Jexper Holmen is a composer of extremes - a ‘classicial' composer with a penchant for the likes of Aphex Twin. One that enjoys placing the soft noise distortion of ambient electronica alongside the radical thinking and existential intensity of through-composed music such as that of Xenakis.
His earlier works were often provocative in their embrace of ‘ugliness' - loud and extreme instrumental sounds presented in only slightly varied repeated patterns confronted one with a raw musical surface. Yet in more recent works a gentler side has made its appearance - the lengthy and subtle Night Cycle with its moments almost Feldmanesque sensitivity was also one of the first of his works to expand its boundaries so as to fill an entire CD or concert performance. Along with this one nevertheless still finds a taste for the macabre and grotesque (E.A. Poe's Berenice formed the basis for a recent chamber ‘opera') or, as in a recent series of works, his own take on the cosmic. But the music, despite its fantasy or consciousness of ‘bigger pictures', never ‘spaces out' nor succumbs to grandiose schemes - it remains strongly rooted in an awareness of the musical resources used to construct it and the everyday reality the composer finds himself in.
Biography