22 November 2025
DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend - Day 1
In the context of the DNK is DEAD… residency at art space W139, DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two sets of cutting edge and quite classical experimental music by a quartet of young musicians based in The Hague and an ensemble of ragtag experimentalists, professionals and hobbyists alike, from the Amsterdam region aka The Social Music Club.
Set 1:
Montoriol, Eckhardt, McGuire, & De Gendt play: Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song)
Roc Montoriol, Jacob Eckhardt, Lawrence McGuire, Cis De Gendt are a The Hague-based quartet, sharing an interest in perception and attention in relation to presentation formats, playback media, volumes and space-time. Their work currently utilizes amplification, sound recordings, electro-acoustic devices, objects, and voice.
For this performance at W139, they reimagine DNK ensemble’s 2017 performance: Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song) with (synthetic) voice and non-pitched sound materials layered across a range of playback devices. They take inspiration from its forming of relations, the structural repetition of re-starting and re-shifting, and the masking that occurs.
Set 2:
The Social Music Club performs:
Christian Wolff - Stones
Cornelius Cardew - The Great Learning - Paragraph 7
[Simultaneous performance of the two pieces]
The Social Music Club is a loose collective of musicians and non-musicians who regularly come together to listen, make sound, talk about interaction, and try different types of text-scores and exercises from the book: Search & reflect : a music workshop handbook compiled by students of the late percussionist, improviser, and teacher: John Stevens.
Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was an influential and controversial English experimental music composer, known for pioneering graphic notation, free improvisation, and the Scratch Orchestra. His career evolved from early classical training and an association with Karlheinz Stockhausen to becoming a political activist in a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s. His musical work shifted from the avant-garde to more populist and traditional styles, infused with his political beliefs, before his death in a hit-and-run accident in 1981
Christian Wolff is an American composer, performer, and improviser born in Nice, France, in 1934. Associated with the New York School, he is known for pioneering the use of indeterminacy in his music, which grants performers significant freedom during performance. A key figure in experimental and avant-garde music, he also incorporated political themes into his work and collaborated extensively with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Wolff also has a background as a classicist and former professor at Harvard and Dartmouth Colleges
+ after-hang with music by the DNK DJ Team