Sofia Jernberg
Sofia Jernberg is a Swedish experimental singer, composer, improviser and performer, born in Ethiopia 1983. She grew up in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Sweden. Since 2011 she lives in Oslo, Norway. One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a conventional singing style. She has dug deep into non-verbal vocalizing, split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
She is also particularly involved in music theatre / contemporary opera and has collaborated in various projects with visual artists. She has performed several staged music theatre pieces like Arnold Schönberg’s ”Pierrot Lunaire”, Salvatore Sciarrinos “Lohengrin”. Composers have written roles especially with her in mind like in Emily Hall’s “Folie à Deux” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “UR_”. She has performed together with visual artist Camille Norment and was part of her piece “Rapture” (Venice Biennale 2015) and “Lull” (Bergen International Festival 2016). She is featured as a singer in an 80 minute cinematic work, “Union of the North”, by Matthew Barney, Erna Ómarsdóttir and Valdimar Jóhannsson. She is the central singer/performer/human, in a 20 minutes audio-visual work by visual artist Kristina Norman, premiered in 2018 at the Tallin art museum. As a composer she has been commissioned by Barents Composer Orchestra, Swedish Radio P2, Stockholm Jazz Festival, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Oslo 14 Vocal Ensemble, Klang – Copenhagen Avantgarde Music Festival, BANFF – Centre for arts and creativity, The Gothenburg Combo and various chamber ensembles. As a teacher in singing and composition she has worked with BANFF Centre for arts and has given lectures and workshops at several universities around Europe.
Sofia@DAI: