Henry Andersen

Henry Andersen is a Brussels-based visual artist and composer. Trained as a minimal and reductionist composer under the wings of Peter Ablinger, he moved from music into visual art, writing and sound performances. His debut vinyl is a recording of the longrunning piece ‘Stanzas’ or ‘the Law of the Good Neighbour’. On each side, a pair of his friends reads simultaneously from a list of words. The list is an unfinished result of a word game Andersen has been playing for several years. Stanzas… seems to be a precise text-sound composition, a liquid and elegant piece of concrete poetry that reveals the individual qualities of the voices and their interpersonal relation.

But what sounds like a hardcore conceptual and idealist  composition has a lot more to it. Being an heir to a playful and prosaic Cagean and Ashleyan tradition, the list of words is a score that acts as a field for an infinite amount of possibilities. Andersen documents some of these many possible outcomes, expressing an urge to be a human body in space, interrelated with others. The composer reveals on the record another face of conceptualism: as a material, personal and truly moving beauty.