While working hard on the Tubes in Chains and First Law of Kipple premieres this Sunday, I also keep myself busy creating a soundwalk together with Anne Rooschüz. Here's the promo text:

Theater maker Anne Rooschüz and sound artist Robert van Heumen take you on a journey along buildings of the Amsterdam School. Children’s voices in your headphones playfully make you aware of all kinds of special aspects in the architecture: weird protuberances, useless curves, blind walls, secret vistas. Steenklank is a musical interpretation of the architecture, coupled to a game of neighborhood voices and street sounds.

More info here.

Another nice review, by Vera Vingerhoeds.

Alienating ambient?
Soothing calming soundscapes?
Unknown sounds?
Unsettling disordering music
All of it

Shackle received a nice review in Neural. You can subscibe or read it here (click it for more).

Where?

In September 2013 I created the composition Night Call for the band IstanPOOL. Initiated by Mark Alban Lotz and Korhan Erel, IstanPOOL merges the Istanbul and Dutch improvised music scenes, both acoustic and electronic. Night Call is pure suspense, inspired by Painkiller, David Lynch and Ennio Morricone.

Night Call uses the Shackle System: a digital cueing systen that will regularly propose new musical sections to the players to play. The proposals will be displayed on an LCD screen visible to the players only. The length of the sections and their order will be somewhat random: some sections will be a bit longer than others and some will occur more often than others. There will be one 'conductor' who can interfere with the system to cancel propositions and to call up new proposals. Each new proposal is counted down in 15 seconds to allow the musicians time to prepare for the new section. For Night Call I created 5 musical sections.

The composition was not originally in my stipend application. It came to life when Mark asked me to join IstanPOOL and write a piece for the band.

More information and a recording of the premiere in Rasa here.

On Okt 7 I spend some time at Orgelpark to finetune The First Law Of Kipple, for tape and MIDIfied organ. Especially nervewrecking was finding out whether the organ had changed tuning again. Last year August I made recordings of the instrument, incorporated them into the tape, only to find out in November that the tuning of the organ was changed quite drastically. I pitch-shifted the recordings and all was fine again. But you can imagine I was happy to find this time the organ was in tune with the recordings.

Ready for premiere on November 3!

On Sept 30 I found myself in Orgelpark again, for the final 'development' rehearsal of Tubes in Chains with Nora Mulder and Anne La Berge. Changes were made beforehand, we tested all the musical sections I created for the combination of church organs, flute and electronics and laptop-instrument. Nora and Anne gave me valuable ideas to solve things and to create a beautiful combination of sounds and a good sense of structure.

We will be using the MIDI-fied Sauer organ, the little chest organ and the characteristic Molzer organ. We'll have three days before the concert to work with the organ player Dominik Blum who will perform at the premiere.

Many thanks to Anne and Nora for working with me developing the composition. Nora was especially generous as she's not even playing the piece on the premiere!