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Jaap Blonk performs at Other Minds Festival
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On April 9 and 14, Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk performs at Other Minds Festival in San Francisco
On April 9 and 14, Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk performs at Other Minds Festival of New Music in San Francisco, CA. The first performance takes place on the opening gala, and the last on the closing event. On April 10, Blonk will give a workshop/demonstration of sound poetry techniques with reduced student prices. More information and tickets can be found here.
Ahead of his Other Minds Festival performance, on April 5, Jaap Blonk presents “Songs of Little Sleep” and other recent works for voice and electronics at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. More info and tickets can be found here.
Jaap Blonk
Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a self-taught composer, performer, and poet. In the late 1970s he took up the 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.
From around the year 2000 on 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.
As a vocalist, Jaap Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. He has performed around the world, on all continents. With the use of live electronics the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension.
Other Minds
Other Minds is dedicated to the encouragement and propagation of contemporary music in all its forms through concerts, recordings, broadcasts, audio preservation, and public discussions that bring together artists and audiences of diverse traditions, generations, and cultural backgrounds.
By fostering cross-cultural exchange and creative dialogue, and by encouraging exploration of areas in new music seldom touched upon by mainstream music institutions, Other Minds is committed to expanding and reshaping the definition of what constitutes “serious music.”
Founded in 1993, Other Minds in San Francisco is a leading organization for new and experimental music, devoted to championing the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices in contemporary music, with an emphasis on composers of the American Experimental Tradition.
From festival concerts, film screenings, radio broadcasts, and the commissioning of new works, to producing and releasing CDs, preserving thousands of interviews and concerts and distributing them free on the Internet, Other Minds has become one of the world’s major conservators of new music’s ecology.
