NL premiere

Soloist musician and composer Laura Ortman brings her unique music for Apache violin and voice to Rewire 2024. Awash with curiosity, energy, and inventiveness, Ortman’s thrilling performances show her commitment to pushing the violin to its utmost noisy, vibrant intensity. Amplified and fed into post-processing effects, this is the violin as you have never heard it before. Having played the violin since she was seven years old, Ortman’s mastery of the instrument is virtuosic and inspiring. Her songs, compositions, and improvisations are intelligent, yearnful, moving, and always drenched in distorted reverb. In Ortman’s recent album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur (2023), the tumultuous distortion of her violin is anchored by her melodic, almost poppy vocals. The music evokes emotions all along the spectrum of feelings. Speaking to Kaput, Ortman says: “Native traditions such as smudging, laughing, massaging, running, crying are in my veins…. It’s always good to respect your place as an Indigenous soul on this earth, and I love to walk with it to express myself without any self-inflicted misunderstandings.” As such, there is a wise understanding of self that forms the bedrock of Ortman’s music, one with such strength to allow her curiosity and creativity to guide the music to strange new places – sonically, thematically, performatively, and with a deep sense of empathy.