ULTIMA: KNAUSGÅRD & KOTCHE - HISTORIAconcert

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‘Music was mood, period. Music was atmosphere. Music was something other and more than reality.’ — Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night  (2023)

The novel these words come from is set in London in the mid-1980s — a Faustian story about a young Norwegian photography student whose artistic ambitions take an increasingly dark turn. Now, with Historia, its author brings his words off the page and onto the live stage. 

Writer Karl Ove Knausgaard and US drummer/composer Glenn Kotche (Wilco) have put together an evening where literature, percussion and moving image come together. Kotche opens alone with Monkey Chant, a prepared-drum piece drawing on the Balinese kecak tradition. Knausgaard reads passages from The School of Night. Then the elements converge: words and improvised sound against The Left Shore, a video installation by Johan Renck. Something accumulates that none of these forms could have produced alone. 

The evening closes with a conversation between Kotche and Knausgaard on craft and collaboration. In 2017 Knausgaard curated the exhibition Towards the Forest and wrote a book, So Much Longing in So Little Space, about his relationship with Edvard Munch's work, so for a performance at MUNCH these questions arrive already charged. What can art demand of the people who make it? How does an artist turn private obsession into public form? Historia is, in part, an answer: a space where sound can hold an encounter that a book alone cannot. 

Historia 
Karl Ove Knausgaard & Glenn Kotche, video by Johan Renck 

Programme 

Glenn Kotche: Monkey Chant 
Performance 

Karl Ove Knausgaard: Selections from The School of Night 
Reading 

Glenn Kotche & Karl Ove Knausgaard: Historia 
Performance with The Left Shore, a video installation by Johan Renck, created with the still photography of Anders Petersen 

Glenn Kotche: The Path Only Appears With The First Step 
Performance 

Glenn Kotche and Karl Ove Knausgaard: Artist talk 

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a novelist whose My Struggle series is heralded as a masterpiece. Glenn Kotche has been a drummer for Wilco since 2001 and has played on over 180 recordings by artists such as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Radiohead’s Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien. Johan Renck is a well-loved director whose work includes the pilots for Vikings, Bloodline and episodes of Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.