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Aeyde Radio—Mix 08
In Conversation with Billy Bultheel
"Generating a Landscape of Sound"

Words: Whitney Wei
Images: Brendan Macleod
Date: 29.12.2024
The Belgian experimental composer and performance artist liberates music from its normative confines into invisible architecture that responds to the material world.

To glance over the tracklist of Billy Bultheel's latest album Two Cycles is to dive into the personal library of an erudite composer. There's the opener "The Arcades Project," named after Walter Benjamin's famously unfinished critique of Parisian bourgeoisie consumerism; "Mt. Analogue," the title borrowed from an allegorical adventure novel by René Daumal; and "The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet, an autobiographical, queer classic with poetic prose that crawls into the subterranean underworld of crime and depravity in 1930s Europe—and exalts it all the same. 

"[Genet] was a gay man, who was very open about that, and used his art to delineate a territory in which he moved…," the Belgian experimental musician and performance artist explained, "I feel especially inspired by the way he describes gay life as a life that is necessary and has the privilege to be outside of society—outside of normalism." 
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Image: Brendan Macleod
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Image: Brendan Macleod


Bultheel may be best known for his many collaborations with artists such as Anne Imhof (he composed the soundtrack to her performance Faust, which won the German Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale) and James Richards. But, in his own projects, he has maintained his own distinctly intellectual, yet romantic point of view that sits comfortably outside of conventional musical trends. His compositions borrow their color from 20th-century literature and algorithmic strategies from European Medieval and Renaissance music; his approach to music arrangement looks outwards towards the shifting material world that encases it by invoking the sinusoidal ripples of water with flutes or protruding gargoyles with brass instruments.

For Aeyde Radio, Bultheel takes listeners to marbled art museums in Paris and ancient amphitheaters in Greece, among all the places for which he's composed, in a mix that showcases all of his own original music. Subversive and unusual given its almost dramaturgical origins, Bultheel's signature sound should be thought of as structural or environmental in nature—as he puts it, "architecture that's laid on top of the architecture," with the intention of "generating a landscape of sound."
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Whitney Wei: Could you walk me through your early musical history and upbringing? I understand that you went to a conservatory?

Billy Bultheel: I started being interested in music at a quite a young age. I started going to a kid's conservatory when I was maybe nine. But already before that, my dad would play musical instruments like the guitar at home. Then I started learning piano and producing music quite early on. I had a band when I was a kid, and I always had some musical project going on with other people, but I started working at the computer with a program called Reason at 13. When I finished high school, I decided to go to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague in the Netherlands. I studied something called Sonology: electronic music and experimental music composition. It was a school that was founded by [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and [Gottfried Michael] Koenig back in the 50s. It's always been this experimental lab, they developed new radio technologies, and it was a school that was always very tightly connected to technological innovation and music. And what came out of it was actually this very experimental electronic music culture. But I have to say that after four years, I found it so solipsistic and it can kind of turn a bit into itself. I decided to leave that world and go into performance and dance. And then I moved to Frankfurt after I graduated with my Bachelor of Sonology. I started studying choreography and performance there as a Masters under William Forsythe. In that period, I was fully focused on performance. I left my music behind me. But then after three or four years living in Frankfurt and having also a collective, I met Anna [Imhof] and started working with her as a performer and a choreographer. And then eventually, when she asked me, I played her the music I made back in Sonology, which she was really crazy about. Then I performed a lot of my old pieces tailored to her work in the very beginning of our collaboration. Eventually, she asked me to write a new score for Angst and then for Faust, so that's how I got back into music production. Then after working with Anna, I was really like, okay, I want to bring all this knowledge of my own, of my history, into my own practice, and start making performances or compositions.

Whitney Wei: Your music involves a lot of research into European medieval and early Renaissance music and borders on a similar "sacral" approach. Could you explain more about why you gravitate towards music that was originally composed for the church?

Billy Bultheel: While I was studying in The Hague, one of the departments of the school that was quite experimental that attracted a lot of interesting people and interesting discussions was the Early Music Department. There's not a lot of conservatories that have such an extensive offering of early music and knowledge—the Composition Department was also really strong, and then Sonology, so you had these three creative hubs. Between Sonology and Early Music there was this really interesting interaction going on, so I got exposed to a lot of music from the eighth century to the sixteenth century. I got really fascinated by the traditions of the art that was made in these times and in these places. Specifically, I was drawn to the kind of late Renaissance period where a lot of Flemish composers became really big. It probably also has something to do with me being Flemish and that historical connection.

