BEAM SPLITTER - Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) -
is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics.
BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing close to two hundred concerts in a wide
variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate
as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a
distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and
trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play.
The duo’s latest album "SPLIT JAW" was released on Nat Baldwin's Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size
format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute
magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from
a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where
audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle,
muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums.
BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires and
largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine
(for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency.
Since 2020, Audrey and Henrik have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY, an ongoing concert series and
collaborative artistic project, where they have invited a diverse array of artists from around the world,
primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration
across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, they are seeking
to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication in sonic
language and music. In the past two seasons, they have worked and recorded with: Mo’ong Pribadi,
Hyunhye Seo, Elaine Mitchener, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas & Orphy Robinson (Black top), Carla
Boregas, Mauricio Takara, Mieko Suzuki, Pak Yan Lau, Eivind Lønning & Espen Reinersten (Streifenjunko),
Hugo Esquinca and Yara Mekawei
BEAM SPLITTER's second duo album "SPLIT JAW" was released in March 2023
--> Click HERE to check it out <--
about “Split jaw”, 2023 :
"The Beam Splitter duo might be the best context in which to hear Chen ply her trade; she excels in dialogue. And while electronic sounds—either produced by herself or her partners — give a nice ungrounding to her delivery, there’s something particularly satisfying about the pairing of her voice with Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø’s trombone. Nørstebø frequently performs solo, so he and Chen both bring that particular fluidity to the duo. His trombone is voice-like and voice-unlike enough to complement her just enough.Split Jaw is Beam Splitter’s third, and best, release to date. (...). I’m still not entirely sure why this music’s so good, but ultimately I know that it is."
- Kurt Gottschalk, New york city jazz record
about “Rough tongue”, 2018 :
"Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø’s album is quite something. Henrik Nørstebø’s meticulously realised trombone scapes combine elegantly with Audrey Chen’s extraordinary array of virtuosic formant manipulations. Always inventive, often deeply emotive, this is a beautiful duo."
— Chris Abrahams (The Necks) for Subradar
“BEAM SPLITTER is highly improvised, extremely crafted and held in an iron will for experimentation.”
— Jean Louis Fernandez, La Nacion (AR)
"Slow in motion, yet quick in phrasing, Beam Splitter swings precariously from trapeze bars, spinning wingless above the ground,
taunting Mother Earth to claim gravity’s fugitives."
— Todd Gruel, A closer listen (USA)
"For each of us, breath is a highly personal signature at the audible edge of sound; to magnify it, as Nørstebø and Chen do,
is to make oneself available in a particularly bold way. And the work on Rough Tongue is nothing if not bold.”
— Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News (USA)