Liquid
Room XII:
A Perfect
Life

Eterical musical fictions and Norwegian music

As part of this year’s Ultima festival, Ictus joins forces with soprano Nina Guo, actor-dancer-performer Tarek Halaby, POING, and the Swiss ensemble Contrechamps to present a Liquid Room in Oslo for the first time. This edition is rich in Norwegian music and inspired by Robert Ashley’s late-1970s television opera Perfect Lives.

Robert Ashley was the inventor of “æthereal music”, a mesmerising, dreamlike style rooted in the rapid delivery of spoken voice. In his words: "I'm in a kind of daydream when I can hear words with music." Ashley’s strange, pop-art musical fictions have no central heroes. Instead, they are populated by a myriad of characters from archetypal small-town America, their lives unfolding in places such as the park, the supermarket, the church and the bank.

Ashley’s music is presented alongside music by Eivind Buene, Laurie Anderson, Jessie Cox, Jennifer Walshe, Lars Petter Hagen, Bára Gísladóttir, Øyvind Torvund, Sarah Nemtsov, Tom Johnson, Svetlana Maraš and other musical singularities that lend the opera a contemporary resonance.

Programme

Robert Ashley
Tap dancing in the sand (1982)
Perfect Lives, Act 3: The Bank (Victimless Crime) (1983)
The Indifference Text (from The Improvement) (1984-1990)

Bára Gísladóttir
all be, all play, all slaughter (2025, WP)

Eivind Buene
Mahler mixtape  (2020-2025)

Sarah Nemtsov
Implicated Amplification (2014)

Jessie Cox
The Drum is a Tree I (2024)
Re(mnants): of Woods and Skins (2024)
The Drum is a Tree II (2024)

Laurie Anderson
O Superman (1981)

Tom Johnson
Rational Melody X and XV (1982)

Jennifer Walshe
From Trí Amhrán (Three Songs) (2019)

Bryn Harrison
Five miniatures in three parts (2008)

Øyvind Torvund
Giants of Jazz (1999-2001)

LP Hagen
Kronologi (2003)