On This Planet transcends the limits of conventional opera and presents a new artistic idiom that is ideal for the DVD medium.
Anders Nordentoft’s past as a rock musician is combined with his classical training in a brand new musical universe where the concept of crossover is no longer adequate as a label. On This Planet is a new artistic idiom. Thomas Sandberg is well known in Scandinavia as an unusual mixture of performance artist, percussionist, clown and sound artist. Together with Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen he creates a symbiosis of the human voice and instrumental sound where texts by Anders Nordentoft and the West Indian poet Derek Walcott meet. With On This Planet we enter the same universe as Twin Peaks and Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom, where anything can happen and nothing is what it seems. This suspense-filled universe is given musical nerve by Anders Nordentoft in a mixture of rock, jazz, blues and modern composition music, and on stage Martin Tulinius has created a unique unity of video, computer graphics, sound and light – just as the music mixes different genres.
