Non-Event presents a special double bill featuring the legendary Dutch sound poet, electronic musician, and improviser Jaap Blonk, and Jorrit Dijkstra’s newest group project BLINK.

About the artists

Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. He went to university for mathematics and musicology but did not finish those studies. In the late 1970s he took up 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 as work with analog synthesizers. 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.

BLINK is
Jorrit Dijkstra | alto saxophone, compositions
Nate McBride | bass guitar
Eric Rosenthal | drums and percussion
Eric Hofbauer | guitar
Gabe Boyarin  |  guitar

Jorrit Dijkstra’s new group BLINK is the latest project of The Porch Trio: an electric guitar band that features the Trio plus Boston jazz veteran Eric Hofbauer, and young talent Gabe Boyarin on electric guitars. The band uses a microtonal tuning system between the instruments, which gives it a mesmerizing and dreamy sound, inspired by classic African High Life bands, Indonesian Gamelan and delta blues guitar players. Dijkstra’s compositions are full of collective melodic and multi-rhythmic layerings, and form a spring board for open improvisations.