Long before his name was murmured in sound‑art circles, Baudouin Oosterlynck was a young listener in Belgium, raised on classical music and already leaning toward the outer edges. As a student in the early 1970s, he began organising concerts in a garage at his home – a space dubbed Oreille Cassée (“Broken Ear”) that also served as his first pseudonym – inviting giants of post‑war music who were literally twice his age: John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Those encounters left a mark. A particularly revelatory performance by Sylvano Bussotti didn’t just impress him; it provoked a productive jealousy, pushing Oosterlynck to begin composing and making his own recordings in 1975, focusing as much on the contour of silence and the fragility of sound as on notes in any traditional sense.

From there, his practice expanded far beyond the usual composer’s remit. Over the following decades Oosterlynck became an itinerant figure in international sound art, creating sculptures and installations, publishing books and devising listening devices and scores that redefine what “silence” might be. In 1978 he issued a single LP under his own name, and for many years that and a scattering of documentation were all most listeners could access. Only in 2008 did Metaphon’s box set of early works (1975–78) give a fuller picture of this quietly radical period, revealing music of unusual poise and strangeness: pieces that treat resonance, space and the smallest vocal or instrumental gesture as primary material.

The present album returns to that formative era from a new angle. It contains two pieces originally composed in 1977 and 1978, but heard here in contemporary re‑creations by vocalist Bénédicte Davin. She first revisited these works in 2021 during the Pars Pro Toto Festival organised by Silvia Hatzl in Brussels, approaching Oosterlynck’s scores not as museum objects but as living proposals. Her interpretations highlight the internal drama in his writing: micro‑inflections of pitch, carefully timed entries and withdrawals, the way a single phoneme or breath can reframe a space. The versions captured on this LP were recorded live on 4 May 2025 at Glasgow’s Tectonics Festival, with BBC Radio 3 documenting the performance. The concert setting matters: you can hear the hall’s air wrapping around Davin’s voice, the slight tension of real‑time risk, the way Oosterlynck’s concepts bloom differently in a large resonant environment than in a studio.

Rather than stacking layers of technology, the music remains spare, even ascetic on the surface. Davin’s voice is the primary instrument, treated not as a vehicle for text but as a source of pure sound – vowels stretched until they fray, consonants used as percussive flickers, long held tones that shade from stable to unstable as breath and acoustics interact. Oosterlynck’s structures shape this material from the inside, determining where silence falls, how long a figure is sustained, when a timbral shift should occur. The pieces hover between composition and performance art, between concert music and something closer to a scored listening exercise: as much about how sound dies away as how it begins.

This release appears in conjunction with Oosterlynck’s performance at Ultra Eczema’s Sund.Aft at De Kern in Wilrijk, Belgium, on 22 March 2026, further cementing the connection between his historical work and its contemporary resonances. Ultra Eczema presents the LP / digital edition in a format that reflects the care in the music: a triple‑fold open sleeve, a silkscreen print on the B‑side, download code and the label’s customary sticker. The physical object echoes Oosterlynck’s own attention to the relationship between score, space and experience – an artefact that unfolds, literally and figuratively, around two concise but deeply charged performances.

For listeners familiar with Oosterlynck through archival releases, Baudouin Oosterlynck & Bénédicte Davin offers a rare chance to hear his 1970s vocal thinking refracted through a present‑day performer at the peak of her powers. For newcomers, it’s an invitation into a world where almost nothing happens in the conventional sense, yet tiny decisions in breath, duration and resonance accumulate into something quietly transformative.