SØS Gunver Ryberg

Originally working at the outer edges of experimental music, SØS Gunver Ryberg refined her approach via sound installations, art projects, and theatrical productions. Born in Denmark, she cultivated an early fascination with sound design before entering theater through roles as both actress and stuntwoman. Her initial sound-design presentation occurred in 2005 with the exhibition of “Das Himmelhund” at Denmark’s Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition. Galvanized by that showing, she spent subsequent years sharpening her skills before enrolling at the Danish National Academy of Music, from which she graduated in 2010. While employed as composer and sound designer at the independent studio Playdead—an affiliation that later earned her a 2017 BAFTA Games Award nomination for best music on Inside—she persisted in mounting installations and fabricating sound sculptures, drawing on field recordings gathered during journeys to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and, in 2012, on studies of Korean shamanistic music undertaken in South Korea. At Copenhagen’s STRØM Festival in 2013 she encountered experimental British techno artist Cristian Vogel; together they issued their first joint recording, the 2014 album Moved by Magnets, credited to the SGR^CAV’ alias. That same year her material reached Berlin-based Hayley Walker Kerridge and Samuel Kerridge, proprietors of the Contort club night and label, who were struck by her distinctive polyrhythms and densely layered soundscapes. After her live debut at Contort she was asked to appear at the 2014 Berlin Atonal Festival edition curated by the couple, a connection that yielded her first solo outing, the 2016 EP AFTRYK. The following year that release brought a Danish Album of the Year nomination, and she supplied a track to the second volume of Paula Temple’s Decon/Recon series, in which participating artists—including Temple, Rrose, and Aïsha Devi—rework one another’s source material.