TEMKO + Slagwerk den Haag at HCMF
Creative Tourist
With W.A.L.L., composer and instrument builder Aart Strootman turns his bespoke musical objects into political metaphor. The ‘wall’, in these times, is a stand-in, a symbol of our globe’s rising taste for populism and racism – a legacy not created but certainly accelerated by US president Donald Trump. These barriers exist everywhere, and can even be found in polices being implemented in Strootman’s home country of the Netherlands. With WALL, Strootman considers the destructive effects of barriers, and the discursive ripples they’re causing throughout the world. Using newly made instruments – ‘glass marimbas and microtonal tube clocks’ – he erects his own boundary, his own ‘impenetrable sound barrier’.
