For two weeks, Bendik Giske challenged himself to his career’s most exposing and physically demanding period. He was recording his third studio album in northern Italy last year. “One thing about the tenor saxophone,” the Berlin-based Norwegian artist told me about his signature instrument, “is that it is six kilos of metal hanging in front of your body from your neck. When you work with duration, as I do, and the kind of repetitive or sustained tensions that I have in my fingers and on certain joints, the lower back, shoulder, and underarms get very exposed to injury. There’s a strength required to do this work over time, and there is oxygen uptake.” One look at Giske reveals the athleticism he describes: he’s a frosty blonde with aloof features, sculpted and poised with impeccable posture. This, coupled with the quality of being disarmingly poetic in speech, gives him the air of someone less human and more long-lost Norse deity.
For two weeks, Bendik Giske challenged himself to what was the most exposing and physically demanding period of his career. He was recording his third studio album in northern Italy last year. "One thing about the tenor saxophone," the Berlin-based Norwegian artist told me about his signature instrument, "is that it is six kilos of metal hanging in front of your body from your neck. When you work with duration, as I do, and the kind of repetitive or sustained tensions that I have in my fingers and on certain joints, the lower back, shoulder, and underarms get very exposed to injury. There's a strength required to do this work over time and there is oxygen uptake." One look at Giske reveals the athleticism he describes: he's a frosty blonde with aloof features, sculpted and poised with impeccable posture. This, coupled with the quality of being disarmingly poetic in speech, gives him the air of someone less human and more long lost Norse deity.
“One look at Giske reveals the athleticism he describes: he’s a frosty blonde with aloof features, sculpted and poised with impeccable posture. This, coupled with the quality of being disarmingly poetic in speech, gives him the air of someone less human and more long-lost Norse deity.”
It is no coincidence that the record is self-titled with his exposed clavicle as the album artwork, both calculated choices to reflect the intimacy (or “musical full-frontal nudity,” he termed it) and labor invigorating the work. Beatrice Dillon, the critically acclaimed producer and his collaborator on Bendik Giske, was the one who proposed this new, honest approach to him. As a result, all of the breathing, endurance, and labor from performing single-take recordings are captured here, like an insect in amber, for time eternal. “It’s a scary prospect because there’s a real risk of failure,” he revealed to me. On the track ‘End,’ for instance, Giske noted that he could hear himself “struggling through layers of exhaustion.” Still, by no means in a negative way: as he put it, “It just means that the experience has been kind of heightened to a certain level because of the duration and the kind of persistent presence that it requires “—in other words, a purity and an openness.
This is yet another nod to Berlin’s queer club culture, of which Giske often references in his practice (his 2019 full-length Surrender was inspired by after a fateful trip to Berghain in 2012). But his “affinity for duration,” his ode to the city’s marathon techno nights, could never be truly actualized were it not for the stamina and training from his earlier years spent between a Norwegian music conservatory and Bali, Indonesia, a city frequently adventured by his free-spirited artist mother.
During his technical development, Giske’s trademark fluttering sound emerged from saxophone teachings from one mentor whose method of ornamented playing, otherwise known as the embellishment of a melodic structure through adding notes or modifying rhythms, came from studying the bagpipes. Ornamentation is onerous because it combines the muscle memory of a quick and complex fingering technique, which requires physical dexterity, and also maintaining an evenness of the rhythms and tonal clarity through steady breathwork. Another teacher of Giske’s helped him learn circular breathing to play a single note without interruption, something he was familiar with through his exposure to Balinese music but had deemed objectively impossible on the saxophone because of how much air escapes from the instrument. Yet he persisted.
The apotheosis of his mastery is heard throughout Bendik Giske. The sheer physicality was one factor. The other was his mentality. “I know for my own sake that I had to kind of work on a mindful confidence that this was something that I could do,” he told me. Listening through, the album coils under a wiry tension often associated with the pressure of human performance. Every measure creaks with the potential for both entropy and ascendancy at a single turn, and it’s this razor’s edge where his sound becomes so electrified.
“During his technical development, Giske’s trademark fluttering sound emerged from saxophone teachings from one mentor whose method of ornamented playing, otherwise known as the embellishment of a melodic structure through adding notes or modifying rhythms, came from studying the bagpipes.”
Whitney Wei:
Tell me about your musical background.
Bendik Giske:
My musical background comes from Norway, and in the later young, adult years also from higher, musical education. So that's very present. But what's also been present for me, I think, is this enormous formative experience that was to be exposed to Balinese dance music culture, and I say dancing music because it's almost inseparable in the way that the traditional stuff is presented. It's very much music accompanying dance. But you can also choose to view it the other way around. The dancers all very often have a narrative aspect so they have characters and they have an art of suspense. It's based on the Ramayana, so it's full of gods and demigods and creatures that are half human. [There is this] aspect of storytelling, but also the aspect of movement and costumes and a lot of them are masked characters, so it's kind of assuming an identity through masking yourself and going into character. And so I think that's been very much kind of at the core of how I understand music and how I want to communicate.
Whitney Wei:
I understand that you played both the flute and saxophone, but what led you to the decision to stick with the latter?
