The traditions and intentions of shamanism seem to orbit around the concept of an offering. Initially, it’s an offering of oneself to the experience that in turn yields an offering back to the participants — some form of transcendental moment, which lifts the clouds of ordinary perception to unveil a world reborn. Music on its own has always shared not only the aspirations of shamanism, but is often present in the techniques of shamanism itself: melodic incantation, ecstatic drone, and the silence of a still mind. These ideals were exemplified in the artistic life lived by our mentor Steve Kaspar (1952-2020) and form the very core of our work as a duo. Thus, it is with great honor and gratitude that we bring our most recent works to the audience at the 2024 Sonic Shaman Festival.
For Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore, what began as a collaboration built on the musical legacy left behind by Luxembourg artist Steve Kaspar, ultimately revealed a new sonic partnership with an energy all its own. At first taking root in the performance of unfinished Kaspar compositions, the duo began composing pieces which suited the unusually sonorous combination of trombone and accordion — instruments which take advantage of both the power and limitation imposed by the movement of air, the motion of breath and the necessity of physical space to the function of sound. These pieces took their shape from long temporal cycles, where interacting digital delay systems could create life-like form and spontaneity from simple melodic inputs, with the resulting work comprising 2023’s Event Horizon, presented through Casino Luxembourg and KulturFabrik in Esch.
This title was aptly chosen, as the project proved to be a necessary bridge from the music of Kaspar — psycho-acoustic incantations essentially free from the constraints of time and place, like the worlds of memory and dream — to the music of the duo, by contrast seemingly more bounded in resonant spaces and constrained by the realities of the human body. In the end, this bridge acted in a way to unite these two visions of sound, in fact showing them to be a type of duality mirroring an understanding of Self — the experience of becoming in both the physical and metaphysical realms.
The duo of Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore first performed together in 2022, as part of a tribute to the late Luxembourgish artist and composer Steve Kaspar. By 2023, they had begun the process of composing their first original works which would eventually become Event Horizon, a series of pieces premiered at Casino Luxembourg and performed later at KulturFabrik in Esch. While there are many shared elements with electro-acoustic music via synthesizers and digital processing, the duo’s primary force comes from its use of resonance in acoustic spaces and in the instruments they play — accordion and trombone — to create harmonic fields into which melodic elements are introduced encompassing spiritual jazz, ritualistic drone and western classic traditions.
Steve Moore is a pianist, trombonist, composer, and author born in Seattle, WA. Hestudied trombone with Julian Priester and composition at the Oberlin Conservatory before embarking on a solo career. Mr. Moore has produced two solo albums, STEBMO in 2008 and Super Drum in 2012.
Nataša Grujović, after finishing her musical studies with Prof. Hugo Noth at the “Hochschule fürMusik Trossingen” Germany, Nataša mainly performed with various ensembles in West and East Europe. Since 2009 she is based in Luxembourg, where she further developed her approach to chamber music, specifically oriented in the experimental sound generation and also began to compose.