Interview with Miman



Miman is a group of three artists: Andreas Røysum, Egil Kalman and Hans Kjorstad. They play improvised music on guitar, clarinet, double bass and violin. Currently, they are on tour to celebrate the release of their debut album Ulme. After the performance in A4, we made a short interview with them.


Can you tell more about you as a trio?

We’ve been playing together for about 2,5 years now, and Miman is the most active project for all of us. Our music has some elements from different styles, in particular contemporary/avant-garde composed music and folk music from different countries. We bring other elements into it to make it sound natural for us. We play acoustic, so our instruments play a huge part in the sound. We use different techniques, so we try to find what sound can the instrument create if I do the opposite of what I’m supposed to do with it.



How does playing improvised music really work?

It works as a combination of many things. The two most important things are listening to each other and experience with many types of music, both improvised and not improvised. Also, the experience of playing a long time together is important. You can listen to what the others are doing and you can hear what are the possibilities. This way you can make something coherent together. Besides that, everyone is quite equal in following and leading and it’s important to engage the audience by playing in a different way - like louder or softer.


What do you like most about touring?

Meeting people, playing music everyday and having a lot of discipline, because we have to stay focused all the time. It’s the most constructive way to develop our music. I think improvised music is much more about dialogue, and other methods of making music, so you get to know your bandmates a lot better when you are supposed to play something different and new for 20 days in row.


What are your plans after the tour?

We all play with different projects as well, so we are gonna continue with that. In May, a friend of ours is starting a band in which we all will be playing, so that’s very exciting.

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