Electronic Music Week: Van Rijswijk & Strijbos

Now in its third year, Electronic Music Week is currently making itself heard across Shanghai, with a packed programme of lectures, concerts and installations across the city. Seeking to present electronic music in all its guises to a diverse audience, the annual event draws artists, composers and enthusiasts from the international community, all creating a weird, wonderful and sometimes baffling range of otherworldly sounds, voices and effects. CreativeHunt met up with Dutch duo, Jeroen Strijbos and Rob Van Rijswijk on their first China foray to discuss their contributions to festivities: multi-media installation, Whisper, and acoustic-electro performance piece, Air Sensible.

" We met whilst studying Electronic and Computer Music Composition, but coincidentally, we'd both studied graphic design before that, and so I guess visuals have always been very important to us", explains Rob. "For us, music not only about ears, it's how you receive it as a whole, how it's communicated. Our sound installations are a stage for our music – theatre, in a way, where lots of different kinds of art come together"

Part of Touch Sound, currently on show at View Point gallery at Moganshan Lu's M50 complex, Whispers is all of that and more. Theatrical, atmospheric and intriguing, the work comprises five ceramic horns, created by Italian artist Pierluigi Pompeii, suspended in a dark room, eerily lit in blue. Inspired by the possibilities of Pompeii's objects, Strijbos and Van Rijswijk composed a complex, intricately layered score for the piece that can only be fully appreciated by circumnavigating the suspended instruments, all the while reaching, leaning and crouching to hear their respective voices.



"It's a three dimensional composition: you have the speakers in each corner of the room which surround you with sound, and then the separate sounds from each of the five horns. Together they're a complete composition. The sounds we use are those found around us, some from voice. It's not about words but I guess how things are spoken. When you combine these things – musical notes, words and sounds – they create a sort of story – not a literal one, but just enough pointers for people to make it their own".

Sometimes it sounds like a seashell, a busy street, a groan or tremor from deep in the earth. There's something mechanical, robotic, that buzz from tuning a radio; all punctuated by a sound altogether more human – a laugh, that could be a sob, sometimes something playful, sometimes sorrowful. It's confusing, constantly changing and completely enveloping. The story – or rather raw materials – behind the piece add an extra dimension and poignancy to Whispers: the sounds come from a recording of a friend discussing his hearing problems and forthcoming operation to prevent imminent deafness...

"It's like a metaphor of what's happening to him", muses Jeroen . "He can hear now, but sounds will become less and less human, his hearing worse and worse. It's indistinct, you're not sure whether what you're listening to is human or not". Add to that the visual element of the piece, the weird shadows cast by the objects, and the overall effect is altogether disconcerting.



Also as part of Electronic Music Week, the pair will present performance piece Air Sensible at M50 as part of a wider Touch Sound concert on Wednesday night. "[Air Sensible] is really about how to make one being out of acoustic instruments and electronic music", Rob says of the piece, written to explore the exchange, emotion and collaboration between the classical accordion and computers, all in an intimate gallery setting.

"I think lots of artists – be they composers, artists, dancers, or whatever – tend to exist on these islands without much crossover, but we think you can learn a lot from working with other artists", explains Jeroen. "With Air Sensible we strive to make one instrument by composing the notes for the accordion played by the musicians, putting it through the computer and the room, and then have the accordions play on top of that layer of music. It becomes one dynamic process. There are no islands any more".



Indeed, the pair repeatedly hop between these islands, blurring boundaries between art, music and theatre to spectacular effect. Take Vox, for example, a performance piece that plays on the acoustic architecture of churches via speakers, computers, live sopranos and video, or, for a more portable aural experience, creative iPhone app Walk With Me. Rob explains: "It's our ambition to take music out of four walls – gallery, concert venue or whatever – and into the public space. The app works with GPS, and you can effectively create music by pinpointing areas on the map where you want certain sounds. You can layer them, overlap them and also hear the real outside environment through the microphone so it changes as you walk".





Like their co-exhibitors, Strijbos and Van Rijswijk's contributions to Electronic Music Week are far from aural alone. Take a look and go for a listen: there's much to see, from Arno Fabre's ingenious Dropper01, through to the electroencephalographic whirrings of Samson Young's Signal Path, and the dazzling rainbow-coloured Sonik Cube, a collaboration between Trafik and Yann Orlarey. Rich, layered and engaging, the installations on show at M50 play on the senses to interesting, and often surprising effects. Describing their own approach to immersive soundscapes, Jeroen sums up the composers' ethos: "We continue composing right up until the moment the sound reaches the ear of the audience. For us, music doesn't end at the studio; it ends at the moment of the concert – how and where the music is played, the lights – everything influences music, and that's what we like to play with".


Dropper01, Arno Fabre


Signal Path, Samson Young

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For more information and inspiration, check Jeroen Strijbos and Rob Van Rijswijk's website here. For details of Electronic Music Week, including a full schedule, click right here.
Touch Sound is on show across Moganshan Lu's View Point and EASTLINK galleries until 16 October.