Bio
As SoundOkapi, I work with improvised electronic music.
It moves across quite a wide range, but often lands in minimal music and ambient soundscapes, with occasional grooves, noise, and other sounds that are harder to place.
My approach is generally experimental. Making music still feels like an ongoing investigation to me.
Most of it is made with synths, pedals, and loopers. More recently my own voice has entered the picture too, along with the bass clarinet I used to play in my younger days.
One of the biggest SoundOkapi projects so far was making all the music for the 2025 dance performance UNMASKED by the Danish company Kompagni47. The albums I have released matter a lot to me too.
Over the last five years I have collaborated with Hanne Raffnsøe, Helle Thun, Nicholas Wolf Haamann, Ernesto Cárcamo Cavazos, Guilherme Rodrigues, and the Berlin-based trio Pausa a Pausa. I often play in churches, but also at festivals and smaller venues, including in Berlin.
My real name is Flemming Chr. Hansen, and I was born in 1968. I trained as a classical organist and choir leader, and I still work as an organist alongside my electronic music.
I started composing at the age of 10, mostly chamber music, organ works, and choral pieces, written down the old-fashioned way, note by note. For a short time I studied composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, but chose to focus on my work as an organist instead. I kept composing, though, and over the years that work has led to commissions, grants, and performances in different places.
During the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, I moved my long-standing interest in meditative music from acoustic instruments into electronics. In some ways that felt like a new direction, and in other ways it felt like returning to something older, because I had spent a lot of time in the academy's electronic music studio when I was young.
Since then I have mainly worked with live electronic setups, balancing improvisation and structure in real time.
Some of the music, records, and people I keep returning to are:
Charles Tournemire (L'orgue mystique)
Olivier Messiaen (Turangalila, Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps)
Per Nørgård (I Ching, the symphonies)
Philip Glass (Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima)
Steve Reich (Drumming)
Jan Jelinek (Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Tierbeobachtungen)
Laurie Anderson (Big Science, especially O Superman)
Aphex Twin (Drukqx, Selected Ambient Works II)
...along with Hainbach, Oval, Jon Hopkins, J.S. Bach, Kate Bush, Ole Buck, quite a few others, and folk music from different traditions.
