A collaboration with EKKI MINNA

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Credits:

Premiered at MINU_festival_for_expanded_music 29.11.2025 - Xenon (Huset i Magstræde) Copenhagen

 

co-created by: Matthew Grouse, Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson and Andrew Power

Performed by: EKKI MINNA

Camera/video documentation: Spektrals

Sound mix: Matthew Grouse

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About:

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"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. [...] There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people.” - George Orwell (published in 1944, in an essay entitled ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’)

 

We're Pleased To Meet Us oscillates between music theatre scenes, self-reflexive documentary footage and autofiction. The investigative core of the work is EKKI MINNA Duo itself, as distinct individuals and as two halves of a whole. EKKI MINNA approached composer Matthew Grouse in 2021 and proposed a collaboration based on egalitarian working methods, where roles such a ‘performer’ and ‘composer’ were cast aside in favour of a blurrier, co-authored expression.

 

4 years later, the project is under-funded, they've hit various impasses and they're out of ideas about how to bridge their creative differences. At the beginning of the process, in an attempt at radical honesty, they asked each other a series of questions and recorded vlog-style answers. These questions include: ‘What would be the most frightening thing to reveal about yourself in front of an audience?’ and ‘What are the biggest challenges in working with your duo partner that you haven't aired before?’. These answers underpin various strands of enquiry that unravel during the performance, namely, the subjectivity of shared experience, the fine lines between persona and the ‘authentic self’, and the inherently problematic notion of truthful auto-biographical representation.

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The piece was realised with support from KODA Kultur and MINU_festival_for_expanded_music. It was partially developed during a residency at Inter Arts Centre, Malmö

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Snippets from reviews:

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"There is no way to catch the brilliance of Matthew Grouse and EKKI MINNA's 'We're Pleased To Meet Us' in a single clip" - Macon Holt

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"While the overall effect of the piece and the subtlety of its construction are difficult to fully catch in a few words, through the use of obsessively and troublingly open documentation of the collaboration process, it catches something of a particular »art-male« insecurity that is often overlooked. [...] Indeed, it opens up a burning question. What does it mean if art and music making are so much like other jobs, with all the pettiness and hard feelings that characterise office/Zoom call life, that those who do it enjoy escaping into the fantasy of driving a truck across Europe alone?" - Macon Holt in Seismograf

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