Worm Records has released three limited-edition, twelve-inch vinyl albums of their Soundpiece Project. In 2011 Lukas Simonis, music curator of the Dutch alternative art space Worm invited three composers—Rutger Zuyderveld, a.k.a. Machinefabriek, Dyane Donck, and Pierre Bastien—to create pieces for a system of thirty-two underground loudspeakers around the Rotterdam theatre square. Electronic musician Machinefabriek made a loop of sine tones in which the frequency of occurrence corresponded directly with the frequency of the pitches, resulting in slowly revolving, seemingly unpredictable cycles of tones and chords. Dyane Donck created a piece around William Blake’s bleak poem London, underpinning distorted and fragmented recitation of the text with sound layers of distant planes, processed breathing, and a variety of ominous electronic cracklings and downward-sliding tones. Pierre Bastien forged recordings of insects into a decidedly musical composition, using pitch shifting and working with both the tonal quality of buzzing and the rhythms of cricket stridulation. These pieces, initially juxtaposed with urban surroundings, have now been released on three LPs. They each take up one LP side, with a newer work on the second side. Machinefabriek plays his original piece backwards and adds reverb. Donck plays London in two versions, as electronic pop songs with her Daisy Bell trio. Bastien has added a concert with electronic musician One Man Nation. All this imaginative work has been pressed on brightly coloured vinyl.
René van Peer is a music journalist from the Netherlands. He writes about improvised and contemporary composed music, world music, and sound art. He also writes program notes for several Dutch venues, such as the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam. Leonardo and Songlines have published his articles and reviews. Het Apollohuis published his book Interviews with sound artists. He is artistic adviser for composers, ensembles and festivals, and is a member of the music committee of a major cultural foundation in the Netherlands, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.