Ultima 2026 Mot harde flater // Øyvind Mæland | Garcia & Gaïotti

Against Hard Matter

Øyvind Mæland: Quality Finish

Nina Garcia & Anna Gaïotti: guitar and tap dance

Hard surfaces resist.

In Quality Finish by Øyvind Mæland, six percussionists play instruments built from large panels of ceramic tiles, wood, metal and other materials. Bows are drawn across the surfaces. The performers become string players of a kind, moving through a strange, quasi-melodic landscape of noise, friction and fragile cooperation.

The materials hum and shriek. A tone allowed to sing out across the surface can stop another sound dead; a careful stroke can quickly become pressure. The music has to gather itself again and again, as if recovering from contact.

Nina Garcia is one of the most distinctive voices in the French noise and improvisation scene, known for an intense guitar practice where even the sparsest means can open large, raw sound worlds. Anna Gaïotti is a dancer and musician whose feet movements become percussion. For their first duo appearance at Kulturkirken Jakob, Gaïotti taps against the old wooden floor. The audience, seated around her and Garcia, feels the creaks and vibrations in their own bodies.

Noise, this evening, is not a genre or a gesture. It is in the crack of a tile, the scrape of a bow, the strike of a foot, and in the hard matter that answers back.

Credits

Performers, Quality Finish

Jennifer Torrence

Tomas Nilsson

Dagfinn Theodor Ingebrigtsen Holte

Elvin Ingeborgrud Berg

Sigurd Adrian Schøyen

Amund Morgenstierne

Choreographic advisor, Quality Finish

Ingrid Berger Myhre

Composer, Quality Finish

Øyvind Mæland

Electric guitar

Nina Garcia

Tap dance

Anna Gaïotti

In collaboration with

Norwegian Academy of Music

Supported by

Norwegian Society of Composers