"There’s a clichéd joke about watching live electronic music shows which says you might as well be watching someone read their emails. The physical gestures required to make music with laptops and other digital devices are the same as those for office work, small movements that do not inspire an audience to move and be moved by an artist. You can't see what the artist behind a screen is doing in the way you can with a guitarist or a drummer. Maja SK Ratkje’s live electronic performance for Tusk works around that problem by giving us a very close-up view into the creative process. Or rather, her children do, because the whole thing was filmed by 11 year old Marte and 13 year old Elias.

Their eyes see Ratkje sitting calmly at her work station. Their mother’s tools are a microphone, a MacBook, a small keyboard and a multitrack mixer. The camera pauses in turn on her hands, her face, her space, circling around her and the room inquisitively. It is a sophisticated film for such young directors. The only concession to youth fashion is maybe the washed-out colour, like a high contrast Instagram filter.

The building block of Ratkje’s soundworld is her own voice, sampled, manipulated and processed in real time. Whispers and babbles are rolled into micro-loops of rhythmic texture. Sung notes are stretched into choral drones. Samples sped up as if in whirling tape decks sound like sci-fi laser beam battles. Talking voices come and go the mix, chattering, whispering conspiratorially, then pitching up into chipmunk squeaks. Other speaking voices sound like aliens, distorted, unintelligible, as if they are tuned in from the stratosphere or the ether. There are burbling, watery, bubbling bath sounds, layered over whispers and squeaks. It is an amazing palette of sound from a simple set up.

It feels alchemical, the base human voice transmuted into clicking, clanging, crackling ambient dub noise gold. It feels like a dream, in that it all seems to make sense and yet you never quite know how you arrived where you are. The changes in the flow of the music are constant, yet almost imperceptible, as each layer fades in and out independently of the others. As the last delicate, floating voices are rolled up into whizzing overclocked tape reels to bring the performance to an end, the camera lingers for a moment on a piece of calligraphy pinned to the wall. “Lyset du treng finst” it says, “The light you need is there” in Ratkje’s native Norwegian, from a poem by Helge Torvund. A positive message in times of pandemic, and maybe also a user guide to this open-ended music that can be interpreted differently by every pair of ears."

-Rory Carr, for TQ Zine