Bendik Giske:
It is interesting because it kind of can you imagine when someone first picked up a cylinder and realized they could make music from it? It must have been twenty thousand years ago, I don't know. So it kind of connects to all of humanity somehow, this way of interacting with an object. The flute kind of sticks with me, but I have to say that the trail of exploration that the saxophone took me on is just not an experience that I've had on any other instruments and I think with the saxophone has provided for me—this experience of exploring the kind of territories and challenges that I thought were either impossible or were unaware of their existence... It's purely a discovery of the capacity of the instrument and kind of also just longevity with an instrument that opens up all these sonic territories.
Whitney Wei:
You occupy this unique space where you play an acoustic instrument, but exist within a very electronic music and club centered world. How do you negotiate these two seemingly opposing musical forces?
Bendik Giske:
It's been an interesting experience. The choice that I made was that electronic music very often explores time and repetition. In a way, the tools for electronic music production are rigged to do just that. [The electronic musician] Caterina Barbieri once talked about how her oscillator is an object that already makes sounds, so she's not creating sounds much as she's shaping an already existing frequency or hum. And so I adopted those ideas into my own practice. What if my circular breathing is the oscillator? What is my mouth cavity and my airflow? All of this is the subtractive or additive synthesis when I apply voice to the saxophone when I sing and play at the same time. It distorts the sound of the saxophone, almost like a ring modulator would and so the more I thought about this, I realized that I have all these tools at my disposal. That's the choice that I made and I don't think it's an opposition. it's almost more like something that I want to put into the conversation.
Whitney Wei:
Were there any challenges that you faced being drawn to this ecosystem but not necessarily having a blueprint to follow?
Bendik Giske:
If I'm gonna say there was a big challenge, it was maintaining patience. I developed a kind of confidence in my own material but initially, I was a gigging musician. Meaning that I would play other people's repertoire, but then I discovered this gem [of my own improvisational sound] that just kept growing and the more I interrogated it. That really became kind of an opening of the floodgates where I said goodbye to a lot of colleagues, professional relationships, and so on. My reality became in some ways, more of a monoculture where I kind of just focused on my own project, which is a wonderful luxury.
“It is interesting because it kind of can you imagine when someone first picked up a cylinder and realized they could make music from it? It must have been twenty thousand years ago, I don’t know. So it kind of connects to all of humanity somehow, this way of interacting with an object.”
Whitney Wei:
A gigging musician necessitates you to blend into an ensemble. With this new focus on yourself, did you have to develop a new persona or an alter ego to step into when you made the shift to creating your own sonic material?
Bendik Giske:
I don't want to bad mouth anyone, but I had a booking agent at the time that at one point told me in not so many words to present "more normal" because of all the things that you mentioned. This request made it very clear for me that I probably didn't have a future there because pursuing the expression where I felt I had something special to give was in conflict with the environment in which I was working. That was a moment of clarity for me when I understood I have to actually start carving out my own space. It's been fun. I decided to do it through play and being less worried, if it landed or not.
Whitney Wei:
On the topic, I remember seeing you perform a few months ago and feeling like, wow, there are so many expressive elements you combine as an artist—bits of electronic music, the saxophone and this incredible personal style.
Bendik Giske:
Thank you. I mean, Berlin is a fruit basket, isn't it? You can just pick any flavor and play around with it. It's such a fantastic environment to meet people and ideas and creative expression and also just unlearn a few of the kinds of codes of presenting music. It's been important for me and doing that through some version of subversion. I'm not saying that I've been kicking in closed doors necessarily but it's been important to discover through experience that I can experiment with various degrees of nudity for instance. It's fun because it's on stage and that often depends on the culture that receives it as well, the scene that receives it. So, yeah, Berlin is a wonderful place to discover and grow. I think it's been good to me.
Whitney Wei:
You said that your new musical approach on your record takes you to "a flow state, somewhere between ecstasy, elation, and spiritual awakening." What does spirituality mean for you in this sense?
Bendik Giske:
On the subject of spirituality, I have observed that a lot of people and subsequently communities find themselves in a state of spiritual crisis. We're in a time and age where many of us have felt very pushed out of the organizations and spaces that provide the spiritual experience. I use the word spirituality, but what when I use that word, but what I really mean is the understanding that you are part of something greater. I think a dance floor is a fantastic example of that because you go in and you experience that your presence influences the community, and the community and the circumstances influence you. It's almost an easy way to experience part of a greater whole.
I think the practice that I have in my repertoire and, by extension, the performances that I give are in fact, a result of these experiences. I attach the saxophone to it and it makes a sound that invites other people to partake in my experience. That perspective has been quite liberating for me. I've realized that when I go on stage, I'm not telling anyone to feel this, that, or the other or engage. I'm just engaging myself and, by extension, that creates a resonating experience for other people.
"Described as "a roadtrip through the subconscious" this track is like listening to the intentions and experiences of a curious traveller. The flat hierarchy between rich elements makes this a track that keeps giving listen after listen.”
–Bendik Giske on “Atlas” by Laurel Halo
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