CMAT welcomes Jaap Blonk for a research seminar this January

Research seminar

Tuesday 29 January, 5pm

Clock Tower Lecture Theatre, Historic Dockyard Chatham

Jaap Blonk, avant-garde composer and performance artist, will join the University of Kent for a research seminar this January. Blonk will discuss his work, placing it in the context of its roots: sound poetry, improvisation and new music. He will present his work in the form of snippets of live performance, projection of texts and scores, sound examples, including his work with other musicians and with electronics, and video fragments.

Biography

Jaap Blonk (b. 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a composer, performer and poet. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music.
A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds.

Later, Blonk started work with electronics, at first using samples of his own voice, then extending the field to include pure sound synthesis as well.
He took a year off of performing in 2006. As a result, his renewed interest in mathematics made him start a research of the possibilities of algorithmic composition for the creation of music, visual work and poetry. Blonk’s work for radio and television includes several commissioned radio plays. He also makes larger-scale drawings of his scores, as well as visual poetry, which is being exhibited.

He has his own record label, Kontrans, featuring a total of 25 releases so far. Other Blonk recordings appeared on various labels, such as Staalplaat, Basta, VICTO, Ecstatic Peace, Monotype Records, Terp and Elegua Records. His book/CD ‘Traces of Speech’ was published in 2012 by Hybriden-Verlag, Berlin. Forthcoming is a sequel with the title “Traces of Cookery”. A comprehensive collection of his sound poetry came out as a book with 2 CDs in 2013, entitled “KLINKT”.

Image: Etang Chen, 2015