Lana Claravera is a character from ‘The Identity Machinery’ – a project that at this moment is mostly a soap on Instagram. It is a collaboration with my partner Laura A Dima, who plays the characters. I do the photography and together we doe the styling, making up the stories and everything.

The Identity Machinery started because of out interest in fetishism and psychology, or perhaps mostly in group behaviour. We noticed that fetishes and women’s attire often are derivates from a functional starting position. Nun’s or Nurse’s clothes indicated a function and a way of life – but type those terms in a search engine and you will see something else compared to how it used to look. Also, the derivates are quite different than the originals: if you look at it with an artistic eye, the ‘French Maid’ costume you’ll see now when you search is a sublime abstraction of the original: you’ll get only what you need to recognise it as such and it shows how conceptual the human mind is. Besides that the costumes are of course very sexualised and minimised and to us it seemed we missed a bit of a chance here.

We have a preference of the very beginning of the sexualisation of uniforms and the like. In ’40’s, ’50’s and ’60’s films for instance, you will see pretty people in pretty uniforms, not objectified yet, usually having a real character but somehow very attractive.  We take this confusing and somewhat voyeuristic look at attire as a starting position to do statements about the objectification of the self on Instagram: there are lots of ‘influencers’ out there who are only skin deep – and yet they are nowadays pop stars. We wonder how out society could come so far that holding up a product on camera is a seen as an envious dream job.

We see a lot of stupidity on social media: the ultimate democracy of free opinions led us to a world where we are empty shells who compete in beauty and wealth, and can say anything without feeling consequences. Yet we share in tribes of the likeminded and think we are ‘right’ by having ‘followers’, and throll others.

We try to make the ultimate Instagram cliché’s, sublime objectifications of ‘types’ of women, and then give them a story of their own. As a result we reverse the mass-social tendency to objectify women.

But, in our work, humor always plays a role. We love to vent out the stupidity or navité of certain characters. We enjoy the stupid reactions, mostly of men ready to give up everything for an image and people who think they can talk on behalf of ‘all women’ when they publicly try to point out flaws in our morals.

Most material is gone by now, since ‘betacam’ videotapes, on which TV was shot in the ’90s, were re-used to save on budget. But i dug up this title from a program I worked for in that period – I was the graphic designer for some Dutch TV programs (Lola Paloeza, Lola Da Musica, Lola Moviola, Spirit of America, De Toekomst and some occasional others)

This was a special on Jan Akkerman in Lola Da Musica. I think the guitar work you hear during the title is mine actually – hahaha i was a ballsy youth! Special about the Dutch guitar master and play something myself whahaha.

Educated as a graphic designer, i know that end credits of movies do not get the attention they deserve. As a film buff, I hate it when people even do as much as whisper during the beginning titles but i lost hope for the end credits. A good film has great titles, until the very end! Now I would not say my animated short ‘Deep Shit’ is a ‘good’ movie, but the end credits are perhaps the best part of it. The theme music, that was played incorrectly by the punk band at the start of the movie, now in it’s perfect glam style, (listen to that bass! i am proud of that!) but mostly: look at those titles!

So I posted the stills here – all of them are worth a good look. Some pictures are inspired by real life – like the devil lying on the floor, that drawing is inspired by a photo I took of my friend Rosto when he produced (or tried to) my punk band Disaster Nein. The film itself has references to Café ‘De Diepte’ that I used to frequent and of course to Maloe Melo and the squat Occii. If you’re not from Amsterdam these names don’t say much, but for connoisseurs of the Dutch metropolitan underground it does.

You can see the film here – the titles start at 9.16

 

This is a moving background for the animated Vlogger Little Sister.

Have you ever felt pushed in the dirt when you least expected it? This song is for you!
Contrary to my usual way of working, i played all instruments myself, enjoying the sloppy sound. After all, the song is about somebody being dumped and being forced to be lonely, so i thought it was a great idea if i’d play all instruments myself. And i like this punk feel anyway.

What Are The Odds is a song about a girl trying to flee the dynamics of a distant small village with religious, traditional inhabitants. When she is found dead on the road in an attempt to escape to the city, the song posts the question of who killer her.

