Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

“ ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ ˮ is the culmination of roughly 35 years active research, mistake making, experiment and application of and into techniques and practices of development over a wide range of human endeavor by Andrew M.Mckenzie, the founder member of The Hafler Trio.

As life in the modern world quickens, shallows, intensifies in quantity and not quality, having the tools to take control of perception means that you can deal with situations which until now, you thought were beyond your power to control, leading to a place where the deepest desires and their manifestation in the world are available in a state of real Freedom.

“ ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ ˮ is a workshop dealing with techniques for Time Distortion, Hypnosis, Power Focus, Deep Concentration, and new ways of thinking fused with the best of the old. At the end of the week, you will be using a set of tools that will be the difference that makes the difference in your life, whatever you do, and you will be equipped to take part in an unprecedented performance using the techniques you have learned lasting 14 hours – taking you to places that you never actually even thought about dreaming of!

Andrew M. McKenzie, core of The Hafler Trio, Instructional Designer, Hypnotherapist, Mood Engineer and Maker of Strange Things guides you through the processes that will allow you to take control of the power in your life, from the basics to indications of where the advanced may well lie for you. Drawing on over 30 years of experimentation (learning painfully so you don’t have to), research, practice and practical implementation with a wide range of disciplines and techniques dealing with the REAL issues of power and control, a new relationship from a new set of perspectives with Technology and the Self becomes not only possible, but extremely desirable.

No musical training or technical knowledge necessary.

“ ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ ˮ is open to all willing participants.

Practical info

The workshop takes place at Bergen Kjøtt Monday to Friday 10:00 – 15:00.

The workshop concludes with a 14 hour durational performance distributed over several of the spaces at Lydgalleriet/Østre, starting Friday at 18:00 and ending Saturday morning at 08:00. 12 hours of the performance from Friday 19:00 to Saturday 07:00 are open to the audience, while the first and final hours of the performance are exclusive to the workshop participants.

This workshop and performance is produced in collaboration between BEK, Bergen Kjøtt, Lydgalleriet and Ny Musikk Bergen.

Sign up

Sign up by sending a mail to trond.lossius@bek.no with the following information:

• Name
• Address
• E-mail
• Phone number

The workshop is free.

Andrew McKenzie

British artist Andrew M. McKenzie was born in the UK in 1963. As a teenager at the epicentre of punk culture in the late 1970s, he brought his budding interest in art and sound together in a project that would have nothing to do with frustrated rock n’ roll or political sloganeering. The project, called “The Hafler Trio”, bloomed in the early 1980s as a platform for McKenzie’s groundbreaking explorations of sound, music and esoteric spirituality. The project as such still exists some 30 years later on and has gone through many different phases and collaborations, often based on impressions of the locations where he’s lived, like the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Estonia and, most recently, Latvia.

With album titles like Fuck, Masturbatorium, I Never Knew That’s Who You Thought You Were, A Thirsty Fish, Being a Firefighter Isn’t Just About Squirting Water, Three Ways of Saying Nothing, and a book title like Plucking Feathers from a Bald Frog, it isn’t hard to sense some kind of kinship with surrealism and Dada in McKenzie’s work. In 2009, he even recorded his own version of Tristan Tzara?s classic song La Chanson Dada.

In the early 1980s, writer William Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin were enthusiastically revived and revered by a new generation of artists not only inspired by a romanticized Beatnik lifestyle but also by the magical theories behind the experimental writing and art. The symposium The Final Academy in London in 1982 showcased these gentlemen in an apprehensive environment that in many ways acted as a springboard for pushing their ideas onwards. For Andrew McKenzie, meeting these icons led to his developing a do-it-yourself Dreamachine kit in collaboration with Gysin and others.

In the mid-2000s, McKenzie developed a concept called “Complementary Education” or “Complemation”. Integrating composition, recording and performing with hypnosis and efficiency techniques in a group setting, he has successfully organised several of these events or workshops in different countries. Instead of working with these separate fields of interest, he has merged them and invited others to join in. The resulting pieces of music from each session are used later on as fundamental building blocks in future workshops. Thereby creating, in theory at least, an endless piece of music.