Orphax
Continuation
*300 copies limited edition* Words have never been my strongest point. I have many ideas in my head, often too many. I can talk a lot about them, but putting them on paper is not really me. I rather just work on my ideas. ‘cause whatever your thoughts are, as soon as it is out there and people start to listen it becomes theirs. What I might have thought up before, and have as concept behind the music, might not be how someone else listens to it. And that’s okay. If we keep in mind that my music …
Weerkaatsing
First studio meeting between two figures long circling each other in the Dutch experimental scene. The structure is itself a kind of mirror: Spiegeling is Machinefabriek's remix of Orphax's De Eerste Dag, Reflectie is Orphax's twenty-minute remix of Machinefabriek's 2007 piece Stofstuk, and the title track is the only fully joint composition. Long-form drone built through indirect dialogue, with each signature still audible but inflected by the other.
Embraced Imperfections
*200 copies limited edition* This release combines two live performances recorded during a live video streaming event during the early covid-19 pandemic. Now in remastered version they come together as one release.
As with most of his music, with these live recordings Orphax explores the themes of time and spatially through minimalism. In this exploration, the listener is submerged in the sound in such a way that the essence of time and space are forgotten. Both performances were improvised live…
Movement
“Movement” is a work based on various piano sketches by Kenneth Kirschner, which Orphax edited, added synthesizer and organ, and mixed. The title “Movement” for this work comes with the idea that the music is continuously moving and never really stands still. It is also a reference to classical music, where a composition can be built up from different movements. This work has something similar, and consists of 5 different movements coming from multiple piano sketches (often combined).
Structure
*102 copies limited edition* "Hot on the heals of Inheritance, the collaboration with my brother Tjeerd (who performs as PONI), I have a new solo album called Structure. The music was recorded live at Factor IJ in Amsterdam, during an exhibition of works by Wladimir Zwaagstra (whose art I used for the cover of my CD Less is More). The music was fully improvised, and with only a few small edits presented as mini-album on this new CD. The music was recorded by Fani Konstantinidu at Factor IJ, Amst…
Inheritance
First collaboration between the brothers Sietse and Tjeerd van Erve - Orphax (drone and electroacoustic) and PONI, Person Of No Importance (dark lo-fi guitar songs). Inheritance is a near-translation of the family name van Erve, and the album returns to shared early influences from their father's record collection, late-night Dutch radio and the Belgian Studio Brussels station. Opener As Received builds slow drone into post-rock intensity; later tracks reach toward late-period Swans territory.
Echoic Memory
200 copies. September 2022 I had a short tour in the UK with a couple of performances. One of them was at the beautiful venue Cube Cinema in Bristol during the Echoic Memory evening with Scanner. For this performance, I composed a new work, in which I further explore the perception of time. It follows much in the line of my previous works Embraced Imperfections and Less Is More. Not only because of the live performance, but also in atmosphere and mood. Yet, at the same time is even more dreamy, …
Spectrum
'Spectrum is a continuation of my interest in the perception of time, and at the same time an acknowledgement of me being on the autism spectrum. I got diagnosed with this about 2 1/2 years ago, which was quite the shock for me at that moment. But in the past 2 1/2 years I have learned so much about this.
This album, with my interest in minimalism, opposed to bombastic music, is a form to embrace my autism and to accept it as it is. I didn't change as a person, but I do know myself better. The m…
De Tragedie Van Een Liedjesschrijver Zonder Woorden
Drawn from material composed between 2005 and 2007 and revised through 2010, the first standard CD under the Orphax name. Sietse van Erve's writing rests on minute compositional detail: slow-shifting drone fields that drift between long-tone minimalism, isolationist soundscape and lo-fi experimental ambient. A deepening of Orphax's investigation into psychedelic, mind-altering atmosphere through reduced means, where harmonic stillness and slow textural accretion carry the structural weight.
Dream Sequences Volume 1 Orphax Reframed
First compilation in a series where other musicians reframe pieces from Orphax's ongoing Dream Sequence cycle, an open-ended sequence of experimental ambient and drone works. Haarvöl, Jos Smolders and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) each take a different Dream Sequence as point of departure, returning quiet contemplative re-readings that fold their own languages into the source. A study in remix-as-translation across the Dutch and Portuguese electronic-experimental axes.