Music written by Ruud Kleiss and Martin Draax, lyrics by Martin Draax

‘Two Dreams At The Same Time’ is a lovesong dedicated to my partner Laura A Dima, who by the way did the make up and hair for this video.
The video features the musicians who played the actual music:
Lead Vocals: Rosie Stevens
Backing Vocals: Flora Dolores
Bass: Peter Hordijk
Violin: Eva Sofia
Cello: Oene van Geel
Drums: Danielle Pijpers
Keys: Jan Jaap Snellen

Suits tailored by Carola Jense-Wiede
Mixed by Lars Blakenburg
Mastered by Kramer
I played guitar, wrote the music, directed the clip, designed the clothes and did the rest.

This videoclip voor Joop van der Linden is a combination of generated animation by the music itself and added animations, Stills from the clip were used to make the record cover.

When the Spinshots presented ‘Gone Before He Left’ we threw a ‘spy’ party – with prices for the best dressed spies. We also just finished recording the mini soundtrack i wrote for the leader of the Dutch animation festival ‘Klik’ – and performed it live here. Since i did quite some editing I present this as a videoclip rather than a live presentation. The sound was recorded and mixed by Jan Jaap Snellen, video shot by Jelle Mulder and Nicolai van Nunen.

This is truly vintage! I think I made this (with bass player Roelof as a special effects technician) in ehm, 1996…
Notice the Most Unreadable End Credits Of All Time at the end – only somebody educated as a graphic designer can come up with a thing like that. Phooey ‘Form Follows Function’!

Angels Never Stay is a song about the inevitability of seperation from you loved ones.
I used a high speed camera to do this and Laura A Dima danced a choreography on which we practiced for three days: 23 seconds were to be stretched to 5.23 – so you can imagine how precise she had to do the movements! One second late would mean more than 30 seconds late in the end result!

Because the clip has no credits, I put them here:

Written, arranged and produced by Martin Draax
Flora Dolores: Lead Vocals
Daniëlle Pijpers: Drums
Peter Hordijk: Bass
Martin Draax: backing vocals, guitars, noises, one finger organ
Janfie van Strien: Clarinet, Bariton sax
Gijs Levelt: Trumpet
Jan Jaap Snellen: Keys
Wendy van Wilgenburg: Cello
Regina Yap: Percussion
Mixed by Lars Blakenburg, Mastered by Kramer

Special thanks: Jan Jaap Snellen and Lars Blakenburg

This is the videoclip for ‘Multiple Reality Disorder’.
Laura A Dima and I develop an ongoing photo soap opera on Instagram in which our main character suffers from ‘multiple Reality Disorder’. We follow the avatars that in real life could never meet because they live in different realities. Yet they formed a girlband and this is the video of their first hit.

Please watch until the credits as many talented people helped me with this.

I am proud of the clip and the music: i love the composition and the sound of the production, i love it that you can stop the video at any moment and you’ll have a key image with a lot of expressiveness.

This is a videoclip we made for my band Paxy Dragon in, eh, 1998. With Maggie Boogaard dancing and Paul Lomans coaching the dance. And lots of other people as mentioned in the credits.

This film was shot in two takes on 16 millimeter. Everything in the background is animated frame by frame and Maggie dances on half speed to sort of match the feel of the animation. Later, I blended the two films so that it looks as if the dancer is in that surrounding destroying everything. I’d do such a better job nowadays, hahaha! But it has it’s own ;vintage’ charm I guess. And the music never got out other then on this video. De drums are made in a computer program I had: you could tick boxes on a timeline and then you’d hear a specific drum sound on that place. Rooney of thee Wreckers, who plays bass here, had a hard time playing exactly the guitar line but then one fourth later. But he did a great job – this is al pre -quantise, guys! And I asked Wendy to play violin as if it was played backwards – not a bad job either!

Some 60 people were involved in making this clip in 1996. Check the end credits!

The idea behind it is based on Jung’s notion of ‘Animus and Anima’. I thought it would be great to translate that to a live chess game with a black king and crew symbolising the ‘unconscious’, making all decisions (for all we do comes from unconscious impulses). The white king and crew copy the black king and everything works as nature demands. Then a white and black pawn start kissing and turn into a purple queen. Things get messy from there.

So yeah, this was done on video in 1996 – I’d do a better job now. There was still much to learn, as there will be always.
But I like to be as complete as i can on this site, and de clip does have a certain naive charm.

I am sure it’s not easy to be a friend of mine. You always run the risk that I might ask you to be in one of my videos. Here you see a very old one, called ‘Fake Away Spray’ – stay until the end credits – I think they are the most unreadable ever made!

