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.