Less Is More
Recording of Orphax's live performance at Factor-IJ, Amsterdam in August 2021, part of the programme curated by Moving Furniture Records to accompany the Polderlicht-organised exhibition Less Is More. The full set is reproduced as recorded, without edits. The performance brings Sietse van Erve's recurring interest in minimalist aesthetics into conversation with his own drone practice, producing warm, organic atmospheres in which the listener's sense of time and place deliberately disintegrates.
Orphax Reworked (4CD Box)
Four-CD box collecting reworks of Orphax's 44 Sketches of 44 Seconds, in which Sietse van Erve handed forty-four short source sounds to friends with an open brief to take them outside their usual practice. The contributing artists - TVO/Ruaridh Law, Modelbau, Fani Konstantinidou, Machinefabriek, Jos Smolders, Elif Yalvaç, Siavash Amini and Orphax himself - produce over four hours of new music, each retaining their compositional fingerprint while submitting to a constrained shared palette.
Warschauer Straße
* Edition of 300 * The two compositions on Warschauer Straße are inspired by a first visit to Berlin. The titles of the album and the two works might not seem to be very common or memorable places in Berlin to refer to, though for me personally they mean a lot. After the first visit in begin 2016 I went back several times and had some really good moments which still come back to memory regularly. Be it sitting in Mauerpark, walking up the stairs of Siegessäule, eating chocolate in front of Franz…
Somniatores
* Edition of 100 in A5 sized folder. * Somniātōrēs is is the second album I recorded about sleep. This is a follow up to the album Music for Thái Ngọc which was released in October 2016. For this album I reworked several pieces from the "Sæti" EP and the album "Suppressing an unpleasant feeling..." album as one new recording. While still being recognizable the sound has become even more dreamy and warmer, and there is more room for long sustained drone sounds.
Already for a long time I wanted to…
En De Stilstaande Tijd
Continuation of the same piano source material used on the Piano Music 7-inch, here developed into a long-form work. Orphax takes a postcard he bought in a Spanish village in 2001, while studying geology, as imaginative axis: the tranquillity of small houses, church and sand road as a place where time appears to stand still. The album builds organ-like, slightly dissonant tonal fields whose slow evolution renders that frozen-time atmosphere as patient, quiet, nostalgia-saturated ambient drone.
Piano Music
Two short pieces built from piano recordings made by Orphax at De Ruimte in Amsterdam Noord during summer 2017. The 7-inch marks a deliberate break with his usual drone vocabulary, foregrounding more openly melodic ambient writing and treating the piano as the primary voice rather than as raw material. One of his most personal works to date, dealing in textural terms with closure, regret and the slow effort of moving on.
Saxophone Studies
Two long drone pieces built around recordings of improvised saxophone. The first is a seventeen-minute work derived from material James Fella sent Orphax in 2006: multi-layered and roughly cut, with non-harmonic multitones colliding in the room and ear to produce a piercing psychedelic effect. The second, recorded with his father in late 2017, is bass-heavy and centred on baritone, working through multi-layering and phasing into a slow form from which melodic fragments quietly emerge.
2.20
Inspired explicitly by Eliane Radigue's Vice Versa..., Orphax records two source pieces in AudioMulch using nearly identical virtual modular settings, varying only a single parameter, and then sculpts the resulting material in Reaper into two strict twenty-minute compositions. The two pieces are conceived to be played independently or simultaneously, the listener encouraged to build their own mix; the album includes a download with both tracks plus a guide mix made with Jos Smolders.
Time Waves
Orphax's second proper CD, built from a live performance at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam (a STEIM evening shared with Yannick Franck and Thomas Köner) mixed and edited together with a parallel home recording into one continuous work. Sietse van Erve draws his frame from geological time scales: long, slow-floating sonic strata that emerge and recede without telegraphing what comes next, only the occasional rupture breaking the tranquil pace. Drone as an exercise in geomorphic listening.