Well, maybe the end credits of my other Paxy Dragon Clip ‘Dance Of Djapozzit’ comes close. Well that’s what you do when you study Graphic Design at art school.

Désirs Mutuèls was the first clip we made for the Spinshots.

I had they idea finding out that the first recordings we made without microphones. A needle was sunk into turning wax and the band would be playing around it. So if somebody had a feature in the music, they had to com closer to the registering needle. In my head, this transformed to a videoclip in which the Spinshots would live in an elevator and we had to come close to the camera on a tripod if we had a feature.

My friend Rudy had a key to an empty gigantic office building in the middle of the city. We built up our set in the elevator and shot our clip in one night.
Although the colossal building was empty, the elevators were still working, even by themselves. This made filming the clip quite a challenge as we ran the risk the elevator we were acting from would suddenly take leave. During this one-take shot, it actually did not leave when we wanted it to and kept that in, because it provided a funny, very ‘Spinshots-like’ moment.

‘Sell Your Soul’ was sung by Boyd Small. I wrote the song for my animation short ‘Deep Shit’ and performed it with the Spinshots. Boyd did the voice of ‘Lucifero’ in the film and since he is a great blues singer – I asked him to take the lead on this one.

‘Sell Your Soul’ (and shut your trap) is the key tune from Deep Shit, an animated short I did with quite a team. (check the film here)
We performed the song with the Spinshots, with the Van Dijck Sisters at the backings. It turned out to be a great tune so we made a videoclip for it as well – in Jelle Mulder’s studio around the corner of mine.

If you swipe to the right you’ll see the 10 minute animation movie with more music by the Spinshots and friends!

‘Pigeons & people’ is a song in which I tried to capture the dynamics of Amsterdam, the city I have always loved and learned to hate.

It was hard for me to grand my own long cherished wish to write a good song about the city i am obsessed with – and my great example is Ray Davies who wrote all those fantastic songs about London – so what can poor boy do? For a long time, I loved Amsterdam so much, that I did not really have a problem. And ‘a problem’ is needed for a good story. But over the years I became more unhappy with the results of the widely and warmly embraced politics of free market morality; Amsterdam was not about people’s initiatives any longer. The city was so cool that it was recognised as a huge money maker. In stead of a hodgepodge of real and various people with their initiatives, it became a monocultural place to host mass-tourists, consumers, criminals, real estate owners and brand marketeers. We sold our soul.

The videoclip celebrates the last free minds – the last people to keep Amsterdam ‘the Magic Centre’ it once was so obviously. It’s inspired by Billy Wilder ‘s ‘Menschen Am Sonntag’ from 1930.

I made this promo for Lowlands together with David Kleijwegt, who was the editor in chief for Dutch TV program Lola Da Musica at the time.

This is the promotional video for the clothing brand ‘Comic Sexy’. I designed the dresses and did the (art) direction, and I wrote this music.

When we started Comic Sexy the idea grew really fast (and we were a bit too early perhaps). i wanted to design dresses that I would like to see people wearing in the street. Long lasting quality, unique colours, no child labour in the process of making them and hand tailored to fit. And affordable! Since they were made to fit, also men could order them and everybody non binair, if desired.

But i wanted it to have this naive 60s feel without the girl models looking stupid or unaware. The ‘comic Sexy girl had to be consciously flirty and aware of her beauty without being only skin deep. So I asked friends who happened to be pretty girls to be models – I am still grateful they allowed me to make this cute little film with even a choreography I made up in it! Thank you Lae, Bibi, Mayra, Busra, Maureen, Tony, Juli for being great models, Tiddo for the help with editing, Esther for making the prototypes, Jelle for filming and The Spinshots for executing the music.

This is the teaser for the show ‘Pentacost’ I developed with and for Amsterdam Klezmer Band.

Please read the credits at the end because there are the talented people who helped me make it happen.

Part of the fun of making promotional art for your own brand, is the freedom with which you can do so. I had to laugh out lout when I came up with the pay off – ‘Aliens Today, Sisters Tomorrow’ – but then again, this really reflects a concept I use more often in my work. It also reflects the MAYA principle (coined by Raymond Loewy), which shows that people are always scared of the new but we can overcome our fears by simply getting acquainted.

Heck, let’s not get philosophical now, just enjoy these nice and smart girls wearing Comic Sexy dresses and listen to the music I wrote, executed by The Spinshots.

The song ‘Balkan Dinosaur’ was written for the Spinshots, during their ‘Seven Bullets, One Gun’ period. You can here the full song here.

