Imagine yourself in a spacewalk on Mars, wearing a shiny Nasa space suit, listening to Weaving Shadows alone. On acid. A triumph for IDM.
Describe your sound in three words please!
Extraterrestrial Flora & Fauna
What sparked your involvement with music?
When I was a kid we had a piano at home which attracted me like a magnet. I wasn’t very disciplined at doing my piano lessons, but often after school, I improvised and experimented for hours on it.
A few years later a friend of mine came by with a pile of floppy disks to install the music program Fasttracker on my computer
What was the inspiration for Weaving Shadows? You also have a debut album (coming) out! Tell us a few things about the main concept!
In the center of Amsterdam, where the houses are small and the streets are narrow, some streetlights are hanging on cables in the middle of the air. When there is a particularly stormy night, these streetlights will start rocking back and forth and all the shadows on the streets will move as well. In fact, the whole street starts dancing. It’s one of my favourite things. Weaving Shadows is inspired by that.
Yes, my debut album will be released later this year. To me, what most tracks have in common, is that they represent a sort of extraterrestrial landscapes with uncharted flora and fauna. Each track is like a journey through those landscapes where you might end up in a wildly different place than you started. Along the way, you sometimes encounter curious figures and situations, I guess a bit like Alice in Wonderland.
Your music is multi-layered with focus on sound design. Are you scared that the average listener may listen to your music in extremely low quality laptop internal speakers (or even worse on phone internal speakers)?
I would be lying if I would say that doesn’t cross my mind sometimes, but I get that not everybody can afford expensive speakers or headphones. I hope one day in the future technological innovation will bring amazing sound to everybody.
Having said that, I’m sometimes surprised that after extensive mixing and having it mastered, I feel the essence of a track can still be maintained. But I kinda agree with David Lynch’s remarks on watching a movie on a phone. “You’ll think you’ve experienced it, but you’ll be cheated.”
What song characterizes you the most (yours or from another artist)?
Since this is only my second single so far, I’ll pick a song from another artist, but it’s very hard to pick just one song. The first one that pops in my mind is Boards of Canada – Gyroscope. The drums are amazing on it, it’s like origami folded sandpaper.
What is the main challenge as a new artist?
As a wise man once said: Creating an art piece ain’t hard, but, creating a situation in your life where you can make an art piece, THAT is hard. I see so many artists with so much talent struggle with that. But there is also the challenge to get your first finished works to a place which you sort of had envisioned. But then again, once you get over these, you get to make music and be an artist! There’s nothing more beautiful than that in my opinion, so I accept these challenges fully and can see the beauty in them.
Do you like the idea of collaborating? Do you have a favourite artist you’d like to partner with for a song?
I would love to collaborate and there are so many artists I would have in mind. Machinedrum, Lusine, Mr. Bill, just to name a few. But I also would love to work more with vocalists as Flying Lotus did. My ideal vocal collabs would be FKA Twigs, Grimes, Tirzah, James Blake, or someone from the PC Music/Hyperpop world. I think in hyperpop there are so much exciting things happening right now.
What is one thing (musical or otherwise) that you cannot find in the Netherlands and what is one thing you wouldn’t change for the world?
The Netherlands tends to be kinda practical, cold, and Calvinistic sometimes. You see that reflected in how we eat our lunch (if we actually have the time for lunch). Just plain bread with peanut butter or cheese. And people plan everything in their agendas months in advance.
But then again, we have a lively cultural scene and a social/health system which is relatively okay compared to some other places in the world, so I’m not complaining…
Secret Eclectic 