Rutger Zuydervelt
Aliases: Machinefabriek
Hardanger
*150 hand-numbered copies limited edition* Hardanger is a collaboration by Mariska Baars (aka Soccer Committee), Niki Jansen, and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek). The title refers to the instrument played by Jansen, the Hardanger fiddle. It’s a fresh addition to the established musical chemistry from regular collaborators Baars and Zuydervelt. The music on Hardanger started with improvisations by Niki Jansen, guided by Mariska Baars, who responded with vocal and guitar recordings. Rutger …
Eventual
'Eventual' is the first album by double bass player Gonçalo Almeida and 'knob twidler' Rutger Zuydervelt. It's not exactly their first collaboration though, having released two EPs, 'Doze Ruinas' and 'Jangadas', and being colleagues in Hydra Ensemble (with cellists Lucija Gregov and Nina Hitz). When film maker Lex Reitsma commissioned Rutger Zuydervelt for the soundtrack of his documentary about photographer Koos Breukel, Zuydervelt proposed to involve Gonçalo Almeida. Reitsma agreed and visited…
Kaleiding (music for a performance by Lily&Janick)
Kaleiding is the debut show of the contemporary circus company Lily&Janick. It's a play between light, reflections and new perspectives onto partner acrobatics. With a long mirror that lays on the floor, images are getting created that hypnotize – like watching an everyday life situation through a kaleidoscope. This distorted reality invites into a decelerated world where up is down and down is up. Kaleiding is a movement based show working on the border between dance, circus and visual arts.
Recytle
This album wouldn’t exist without clarinetist Gareth Davis, with whom I’ve collaborated several times. When I asked him to participate on my + album, he was working with Monika Bugajny. She got wind of my project and asked if she could join. I agreed and reworked her beautiful clarinet recording into a ghostly one-minute piece. Apparently my concoction was convincing enough for Monika to propose another, more elaborate collaboration. Her suggestion was to use the same working method again, but t…
BERG (Music For A Film By Joke Olthaar)
*2023 stock. In process of stocking* This isn’t a regular ‘original film score’ album. After working on the sound design and music for Joke Olthaar’s slow-paced BERG film, Hugo Dijkstal and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) decided to re-arrange the sound into one long 30-minute piece. In the film, Hugo’s auditory magic is blended with Rutger’s minimalist drones to create an immersive bed for director Joke Olthaar and cinematographer André Scheuder’s striking black and white footage of the …
Our Arms Grew Together (Music For A Performance By Marta & Kim)
*2023 stock. In process of stocking* After 'As Much As It Is Worth' and 'Engel', Marta & Kim asked me to compose the music for yet another dance/circus performance, 'Our Arms Grew Together'. This release presents an edited version of that score, tailored to the album format.
The starting point of the 'Our Arms…' soundtrack was a series of home recordings that Marta and Kim made on my request. As the performance deals with their (romantic) relationship, it made sense to incorporate their daily li…
Wisps
On 5 April 2022 I e-mailed Anne about working on a follow-up to our album Oehoe (released by Where to Now? Records in 2020). On April 7 she recorded a bunch of violin, viola and vocal improvisations at home. Gorgeous sounds and melodies, a gold mine to work with. The material basically wrote itself. I started editing and adding electronics (mainly virtual instruments, I don’t own a real harp), and by the end of that month, the album was finished. I always found the music that Anne and I make a b…
Barbatrama
The Portuguese word Selva means “Jungle”, and this collaborative opus with Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek is one more incursion towards Paradox. The Selva made this paradoxal enterprise its trademark: a trio with two string players (cello, bass) and a drummer with free improvisation and creative jazz as the matrix of their playing, but combining it with other musical languages, going from a deterritorialized kind of imaginary folk or world music to the picking of Renaissance and contempora…
Dwaal / Wold +
Dauw, the great tape label based in Ghent, invited me in 2015 to do a release for them. This resulted in two 18 minute tracks, Dwaal and Wold. Both are exercises in creating an auditory space or sphere rather than sculpting a structured composition. With its orchestral washes amidst a barrage of radio static and erratic noise, Dwaal is the noisy brother of the two. It's a balancing act or battle perhaps between disruptive tumult and serene calm. On Wold, with its sparse piano notes spread out ov…
Deining
Mini album, CD, self released by Machinefabriek, November 20, 2015. 200 copies. The Dutch word 'deining' (pronounced 'dining') translates to 'heave' and also 'commotion'. For 'Deining', I asked violinist Anne Bakker to bow each string of her instrument while sliding slowly from the lowest note to the highest, for exactly five minutes, as fluently as possible. Obviously, it turned out nearly impossible to do this really smoothly, but the unavoidable irregularities are a welcomed bonus. Anne also…
Memory Space
The central concept behind Alvin Lucier's Memory Space is the representation of another time and place through the use of a new set of sounds. In his instructions, Lucier asks the performer/s to go to an environment and record by any means (notes on paper, graphics, audio recording or by memory) the sound situations that are present, then, at any later time, in a different space, attempt to recreate that situation. The purpose of the work is to avoid elaboration or embellishment, but given that …
Secret Photographs
Beautiful new work from Machinefabriek. Secret Photographs was composed as a soundtrack to accompany a film made by Mike Hoolboom using photographs taken by notorious bank robber Alvin Karpis.
Filmmaker Mike Hoolboom discovered a batch of Karpis' photos for auction on eBay. He was the lucky winning bidder. With his newly found treasure, Hoolboom began working on a film consisting of still images, slowly dissolving one into another. Intensifying the slow, hypnotic pace and transitions, the musica…
Sol Sketches
Film director Chris Teerink asked me to make the soundtrack for a documentary he would be making about American artist Sol LeWitt. This was in 2009. Chris and I agreed that the music and the images should both be equally important in his film. We didn't want the score to overpower the images, but neither did we want it to become solely background 'muzak'. I searched for a certain openness in the sound, while at the same time keeping a directness to it. Musical references for me were the piano pi…
One Man Nation & Machinefabriek
Prolific collaborator Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) marks another notch on his laptop in this improvised live recording with One Man Nation aka Marc Chia. Their fifteen minute performance was captured at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam, December 8, 2011, for ethnomusically-minded gathering, The Future Sounds of Folk, and manifests a minimal sound sculpture of clicks and pops ballasted by quaking bass and free-roaming electro-acoustic diffusions. Machinefabriek's own remix, done after the moment, red…