Mary Oliver, Johanna Varner: JOMO

JOMO
MaryOliver, violin & viola
Johanna Varner, cello

Johanna Varner, cellist, scholarship holder of the city of Munich and initiator of numerous concert series in Munich and Mary Oliver from USA, member of the ICP Orkest, Dr. Phil. of music theory and soloist on the viola and violin, founded the duo JOMO in 2008. The two musicians, who are keen to experiment and non-conformist, deal with new creative concepts of an experimental, aesthetically resistant music with an exuberant richness of sound.

There are no artificial oppositions between classical music, contemporary music and jazz improvisation, but free improvisations stand alongside echoes from all eras, jazz and new music. The fact that Johanna Varner and Mary Oliver both enjoyed classical string training at renowned universities characterizes the musical spectrum of the JOMO duo: it oscillates between the acoustic alienation of the scordatura and rhapsodic polyphony, between the barely audible shimmering of flageolets and the beauty of the romantic string sound. Johanna Varner from the ICI ensemble munich and Mary Oliver from the ICP Orkest present their first duo CD in the ICI Edition.

JOMO is an organic music collage characterized by breaks in style and the surprising juxtaposition and alienation of sound elements. Through the emergence of sound as musical material, 'exterritorial' playing techniques and arabesque-like beauty and sensuality as a carrier substance for a new content, Johanna Varner and Mary Oliver open the door to a contemporary yet timeless world of sound. Crystalline structures and fragile, fleeting sound extracts take the listener to an extra-musical aesthetic.

Stefan Rutz about JOMO:

The heads stretch with the first note. Not a well-known symphony, a well-known sequence of notes is presented. Rather, the viewer is confronted with an exciting exchange of two instruments in a rhetorically entertaining manner. An exchange that takes hardly foreseeable turns, that lets music happen, in which no long note is boring, no short note is annoying, which elicits tones from the instruments.

The writer would be grateful if he could think of the appropriate words for just one percent of these notes: the instruments masterfully played, treated, made to sound by Johanna Varner and Mary Oliver, they chirp, whisper, scheme, amuse themselves, they suffer and cheer, they trill and flirt, they act thoughtful, they interpret the felt temperature, the morality of mankind, they give each other pros and cons - something like this has never been experienced - they swell in volume, but they pull themselves also shyly retreat, dance on the tightrope of a lonely soft note, risk looking into the abyss, are not afraid of the pause in conversation, fly through the room like butterflies...