‘Tentacles’ is the name of this music and clip. It is a promotional videoclip for Laura A Dima’s ‘The Finger Rub Rug’ in which she caster 1300 replicas of my fingers and made a single bed from them. She made an installation in which The Finger Rub Rug was in the middle of a designated white room, with a heat blanket beneath it and a haptic speaker playing a heart beat.

People were left alone in the room and could do what they liked: if they would lie on the Rug, they’d hear my music coming from four sides: one side had playful sounds, an other side had scary sounds, one resembled ‘nature’ and another on seemed erotic. All music was composed on the rhythm of the heartbeat you felt pulsing in your chest. This increased the emotional effect and positioned the questions Laura wanted to provoke with her work.

To promote the exhibition, Laura had four one-minute films shot. Video is shot by Fabian Landweert, I edited the rushes to four trailers with excerpts of my music. Oh and I did the titles 😉

‘Skilled Fingers’, ‘Playful Fingers’, ‘Exotic Fingers’ and ‘Tentacles’ are implemented in the OST i made for Laura A Dima’s The Finger Rub Rug. A stereo version can be heard Music For Fingers by Martin Draax“>here.

‘Playful Fingers’ is the name of this music and clip. It is a promotional videoclip for Laura A Dima’s ‘The Finger Rub Rug’ in which she caster 1300 replicas of my fingers and made a single bed from them. She made an installation in which The Finger Rub Rug was in the middle of a designated white room, with a heat blanket beneath it and a haptic speaker playing a heart beat.

People were left alone in the room and could do what they liked: if they would lie on the Rug, they’d hear my music coming from four sides: one side had playful sounds, an other side had scary sounds, one resembled ‘nature’ and another on seemed erotic. All music was composed on the rhythm of the heartbeat you felt pulsing in your chest. This increased the emotional effect and positioned the questions Laura wanted to provoke with her work.

To promote the exhibition, Laura had four one-minute films shot. Video is shot by Fabian Landweert, I edited the rushes to four trailers with excerpts of my music. Oh and I did the titles 😉

 

‘Exotic Fingers’ is the name of this music and clip. It is a promotional videoclip for Laura A Dima’s ‘The Finger Rub Rug’ in which she caster 1300 replicas of my fingers and made a single bed from them. She made an installation in which The Finger Rub Rug was in the middle of a designated white room, with a heat blanket beneath it and a haptic speaker playing a heart beat.

People were left alone in the room and could do what they liked: if they would lie on the Rug, they’d hear my music coming from four sides: one side had playful sounds, an other side had scary sounds, one resembled ‘nature’ and another on seemed erotic. All music was composed on the rhythm of the heartbeat you felt pulsing in your chest. This increased the emotional effect and positioned the questions Laura wanted to provoke with her work.

To promote the exhibition, Laura had four one-minute films shot. Video is shot by Fabian Landweert, I edited the rushes to four trailers with excerpts of my music. Oh and I did the titles 😉

 

‘Baby Doom Sings Money’ was made to convince the jury of the Dutch Film Fund that the technique i had in mind was actually possible (they said not and did not grand me the money for making Deep Shit). This is my first ever After Effects work, so be merciful. I had help by Rosto and Balder Westein, who knew much more of After effects than I did, obviously.

Basically, this is a clay doll that was taken apart and all limbs and parts were photographed from all sides. The photos were coloured in Photoshop and in After Effects I put all limbs together again in layers, that could switch on or off depending on the desired perspective. Of course soon after there were many options for rigging characters, and Deep Shit was only partially made in After Effects, but hey, at the time it was a good idea. A bit laborious though…

this was a test to show students something about character design and animation in after fx

This is a test I made for my students.

Deep Shit was finished in 2011 after a period of 3 years. It’s a ten minute animation short about reality and rock & roll ambition. It plays with the notion of metaphysics, good & evil, the devil in rock & roll, jealousy, losing what you never had, drugs and the history of popular music.

In short: two rivalling bands rehearse in two rooms of the same bar. They want succes but not do the work to get there. The barman hosts the devil in his cash machine and they ask for his help. They travel to their maker to ask to be designed as a successful band rather than the bunch of losers that they are but then they dramatically fail.

For this film I wrote the script, dialogues, did the design and direction, and the music. Please check the credits because this film was made with the help of a lot of people ignoring the need of sleep and money.

This was an end ’90s tv program (at the time, everything was shot on videotapes, kids!)

