BEAM SPLITTER - Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) -
is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics based in Berlin, Germany.
Through numerous performances in a wide range of spaces, contexts and collaborations, they have developed a unique brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. The duo have toured extensively across five continents since 2015, joining 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.
Their latest duo 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. Further recent releases include “Beauties” (2023) with Lønning and Reinertsen, and “Wrists out” (2024) with Phil Minton.
Since 2020, the pair have been organizing Dedicated play, an artistic and curatorial platform fostering community building and genre-breaking intersections of experimental musicians and artists from a diversity of social, cultural, and musical backgrounds. The project has taken shape as a concert series in collaboration with Morphine Raum (Berlin), an online album presentation, a festival in Berlin and London co-curated with Hyunhye Angela Seo (Xiu Xiu), and select satellite events.
BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. Other festival/venue performances include; Sonoscopia (Porto), National Museum of Natural History (Kyiv), Issue Project Room (New York City), Festival Music Unlimited (Wels), Avant Art Festival (Warsaw+Wroclaw), Mayhem (Copenhagen), Trigger (Shanghai), Nameless Sound (Houston), Zebulon (Los Angeles), Gogolfest (Kyiv), Kongsberg jazz festival, Simultan festival (Timișoara), Morphine Raum (Berlin), The Lab (San Francisco), CCRMA Stanford university, Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf), Fylkingen (Stockholm), Tiehua Music Village (Taitung), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Audio Foundation (Auckland), Send+Receive (Winnipeg) and Météo Mulhouse Music Festival.
"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 “Split Jaw”)
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)