Stine Janvin Motland

Stine Janvin Motland is an experimental music composer and performer from Stavanger, Norway. Stine’s work challenges the ways we perceive sound, music and the environment. She employs field recordings, environmental sonic resonances, her voice, light and darkness in order to tackle various artistic and social issues ranging from gender to the capabilities of employing the human body as an instrument. One of the prime examples of this was her strangely haunting performance at Unsound 2014 in Krakow, where she transmitted her voice and environmental sounds, while wandering around the premises of the stage. This was the material for her album “In Labour”, which is a very intimate and physical sonic narrative released on Lasse Marhaug’s Pica Disk label. Apart from her solo work, Stine was also enrolled in numerous other united projects and collaborations including Kitchen Orchestra, Motsol, VCDC and others. Stine is also a part of the SHAPE platform – a project uniting innovative audiovisual artists.

In the records

STM 196 is an exploration of issues of race, violence, spiritual and social struggles and politics. It conjoins musicians from different centuries and their diverse creative and sonic approaches. Combined together with elaborate speeches by boxer Muhammad Ali, Barack Obama and controversial writer Amiri Baraka, they provide a complicated landscape of racial tensions and the historical perspective on related social problems. Musicwise, it is also a colorful affair as the artists range from classical composers J.S. Bach and J. Brahms to such modern sound architects as M.E.S.H or Marcus Schmickler. Stine has not forgotten that pop music has also always been a powerful medium of expression. It is represented by the inclusion of such socially conscious artists as M.I.A. or Kendrick Lamar. In Stine’s own words, “M.I.A and Kendrick Lamar are both well known political lyricists and musicians, consciously using their music and media attention to talk about racial issues and injustice.” The mix is not an easy listen, but it is a very engaging affair that provides diverse angles to look at the social issues of the 20th/21st centuries.

The mix can be partially reflected by one of the artworks from the MCA exhibition mentioned below – a New Orleans–style group photo made in painter Wadsworth Jarrell’s backyard by Wadsworth Jarrell.

Stine Janvin Motland on the mix

After a visit at the exhibition The Freedom Principle at the MCA in Chicago last year, I was especially fascinated by Glenn Ligon’s piece Give us a Poem, which is the two words “Me” and “We” written in neon. The two-word poem is a quotation of “the greatest of all times” boxer, devout Muslim, and antiwar activist Muhammad Ali. In Ligon’s piece the two words flicker alternately and occasionally simultaneously, suggesting that the individual and the collective are mirroring each other. This mix considers issues of race, violence and double-standards by blending whites, blacks, browns and sex into an aural fantasy of endless cotton fields, drone war, 19th century house concerts, political poetry and bass drops.