Kim Hiorthøy

Norway's Kim Hiorthøy engages in painting, illustration, graphic design, film, photography, and writing alongside music that draws chiefly from electronic sources. Across creative domains and especially within his sonic experiments, he routinely sidesteps established norms and fixed categories by favoring an instinctive, intentionally unschooled method that yields inquisitive and at times playful outcomes. Countless releases on the Norwegian imprints Rune Grammofon and Smalltown Supersound feature his singular, frequently spare graphic-design sensibility. Among his albums are the lighthearted, tuneful electronics of 2000's Hei, the rhythm-oriented techno of 2004's Live Shet, and the gentler, classically tinged piano pieces of 2014's Dogs.

Born in 1973, Hiorthøy attended the Academy of Fine Art in his hometown of Trondheim, where he first explored graphic art through self-published 'zines and record-cover commissions while also beginning to record sounds, initially at the school facility before acquiring personal sampling gear. His parallel development in audio and visual work advanced together. While continuing his art studies in New York City and Copenhagen, he kept pursuing these and additional interests, among them several videos for the band Motorpsycho that marked his entry into film, and he later established residence in Oslo while still contributing to exhibitions throughout Norway and abroad. In music he maintains close ties to Rune Grammofon, having created every album cover for the label, and to Smalltown Supersound, which has issued nearly all of his recordings along with numerous examples of his design work. Apart from the self-released CD Fake, packaged with the 1996 limited-edition art book Book Without Function, his initial proper recording appeared as a 7" on Smalltown in 2000. That same year saw the arrival of his favorably received debut album Hei, succeeded by the 2002 compilation of miscellaneous pieces titled Melke.

Three contrasting short-form releases arrived in 2004: the subdued IDM of the Hopeness EP, the unmodified field recordings of For the Ladies presented without conventional musical elements and labeled "acoustic noise music," and the mini-album Live Shet, which concentrated on the direct, beat-centered electronica featured in his performances. My Last Day, issued in 2007, offered a complete album of characteristically unpredictable electronic music incorporating elements from much of his prior output. In 2009 he disclosed the finished recording project Drivan, formed with three dancers-turned-singers from Sweden and Finland; the group's trip-hop-inflected album Disko followed in 2010. Hiorthøy's 2014 release Dogs represented a more conventional undertaking, relying on no sampling and centering on piano compositions. 2018 brought the 224-page art book Let's Put It to Music: 20 Years of Rune Grammofon, which gathers his sleeve designs for the label and includes a 7" of previously unreleased tracks by various artists on its roster.