Cæcilie Overgaard

For Cæcilie Overgaard, all sounds can become music. With a curious approach to ordinary sounds, she creates electro-acoustic music that explores the borderland between the synthetic, the acoustic, and the organic.

In this electro-acoustic sonic universe, the listener is presented with modulated everyday sounds, synthesizers, crackling beats, and acoustic instruments that blend together in evocative soundscapes, all the while a bass drum steadily catches the rhythm of the heart.

Overgaard’s work as a composer is driven by an inquisitive approach to the role and capacities of sound, as well as a quest for something – a frequency, a rhythm, a sonic characteristic, an expression – that comes forward and is chosen by her intuition.

Although all music presumably captures a part of the composer’s own backstory, Overgaard maintains that she is the last person to determine how her music is to be interpreted – that it is the listener’s own imagination that will tell the story of her music. This philosophy is reflected in her compositions where grooves and tristesse is dosed together to create a space for imaginary landscapes to pass by.

Cæcilie Overgaard’s musical career started when at age 20 she decided to end a 14-year career as a semi-professional football player: “I have always pursued what I’m passionate about, and suddenly one day, I was no longer passionate about football, and a void remained.”

The new career path didn’t appear completely out of the blue, though: “From an early age, I had been captivated by evocative and experimental music, most often introduced to me by my father who worked for 25 years as a sound engineer at the Danish Broadcast Corporation.”

With no prior knowledge of music theory, Overgaard began to record sounds and explore the timbres of different instruments in interaction with the computer’s infinite range of possibilities in composition and performance. Five years later, she found herself in the program for electronic music at the Danish National Academy of Music, and the following year, in October 2015, she released her debut album Lydbølgen Af Hjerteslag – an album carrying an imaginative and experimental approach to everyday sounds and sound manipulation, along with captivatingly profound melodies, melancholia, and energetic beats. The debut stirred interest and laid the groundwork for a several audio-visual and cross-disciplinary collaborations within performance and installation art, ultimately bringing her to clang where she released There Is A Home in December 2018.