Ultima 2025: Liquid Room XII: A Perfect Life Comes to Den Norske Opera

Liquid Rooms are multi-hour concerts by the Belgian ensemble Ictus, in which music and communal presence are seamlessly intertwined. You may move between stages, immersing yourself in diverse musical styles and atmospheres at your own pace, or engage with fellow listeners over refreshments and conversation.

As part of this year’s Ultima festival, Ictus joins forces with soprano Nina Guo, actor-dancer-performer Tarek Halaby, POING, and the Swiss ensemble Contrechamps to present a Liquid Room in Oslo for the first time. This edition is rich in Norwegian music and inspired by Robert Ashley’s late-1970s television opera Perfect Lives.

Robert Ashley was the inventor of “æthereal music”, a mesmerising, dreamlike style rooted in the rapid delivery of spoken voice. In his words: "I'm in a kind of daydream when I can hear words with music." Ashley’s strange, pop-art musical fictions have no central heroes. Instead, they are populated by a myriad of characters from archetypal small-town America, their lives unfolding in places such as the park, the supermarket, the church and the bank.

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