Solex - Ahoy! The Sound Map of the Netherlands
If you went and checked out my Matador playlist, you might have heard a couple tracks by Solex. Elisabeth Esselink is a Dutch artist (and record store owner) whose primary medium is sampling (both from records and by making informal field recordings).
Her early work, though unique, is pretty standard hip-hop adjacent, singing over sampled beats, but i hadn't really been keeping up with her work past her first couple albums. So, i checked out her 2013 album Ahoy! The Sound Map of the Netherlands, and wow it's fantastic.
The concept of the album is obvious and mostly explicit, but the full story is worth repeating. She had a boat and a desire to be on said boat for an extended period of time. What better way to accomplish that than to actually make a record on a boat? So, she sailed around her country inviting musicians from every province to come aboard and improvise over a bunch of loops she had prepared. These were all solo improvisations, nobody heard what others had played. Then she took all the recordings including speech and environmental sounds, trashed the original loops, and assembled the tracks into finished pieces.
If you aren't familiar with the peculiar adoration people from the Netherlands have for Rock and Blues (maybe you were sick the week your high school history teacher talked about the Dutch East India company's hostile takeover of Southern Africa, i don't know) then this album might really surprise you. I am familiar with it and it still surprised me. This album boogies and jives, but stays completely loose and unpredictable. That's the cool thing about non-communicative improvisation, it produces intriguing counterpoint you could never strictly "compose." If nothing else, it's a fascinating ethnomusicological survey of contemporary Netherlands. Definitely worth a listen or twenty.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nUn3FV5xXV-ztGes128vuBPOkBY4Gbot0
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Her early work, though unique, is pretty standard hip-hop adjacent, singing over sampled beats, but i hadn't really been keeping up with her work past her first couple albums. So, i checked out her 2013 album Ahoy! The Sound Map of the Netherlands, and wow it's fantastic.
The concept of the album is obvious and mostly explicit, but the full story is worth repeating. She had a boat and a desire to be on said boat for an extended period of time. What better way to accomplish that than to actually make a record on a boat? So, she sailed around her country inviting musicians from every province to come aboard and improvise over a bunch of loops she had prepared. These were all solo improvisations, nobody heard what others had played. Then she took all the recordings including speech and environmental sounds, trashed the original loops, and assembled the tracks into finished pieces.
If you aren't familiar with the peculiar adoration people from the Netherlands have for Rock and Blues (maybe you were sick the week your high school history teacher talked about the Dutch East India company's hostile takeover of Southern Africa, i don't know) then this album might really surprise you. I am familiar with it and it still surprised me. This album boogies and jives, but stays completely loose and unpredictable. That's the cool thing about non-communicative improvisation, it produces intriguing counterpoint you could never strictly "compose." If nothing else, it's a fascinating ethnomusicological survey of contemporary Netherlands. Definitely worth a listen or twenty.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nUn3FV5xXV-ztGes128vuBPOkBY4Gbot0
Next
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