LR Friberg, Ambrose Pottie, pszren – Mellanzonen

LR Friberg is a composer, mastering engineer and writer based in Norrköping, Sweden. Her work moves at the intersection of mathematical structure, ambience and narrative design. Drawing from braindance, kraut-inflected techno pulse, Berlin School sequencing and slow-moving ambient composition, she creates music that feels both architectural and deeply emotional. She is also the founder of Aurora Compilations, a label and narrative universe. Recent work includes contributions to UNPOP, the eight-channel sound installation at Burning Man 2024.

Ambrose Pottie is one of the curators of the Toronto Improvisers Orchestra and a founding member of the Toronto folk-rock group Crash Vegas, with whom he recorded three albums and toured extensively across Canada and the United States. He has also recorded and performed with artists including Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Eugene Chadbourne, Chris Brown, The Polka Dogs, Sleepers and poet bill bissett, among others.

Piotr Szreniawski (pszren) is an artist, poet and composer whose work often operates on a meta level, including the creation of instructions meant to be performed, sometimes as poems. He is also the author of numerous plays and a founder of the EFSPACM collective. His practice moves across writing, sound and conceptual forms, often balancing artistic production with a wary distance from the world of theater. His various projects include, among other undertakings, an anthology of one-letter poems.

These three artists were brought together by Canadian artist Neal D. Retke for his project Three Way Dance, and “Mellanzonen” emerged as a braindance-oriented branch of that collaboration. Ambrose’s process involves taking sonic material from others, improvising with it and then removing the original source until something new remains. Piotr creates his material using tools such as Iannix and WolframTones. Both artists produced two distinct pieces, which were then recombined and further developed by LR. She added ambience and rhythm using a setup in which MIDI notes generated by custom Python code based on cellular automata are sent into a range of synthesizers, with the final sonic architecture shaped manually in a DAW. She also mastered the finished recording.

On a narrative level, “Mellanzonen” draws inspiration from LR’s Swedish flash fiction of the same name, written for the Foldverse project during a creative writing course at Österlens folkhögskola. The text reflects on paths that did not work out, imagines how life might have unfolded if different choices had been made and lingers in a kind of in-between zone before moving forward into something new.