillity returns, although the preceding noise is never quite erased from memory. The serenity promised by the title does not require the din to disappear. The two inhabit the same space, sometimes competing for it and sometimes becoming impossible to separate.
For Holsen, the collaboration also provides a departure from the working method heard on her solo album Ediacara (2023), where trumpet and live processing unfold without pre-recorded material or subsequent overdubs. Here she can concentrate more fully on playing, leaving Gviniashvili to pursue some of the electronic and spatial possibilities around her. Gviniashvili, meanwhile, returns to Superpang following Live at SKAIV (2022). Serene Din is another arresting addition to the label’s catalogue, bringing together two very personal understandings of sound, noise and melody with enough mutual trust to leave both intact.
Mariam Gviniashvili
To helps us navigate the noise we reached out directly to the artists.
The title Serene Din contains a deliberate contradiction: “din” suggests overwhelming, even chaotic noise, while “serene” implies stillness and clarity. The piece seems to explore precisely that coexistence, moving between relatively exposed passages and enormous accumulations of energy without necessarily treating noise and calm as opposites.
Hilde Marie Holsen
What does “serenity” mean to you in the context of such dense sound? Were you interested in finding calm within noise rather than creating it through the absence of noise?
MG: For me, the trumpet has always held a kind of magic and I have spent a lot of time listening to it across very different contexts and musical worlds. What Hilde does with the instrument carries that exact feeling of serenity for me. When I hear her sound existing inside the density of my own part, it does not fight the mass of sound – it cuts through, giving that stillness immediately. Serenity here is not about silence, but about this kind of focus inside the sonic storm.
HMH: For me, serenity seems to have a huge part in my music, and I explore ways of making contrasts to the calm melodies that the trumpet often brings with it when I’m playing. That’s maybe where the din or noise comes for me, as a contrasting element, something that gives me a feeling of discomfort, and puts me on edge of how I can resolve that.
Hilde, your solo practice already involves processing the trumpet electronically, while Mariam’s work frequently investigates the physical and spatial properties of electronic sound. In Serene Din, however, it can become difficult to think of trumpet and electronics as two separate layers: elongated trumpet tones enter dense electronic surfaces, while processing seems to turn instrumental sound into texture, atmosphere and eventually something almost detached from its source. How did you negotiate that boundary? Was part of the collaboration about reaching a point where it no longer mattered whether a sound originated with the trumpet or the electronics?
MG: A large part of our collaboration was discussing what roles we each carry in the piece, especially because Hilde is not only playing the trumpet, but also processing it live in the performance. That was probably the hardest task, finding our own spaces inside the sound, giving each other enough room, and at the same time bringing everything together into a single body. It is really nice to hear that this comes through.
HMH: Yes, I agree with what Mariam says. In my solo practice I’ve always looked at the trumpet and electronics as equal layers, they’re commenting and contrasting and playing together, although all the sound material originates from what I play on the trumpet. What I play on the trumpet also lays grounds for what will come next. Also Mariam had some recordings of my playing that she used for processing, and it was interesting to see how she sculpted these sounds. It was interesting and challenging to figure out which electronic register/sound types etc. we could contribute with without stepping in the other’s field.
Serene Din has an unusually patient large-scale trajectory: a long accumulation across roughly the first ten minutes gives way to a dramatic reduction, before the music gradually rebuilds and eventually enters an extended final withdrawal. What is particularly striking is that these changes are not simply a matter of increasing or decreasing intensity—the music’s density, spectral character and sense of space seem to evolve independently of one another. Mariam, given your particular interest in spatial audio and the physical dimensions of sound, and Hilde, your concern with the threshold between form and atmosphere, how did you think about the architecture of these 25 minutes? Is the listener being taken through a succession of musical sections, or were you thinking more spatially—as though our position inside a single evolving sound environment were continually changing?
MG: Even though most of my work moves within spatial audio and its various formats, I had little experience with live sound diffusion, and I had never worked with the Acousmonium before. Knowing we would have limited time on-site, we spent a lot of time imagining and mapping how to get the most out of the space – both for our own process and, above all, for the listeners in the concert hall. We arrived at Radio France with a very clear plan and a graphical score we prepared beforehand to map out the spatial image and depth of every section. In that way, the spatial choreography didn’t just decorate the piece, it directly dictated the musical architecture.
Even though 25 minutes is quite a long duration, having all these layers to explore, the instrument in its acoustic and processed states, the purely electronic sound, and the spatiality itself, made it much easier to build such a long form and keep it genuinely exciting for us to perform.
HMH: I think we held both these perspectives in composing the piece, knowing it would have its world premiere on the Akousmonium, and being interested in composing a piece with a fixed form and atmosphere that we would find interesting to continue to explore over several performances. For me, being a musician who most of the time performs quite freely or improvised, this was also a challenge, to fixate the length of each part, make structures and melodies that could be reproduced and worked with, at the same time as we also were thinking about how and from where the material would be perceived.
Serene Din began as your first collaboration and, importantly, as a live electroacoustic work, commissioned by INA GRM and premiered at Radio France before subsequent performances at Sonic Acts and Borealis. Accounts of those performances emphasise not only the music’s detail but its almost engulfing physical effect. How much has the piece changed through performing it together in very different rooms and circumstances? And because both of you work in areas where improvisation and live electronic transformation are important, how much of the 25-minute form is predetermined, and how much remains dependent on listening and responding to one another in the moment?
MG: From the start, our way of working was to build a clear structure with distinct sections and approximate durations. Inside that frame, we were completely free to improvise and follow where the sound would lead us. Looking back at the premiere, we both followed that architecture quite strictly, playing it very close to the plan. But by the time we performed it at Sonic Acts and Borealis, our approach became much freer. The boundaries between the sections started to loosen up, and we began reacting far more to each other, the room, and the audience.
I remember clearly being extremely emotional on stage at Paradiso during certain passages, where it felt so obvious that the space itself was dictating what we were playing. Later on, I saw we were tagged in six different social media stories, all capturing that exact same fragment of the performance. It struck me that the audience and the two of us were sharing the very same feeling at the very same second in the hall. That was beautiful.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
