Bram van Klink - Composer and sound artist

Apr 17

Up-and-coming Dutch media composers show their recent work and tell us who they are

photography: Roan Buma

Bram’s first experiences consuming electronic music were in the context of club culture. Electronic music played at venues such as De School and Radion inspired him to start creating. A visit to Berlin Atonal - a festival for sonic and visual art- showed him that there was a whole world of sound art beyond electronic dance music yet to be discovered. During his education he developed his creative skillset and process to create sound-art with MaxMSP, SuperCollider, hardware design, microphones, and knowledge of acoustics.

Nowadays, Bram van Klink is a composer and sound artist who is fundamentally driven by his curiosity and experiments in electroacoustics, spatial composition and programming. Van Klink has expanded his creative vision, besides his work at the Music & Technology department at the HKU, at the Spatial Sound Institute (HU) and during an internship with Edwin van der Heide.

Van Klink is interested in 80’s underground cassette culture and loves to dig into the history of music as a way to connect with other creatives. Conversation often leads him to the best inspirations for his own work. Bram generally works towards a strong narrative or vision in his work, because he believes every project should have a core concept. For example, the starting point of Bram’s latest collaborative work with Victor Marbus, Tension, is the resonant frequency of a church, first played at the Nicolaïkerk, Utrecht.

Van Klink’s performances and installations are presented at various locations, such as Zaal100, De Nijverheid & Art Machine festival, Garage Noord, Der Hintergarten, Elektron festival, and the Spatial Sound Institute.

bramvanklink.nl

Projects

Tension

Tension is a performance in which a steel cable is played in a church with motorized magnets and by an instrumentalist. The technological setup of Tension consists of a steel cable tightened to tune the steel cable and hung upfive meters above the audience with ratchet straps on the church pillars. At one end a computer-controlled motor with powerful N52 neodymium magnets is placed to attract and repel the steel cable, generating vibrations and therefore sound. At the other end is a double coil to pick up the sound which is fed back into the computer where it is processed with distinctive signal processing. The sound is then played throughout the space with the use of a 24-channel sound system. The movements of the magnets, sound pick-up, and processing are done by the same computer in a single, custom Max/MSP patch and spatialised with the 4DSOUND software. The steel cable symbolises the relationship between the church and nightlife, which have an exciting unexpected resemblance: the ritual nature of both worlds is an interesting parallel. Every space has its resonant frequency, which is another important part that binds the steel cable to the church. We incorporated the resonant frequency of the church at which we performed into the composition, by processing or tuning the steel cable to this frequency.

visit victormarbus.nl

more info: bramvanklink.nl/projects/tension

Socially Interactive Feedback Loop

Socially Interactive Feedback Loop (SIFL) is an installation based on the principles of feedback.

Socially Interactive Feedback Loop (SIFL) is a socially interactive installation based on the principle of feedback, which was developed and created by Dan Xu and Bram van Klink. SIFL is the result of a two-day workshop about the Speed of Sound, a work by Edwin van der Heide, hosted by Creative Coding Utrecht.

For SIFL two pairs of microphones and speakers are interconnected to create a looped system. The audience is invited to excite the system and influence the feedback sound by moving the microphones closer or further away from the speakers. Together, the audience members can transform the feedback sounds: if one person covers one microphone, the loop is disrupted and the feedback process halts. SIFL plays with ‘feedback’ both in the sense of a closed audio system and a social interaction with each other, thereby exploring the emergent properties of sonic transformation and social behaviour.

more info: bramvanklink.nl/projects/socially-interactive-feedback-loop

Spatial Sound Institute

In early 2023, van Klink set up, and participated in an exchange with the Spatial Sound Institute. This is the location where 4DSOUND was developed by Paul Oomen and Poul Holleman, at that point led by Vito Willems. The Spatial Sound Institute is a research centre for spatial sound technologies and practices. The facility was centered around a large-scale omnidirectional sound system designed by 4DSOUND, consisting of 60 speakers placed in different locations, custom-built into the renovated architecture of the warehouse. The space then hosted an entity called HOLOS. During this exchange, I participated in different activities, such as building a custom LED lighting setup with 6000 LEDs that would translate spatial movement in the space using the existing 4D engine and Madmapper. I also re-composed one of my previous compositions Contrast to gain a better understanding of composing for spatial sound and light.