Aurora Records proudly presents Temporal Gardening, featuring composer and performer Stephan Meidell and the baroque ensemble Bergen Barokk. The new album will be available on vinyl and digital platforms on 15th of September 2023. 
 
Temporal Gardening was originally a commission written in 2020 for Bergen Barokk. The idea was to explore using early music instrumentation in dialogue with new electro-acoustic technology. The unique and remarkable ecology grew from pseudo-baroque music playfully reimagined, reinterpreted, disassembled, remixed, and resampled. 

The trio has been expanded with drums, functioning as speakers for the electronic manipulations of the ensemble. A double-bass recorder vibrates a sub-woofer speaker mounted inside a bass drum, and a live sampled harpsichord sounds through cymbals, gongs, and a snare drum. Meidell himself part takes as a musician in the performance, doing live sampling and electronic contributions. 

What is baroque? And why am I drawn toward it? That is a question I have been asking myself for several years, ever since making the music for Metrics (Hubro 2017). It is somewhat defined by the relation between the excessive and the organic. The castles may be extravagant, but they reek of bodies and muck. I revisited this question by getting the privileged opportunity of writing a piece for Bergen Barokk. Not so much by conceptualizing or analyzing, but rather by feeling my way through what the baroque means to me and how I could envision the baroque sounding today, resonating through instruments, bodies, and spaces. Tracing a lineage to the tradition but still allowing influences I’ve grown up with and internalized in my life to seep through. I sought to augment the traditional instrumentation of harpsichord, recorder, and baroque cello with electronics. It could stimulate extravagant electro–acoustic improvisations unfolding through acoustic instruments using today’s technology.  - Stephan Meidell