Fat Battery: Thorolf Thuestad

Thorolf Thuestad

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Computer/composition

Thorolf Thuestad was born in 1975 in Haugesund on the west coast of Norway. His musical background starts with the conceptual improvisational septet SpontEnsemble, performing pieces by the members as well as classic works by Stockhausen and Cage. The ensemble continued in the form of the trio INITZ, whose work was later released on a disc by the same name on Safe as Milk Records.

Thorolf has a wide educational background having studied jazz performance, ethnomusicology and musicology, composition (experimental and contextual) and music technology at the University of Trondheim, Norway, the Utrecht School of Arts, the Netherlands, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the USA. He has a Masters degree in composition in context and music technology from the Utrecht School of Arts. Thorolf has created music for films, dance productions, theater productions and records, covering a wide range of styles. He has delivered technical solutions for installations and pieces with performers and electronics. He has worked as a sound designer, composer and sound engineer for a range of stage productions, mainly with dance and theater ensembles. He regularly works with multi speaker setups and sound diffusion techniques for live use, and he is often found as an engineer for live and recorded sound. He has worked with generative music, which he wrote his master's thesis on, as well as adaptive composition systems for use in games and similar situations. Thorolf holds the position as Director of Sound Arts at the Bergen Center of Electronic Art and is currently involved in a range of new theater productions, among them is Polyfonia with Transiteatret which use the idea of the visual radio play, where scenography is described in sound alone and the actors are allowed to interact freely with aurally defined objects. Thorolf has also been working with Ole Hamre to create the new Folkofonen instrument, as well as the spectacle Concert for Infrastructure, where a performer uses the city of Bergen as their instrument. In addition to Fat Battery he also performs with the group Myrtle.