MUSIC COMPOSITION ARRANGEMENTS IMPROVISATION MIXING
MUSIC COMPOSITION ARRANGEMENTS IMPROVISATION MIXING
Fascinated by sound.
Music is a language like any other. It has a set of grammatical rules but it does not need words. And I like that! When you know the rules, you can start to play with them. This is how I approach every new language I learn, every new project I create.
Almost always together with others.
WORDS you can talk, WORLDS you can walk. I like to create such worlds where we speak with all our senses. Does that make sense?
Click on my soundcloud to hear some of the musical work I created in recent years.
Composition
I like to make music.
To write music is like writing a story with exciting characters and fascinating plot twists. As many other authors, I find my inspiration in the world around me: a bird’s melody, multiple machines in accidental harmony, the groove of people walking to work or the ever changing colours of a sunset.
It is only a few years ago that I discovered that my understanding of music also allows me to compose it. The floodgates are open.
There is a lot more coming.
Arrangements
To arrange music it is to take an existing piece of music and ‘arrange’ it for another setting, for example by turning a simple melody into a 4-part choral piece or by taking a popsong and writing it out for an orchestra. Making a reduction is also a fun challenge: literally reducing the amount of voices and taking the music back to its core. Globally speaking, I translate musical elements into another dialect, so other cultures can understand it too.
A fun example is the work I did in 2021 for Warner Bros and Dutch TV: I arranged the music, trained and conducted the actors to sing traditional shanty songs.
Improvisation
The art of improvisation, for me, is all about creating a framework to follow and then letting go, trusting the skills of my fellow artists and my own experience. Solo or in group, engaging with the surroundings, plucking inspiration from whatever happens around us and turning it into something more concrete, contextual and concertant.
A beautiful example of this is the project Dance for Beirut in which 15 artists improvised together, directed by a wheel of fortune that indicated the next emotion. It shows how I like to build a framework for fellow artists by trusting their talent and skill to support each other through such a journey.
Mixing
To mix music is like photoshopping, but then with sound. In my DJ-mixes I love to put very varied styles of music into the same room and see how they dance with each other.
Take classical music: it is very rich in tone quality, harmony, phrasing and structure. But classical musicians do often take rhythmical liberties, making it hard to dance to their music. I like to re-work a classical recording (it’s called warping in my Ableton software) so that it can be mixed with the grooves of electronic dance music.