van Heumen, Robert

Stranger

Label: Creative Sources Country: Portugal

"No Man's Land deals with the Dust Bowl period in the USA, particularly with the people who lived and stayed in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The film portrays the story of Hazel Lucas, who migrated to Boise City in Cimarron County as a child and lived through the worst hard times during this ecological and economical disaster. The story is adapted from the book 'The worst hard time' by Timothy Egan. Most of the sounds on the soundtrack are produced in the CEM studio at WORM Rotterdam with the ARP 2500 and Korg MS-20 synthesizers and a Synton stereo EQ.

Stranger is inspired by Albert Camus' L'Étranger, Philip K. Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep, the film Bladerunner and as always by L.E.J. Brouwer. Utilizing a formalized process, the sounds were taken from one single source, processed at EMS Stockholm and put together at STEIM Amsterdam and Culturelab Newcastle. A blog on the composition process can be found at http://hardhatarea.com/stranger/.

"Robert van Heumen works with sound: electronic, experimental, improvised, structured, composed. Recent works include the compositions Stranger, Fury, Silent and 12 Bullets which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments as well as produced for release on CD. Fury was presented at ICMC08, and Stranger premiered as a diffused work at Culturelab in Newcastle (UK). In the fall of 2008 Van Heumen constructed the radioplay No Man's Land, commissioned by the CEM studio at WORM in Rotterdam, NL.

As a musician he uses STEIM's live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis and algorithmic composition software SuperCollider. He is active as a member of the electronic audio-visual trio SKIF++ (with Jeff Carey & Bas van Koolwijk), Shackle (working with electro-flutist Anne LaBerge on restriction), ABATTOIR (with cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen), Whistle Pig Saloon (with guitarist John Ferguson deconstructing the guitar), noiseband Man in the Middle (with Nicolas Field & Tom Tlalim), founding member of the N Collective, and has shared the stage with dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit), Michel Waisvisz, Richard Barrett, Sakata Akira, Nicolas Collins, Oguz Buyukberber, Luc Houtkamp, Guy Harries, Morten J. Olsen, Daniel Schorno, Roddy Schrock, Nate Wooley a.o. His soundworld is a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices, sounds from kitchen appliances, most of the time smashed beyond repair.

Van Heumen is Managing Director of the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, curator of the Local Stop concert series and member of STEIM's Artistic Committee. In a previous life mathematician, trumpet player and software programmer. He still reads L.E.J. Brouwer."-Turbulence.org/Networked_Music_Review

Read more about this item

At The Squid's Ear!