Almere is a city of radical social engineering: built on the seabed, with carefully designed forests and parks. Here, the boundary between nature and construction blurs—the domain in which Hyper_nature unfolds.

During the Aluminous light festival, a dazzling cathedral of light and music emerges in the forest along the Weerwater. Jaap van Elzen places glowing arches between the trees, while the Black Pencil ensemble illuminates sounds that are as organic as they are artificial – a sacred, contemporary hymn to our hypernature.

It is wonderful to be able to develop this work of art on behalf of Black Pencil—Almere's city ensemble—in their own city. On October 20 the musicians will be playing live in the light installation.

More info on Alliuminous Light Festival.

Tags: Black Pencil, Jaap van den Elzen, Alluminous

On Saturday, 20 September 2025, the Mallet Collective releases their new CD Views from Dutch Trains. I’m proud to be part of this project with my piece Jagged Noir, which was originally written in 2018 for a small ensemble. For this album, Ramon Lormans created a new arrangement for two marimbas, giving the work a fresh, almost tactile energy.

Although it wasn’t conceived with trains in mind, Jagged Noir seems to fit naturally into the album’s theme. It’s a machine-like piece that follows a jagged yet inevitable path, moving slowly downward — as if descending into the dark of the night. In that sense, it mirrors the unstoppable momentum of a journey, the sense of being carried along tracks into the unknown.

The album also includes music by Anastas Paev, Jannum Kruidhof, Jo, Antal and Misha Sporck, and of course Jacob ter Veldhuis’s Views from a Dutch Train from 1992, which gave the whole project its title and starting point.

The release tour begins that evening in the Kunstkerk in Dordrecht, where all of this music will be brought to life by the Mallet Collective.

You can order the album on the website of Mallet Collective.

📅 Premiere concert
Date: Saturday, 20 September 2025
Location: Kunstkerk, Dordrecht

Tags: Mallet Collective, Album release, Jagged Noir, Ramon Lormans

On October 1st LOFAR is performing a live set in the new autmun edition of Rites of Noise, an evening with blooming and edgy sounds curated by Tomas Serrien and Casper de Geus.

LOFAR is my duo with Mathijs Leeuwis electronic duo crafting immersive soundscapes that explore industrial and environmental themes. Their music combines noise, industrial, and ambient textures, often reflecting on human impact.

Lofar on Bandcamp

Tags: LOFAR, Rites of Noise

Ensemble Black Pencil commissioned me to write a new composition with a land art work in the province of Flevoland.

When I first encountered Antony Gormley's Exposure, I was struck not by its stillness, but by everything moving around it. The sculpture—a massive figure crouched at the edge of the Markermeer—might seem frozen in time, but it exists in constant dialogue with its surroundings. The shifting light, the rolling clouds, the restless water, and the changing seasons all transform the experience of Exposure. It is never the same sculpture twice.

This idea of change—of time as a force that shapes and reshapes—became the foundation of my composition. I wanted to write music that captured this motion, this flux. While composing, I kept returning to M. Vasalis's poem Time. Her words describe time as something that rushes forward yet carries us gently within it. She writes of trees bursting from the earth and seas swelling and retreating, images that felt deeply connected to the environment surrounding Exposure.

In my music, I tried to reflect this duality: the unstoppable momentum of time and its quiet moments of reflection. The ensemble becomes a kind of landscape itself—always shifting, always alive. It is about stillness amidst movement, about how even what seems permanent is constantly being remade by the world around it.

Tags: Exposure, Antony Gormley, Ensemble Black Pencil

For a large part of this year I'll be working on Echoes of Erasure, a concert project for and with Bl!ndman saxophone quartet. Premiering in the second half of 2026 I'll be joining the saxophonists on stage with live electronics.

Echoes of Erasure captures a melancholic sense of decay that people may feel when reflecting on the current state of the world.

Inspired by Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, Echoes of Erasure serves as an auditory meditation on the fragility of memories and the forces that shape the connections to reality we hold onto—or lose.

The new composition, interwoven with citations from ancient musical cultures, reflects the quiet devastation of a world where objects, concepts, and memories are systematically erased, leaving behind only faint echoes within the musical experience. As the piece progresses, the music undergoes a gradual process of erasure and degradation.

The saxophone quartet embodies the human response to this loss: resistance, adaptation, and ultimately, acceptance of the emptiness left behind. The electronics act as an archive, a fragile repository of memories on the brink of disappearance.

Echoes of Erasure explores themes of transience, absence, and the poignant beauty of trying to hold onto something destined to fade. It references what the music philosopher Adorno called “the fractured world”— a world where hope, if it exists, lies in the scattered fragments of what we remember, as Echoes of Erasure. In the disintegration of a piece of music, there is always “a promise of what is yet to come,” a glimpse of a new musical world.