De Toekomst (the Future) was a Dutch TV program broadcoasted by the IKON. It was so-called ‘Slow-TV’: two intelligent people would be chatting about the future for an hour.

As a design choice, i had them sit in a pop up studio in a high building overlooking Amsterdam. We made sure the interview would be done during dawn, so you’d see the city become dark with the deepening of the conversation. It was really beautiful to see the traffic-, house- and commercial lights in the background playing a role in the background of two people cut off from it by the studio light.

(I have to say a big thank you to Tim Smith of the Cardiacs at this point – samples of intros by ‘The Cardiacs’ were used for this intro)

This was made in collaboration with Roelof de Groot, alias Potato Die. Wendy played violin for this so once again, we did this with the Paxy Dragon crew!

There was this cool music program I worked for, called Lola Da Musica. I did the graphic design and made ‘bumpers’ (the little animations between items) and some of the leaders.

We covered the Lowlands Festival somewhere in history, and I made films on the spot: the camera operator and I went into the multitudes and tried to catch material I storyboarded beforehand. I also had music prepped and whenever there was a moment in the mobile cutting room i edited the clips. Lowlands was friday, saturday and sunday – the program went on air sunday night.

This tv show opened with my car and out comes my friend Marleen, who did the camera except in this shot where we see her legs.

The material looks crappy, but hey, these were the ’90s! Everything looked crappy! I don’t have the original betacams – those were re-used in tv stations so this is what I recorded on VHS when it was on telly. Yes, VHS.

Okay people, this is old news. Somewhere in the ’90s – the ‘pre-everything era’ I was asked to make so called ‘Bumpers’ in a TV program. This was a program about movies and directors and the short animations were to make cool transitions between items. Its shot on video and I asked my friend Roelof de Groot – so we could do this together. Every 2 weeks, a new bumper was needed. We spent most of our time working hard without getting much sleep in between episodes. We also did the music, by the way.

When the COVID-19 crisis started, Club Amsterdam Klezmer went online. It was a mix of live gigs broadcasted  through internet and interviews through Zoom – and it needed an identity. i made the graphic design, stationcalls and other moving graphics.

I wanted to emphasize  the ‘self made’ but oh-so Amsterdam based character  of the band. The Amsterdam logo consists of three red crosses on top of each other on a black background, so I took some pieces of wood and made an animation featuring a home made cross.

I am putting this in a hard-to-find corner of my site, because for many reasons this needs to stay obscure. But I love this. I know I am not promoting myself to most with this noise crap, but i love this. 1998. Dancers are Marleen and Leendert in nurse uniforms.

This is a videoclip of a performance by the Comic Sexy Ambassadorettes at De Nieuwe Anita. Comic Sexy was invited by Amsterdam Beat Club and I asked people filming with their phones to send me their footage so I could edit this clip.

This is a 10 minutes impression of the show ‘septacost’ i made with Amsterdam Klezmer Band.

Amsterdam Klezmer Band is seen as a ‘party’ band’ but they are so much more. They combine styles, take the idea of Klezmer to the next level and invite guests tp make their music unique and very recognisable as theirs.

So when the band asked me to write a script and direct a show for them, I wanted to put emphasis on their ‘other side’. It is a theatre show about loneliness. They have quite some lyrics about loneliness so i worked from the starting point; is ‘to party’ a distraction so you won’t have to feel lonely or is it a cure? I combined the story telling trick of James Bond films (who always operates alone)  with the idea of existential loneliness and Pentacost masses. I used the fact that they were 20 years on the road together, that the people in the band would not have been the men they were had they not been in this band all the time. I used the contradicting characters of Job (party, everybody together on the dancefloor) and Alec (i wish i was in my hotel room with a bottle of Vodka) to create an underlying ‘conflict’ i could work with.

In the show the band members had to operate parts of the decor by hand I designed a thing with curtains and moving projection sheets that was built by Frank Hietbrink. During the show we see them as kids, as the young adults they were before the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, we see their kids and feel that we all are part of a stream of consciousness.

In the end, a quire of Russian singing ladies is singing the song Alec song on his own in the beginning. They were projected on a screen that had been behind a curtain for most of the show. The material is sped up, it goes forward and backward, at times the image would be frozen. Of course, this made the song pitched differently at moments, and the speed of the music would change. The band played live with this, as if to say: we are born into specific parameters, into a reality we did not chose for but we can work with that if we work hard enough and improvise. We have to be excellent together as well as individual. And that sums up the Amsterdam Klezmer Band.

