Modern Tango World N° 6 (Montreal, Quebec) | Page 34

Sverre Indris Joner
— Electrocutango

interview by

Marco Buso

Electrocutango is an electrotango music project found by Norwegian musician and composer Sverre Indris Joner. The ensemble, mostly known in the contemporary tango scene for its hit songs Felino and Regina, They are appreciated for their irreverent, fusion-driven music which explores tango in different ways,
combining tradition with avant-garde electronica in their two albums Felino (2004) and Adrenalina (2011). In
april 2011, Joner was given the honorary title of Académico Correspondiente by Horacio Ferrer of the
Academia Nacional de Tango de Argentina. I had a nice and interesting talk with him about his past, present
and future projects.
MTW: Good day Sverre! Thanks for being here
to talk a bit about Electrocutango.
Sverre: Hello Marco! Nice to meet you.
MTW: Let’s start from scratch. How was the
Electrocutango project born, and what is the
story behind its two CDs?
Sverre: The first idea came to my mind around
2000, while I was recording the CD Tango for
3 with my quartet ensemble. The name comes
from the fact that the ensemble sounds like it was
a trio, even if it actually is a quartet. I began experimenting with a song at that time. But, it was
not included in the CD because it was destined
for a theatrical project we were working on.
This piece of music turned out to be the songm
A Fuego Violento in the first Electrocutango
CD, Felino. Later, I met the dancer Pablo Verón,
who was busy at that time making the movie, The
Tango Lesson. We discovered that we were both
searching for new directions in tango, and that
we shared interest in other forms of Latin and
Western music as well. We kept in contact, sharing ideas, sketches and enthusiasm.

We decided to try and work together to set up
a show. This happened when Pablo was living in
Montréal. I went to Canada, where we worked together for a while. It was very nice, but he wanted
it to be a very big production, and unfortunately
our investor turned out to be unreliable. So, the
project stopped after a while.
Some time later, by a series of lucky coincidences,
we were both asked by director Peter-Olav Sørensen to take part in his play TanGhost, a tango
version of the original Henrik Ibsen Ghost with
tango. In the original play, one of the main characters, the dead husband, is unable to interact with
the other characters, simply because he’s already
dead, and yet very present and influential in their
thoughts and decisions. Sørensen’s idea was to
have Pablo act as this ghost character, being him
only able to dance with the other people on stage,
but not to speak or to interact with them in any
other way. I was asked to compose the music for
the play, and I decided to revive the Montréal music project for this purpose. By the time the music
was ready for the play, I thought: Wow, this is really
good music, it can’t stop here!.
Maria de Buenos Aires Performance in Buenos Aires
— 34 —

To Subscribe, Click here