 

One of the brighter kids I had the pleasure of teaching at art school was Marlon, who was in transition and wrote a book about his previous life. Not only was he bright, he also was very sad to hear that I would not agree on this book being his examination work for art school. Then he made a smart move: he ‘directed’ a movie for which he asked al kinds of people, mostly criticasters to show how the work is done and made it one of his examination stunts to present a very long lasting movie about his life, seen through other people’s eyes. It was a bit of a stunt, and I think it was more ‘producing’ than ‘directing’ but conceptually i thought it was a strong idea.

So I had to make this in a few hours: choosing one of the chapters from his book and turn it into a visual. Smart ass. i hope they are doing great, out there.

Oh I wrote the music too – played by the Spinshots.

Lucy the Homemade Maid was supposed to be a series of ultrashort little adventures of the ‘Frankenstein-like’ French maid. Also, I made a script for a 10 minute short but i never found the time to really make this. This is a test in After Effects.

Haarlem Comic Festival asked the Spinshots to perform live and have a fashion show with Comic Sexy. We had a very nice stage and dancers in the dresses: the dancers were drawn by a comic artist at the spot.

 

These photos were made by Thijs Tennekes.

Early material of the Spinshots – this is during a talent presentation at Paradiso. I actually have warm feelings of this period of the band, when the future was open and unknown, and musically it could develop in all directions. We weren’t that good yet i guess, but i like this.

Ir Vendermeulen, the ‘Godfather of Amsterdam’ and initiator of the Amsterdam Beat Club, asked me to perform with the Spinshots and create a fashion show with the models presenting the designs while the band backed them up live.

This all happened at Paradiso, the rock temple of Amsterdam.

The Spinshots perform ‘Shake off the Past’ – which is a song I wrote for the album ‘Never So Right’.

In 2013, The Spinshots had the honour to back up Arthur Brown at the Amsterdam Beat Club Paradiso Show

Somewhere at an early stage of The Spinshots I organised a monthly vaudeville show in a circus tent, together with Patrick Moonen.
We had bands, act and deejays, and here you see the Spinshots performing their son ‘Fetish for Veils’ with Maya Acid dancing to it.

‘Click Click Clap’ was written as the soundtrack for the leader of the Dutch animation festival ‘Klik’. Here we perform it live at Woodstock.

When I was a kid, there used to be a TV program called ‘Count Down’ which was our only option to see pop artists performing. In 2019, apparently that program still existed and asked us to perform live. Here we perform the song i wrote for the band, called ‘Slipstream of a Dream’.

Dialogue’s Jan Jaap Snellen, also the initiator of Studio Blackbird, where i produce all my music, asked me to make a ‘moving illustration’ as a videoclip for their single ‘Iguana’. This was a lot of fun to do. I wanted to catch the vibe of the music with a single illustration with minimal moves, fitting the style of the music.

 

Amsterdam Klezmer Band asked me to think up a theatrical show. I noticed that although they started as a ‘party’ band – they had a lot of critical notes in their lyrics and many lyrics written by Alec Kopyt were actually quite sad. I loved the idea of using ‘being lonely in a group’ for their show.

The idea of Septacost was, that the band members unfolded abstract story about loneliness and the cure of it. Was ‘to party’ and being with happy other people a cure or a distraction? I asked Amsterdam Klezmer Band to write a song that was clearly very much about loneliness, and it had to be with rudimental instrumental accompaniment. But he was backed up (in sound and image) by projections of himself singing the harmonies. At the end of the Septacost show, there would be a complete  choir, singing the song in an angelic version. The choir was recorded in advance and projected. I asked Balder Westein to make timeloops, delays and speed-ups in the film with specific percentage, so that the band could make a composition on top of this wrecked up video. So the band played live over a projected and recorded messed up video.

see the trailer for the show here

The choir is called ‘No Romeos’, conducted by Juliette Dumore. The music is written by Theo van Tol.

My partner Laura and Dima and I both believe that art is ‘make-believe’ – but we also give weight to the skills an artist needs for the  works. Both idea and execution should be the best possible. But if art is make-believe, it isn’t the truth: art may inspire you to think about such a concept as truth, but the phenomenon itself is per definition a guarantee for fake.

We like to have a good laugh so we made a program called ‘Kunst Te Kijk’ – and in this episode we mock the ‘Conceptual Art’ tribe.