"I got exposed to a lot of music from the eighth century to sixteenth century, and got really fascinated by the traditions of the art that was made in these times and places."
I was fascinated by the music and by their ways of composing. You can draw comparisons between [late Renaissance Flemish composers] and composers in the 21st century, or more in the state of the 20th century, where kind of mathematical thinking and algorithmic thinking was very prevalent in their methods. You can blame it on the fact that paper was really expensive, so if composers wrote a large piece of music, they had to somehow find codified ways of writing it down because they couldn't just write page after page. They would write one melody and then, like a mathematical formula, something like: sing this five times, then sing it half the time and half the speed as the previous course. That's where things like the [compositional technique of the] canon, for example, are being developed. So kind of these algorithmic strategies to unfold a little melody into an entire composition. People were thinking of music as something that could be code, that you could communicate, or put through a sort of processing system like a computer, and it delivers you a longer score. American minimalism was very much working with shift phasing between, you know, looping, so that is the approach to music I find really interesting.
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Image: Brendan Macleod
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Image: Brendan Macleod

Whitney Wei: Could you explain more about how The Thief's Journal performance was conceptualized? I'm confused—is the performance from your [debut album on PAN] album Two Cycles: Snow Cycle and Game Cycle?

Billy Bultheel: This confusing thing is that I'm recycling the titles that I like. I named some of my pieces after tracks in the album. "Mt. Analogue," for example, is also a castle, a track on the album, and a performance of mine in Paris from two years ago. All of these titles are actually book titles in my library. The whole Two Cycles album is a bit of an archival canon that brings together the music that I've written over, I think, seven years of making performances, both for myself and for other people. This was a bit like an attempt to reclaim it in my own personal context.

Whitney Wei: What are the books that you draw inspiration from?

Billy Bultheel: The Thief's Journey is a book by Jean Genet. It's been a huge inspiration for me. He was a gay man, who was very open about that, and used his art to delineate a territory in which he moved. I feel especially inspired by him by the way he describes gay life as a life that is necessary and has the privilege to be outside of society—outside of normalism. So now, with all the kind of normalization, like gay marriage and all of these groups, which obviously have a lot of great benefits for the LGBTQA community, [Genet has an attitude like] no, actually, we are outcasts and we're better there. This kind of punk attitude. It's something that really resonates with me as well. He does it by using religious language or glorifying language to describe this world instead of it being a world that's been looked down upon in more normative environments.

“This kind of punk attitude. It's something that really resonates with me as well. [Jean Genet] does it by using religious language or glorifying language to describe this world instead of it being a world that's been looked down upon in more normative environments.”
Then Mount Analogue [by René Daumal] is a book that I read back a while ago about this scientist who's looking for this secret mountain. It's this very 20th-century, surrealist story, and he brings along with him this barrage of people—a noblewoman and a poet to find this mountain.

There is also Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project that has followed me around in a bunch of performances. For this particular track on the album, I just felt like it represented what I tried to do with the music itself, creating these worlds for brass players that were originally performed at the Ancient Theatre in Epidaurus in Greece. Each of these brass players was positioned within the amphitheater itself, so not on the stage, but in between the audience. And they became almost like gargoyles that were seated [in a semicircle] on platforms that were protruding out of the amphitheater itself. This amphitheater is huge, about 15,000 people. The composition was trying to generate a landscape of sound, so not so much something that was very melodically driven, but rather something that was a call-and-answer between the brass players, so they created these arcades, a sort of architecture that's laid on top of the architecture. That's where the [track title] 'The Arcades Project' came from. 

Whitney Wei: Two Cycles is split into "Snow Cycle" and "Game Cycle." The first leans towards traditional compositions bolstered by electronic production, while the second is electronic pieces molded by classical and traditional music. You've always played with these two halves on your modular band with Alexander Iezzi, 33, that's equal parts chamber music with hardcore techno. Could you explain your continued interest in combining this duality a bit more?

Billy Bultheel: I belong to two worlds, neither of them is unfamiliar to me. A lot of the pieces actually don't necessarily come about from a compositional question. They are almost all developed for certain spatial setups. I wanted to make a body of work for a brass quartet that was surrounding the audience almost like guards in prison. So that's where the brass was chosen because brass is this kind of classical wartime instrument in this particular set up. The flutes were really chosen in combination with the water, because the flute has the most clear sinusoidal frequency, and water ripples are basically sinusoidal, so there's this kind of visual, physical similarity. A lot of the electronic parts also came from similar types of thinking—like what is the effect of a speaker in a certain type of space.

“I belong to two worlds, neither of them is unfamiliar to me. A lot of the pieces actually don't necessarily come about from a compositional question. They are almost all developed for certain spatial setups.”

Whitney Wei: Last question—why are you based in Berlin? There are so many collaborators I assume that you've met in the city, I don't know how long you've been here for.

Billy Bultheel: I moved here in December 2016. Since 2014, I've been coming to Berlin regularly. Ten years ago was the first time that I started to engage with the scene here, and then with Anne [Imhof], we did all these performances here back in 2015 with the Neue Nationalgalerie. 2016 we did this big performance Angst II in Hamburger Bahnhof.

I love [Berlin]. I definitely also find ways to manage it. People love to complain about it. The winters are hard and the summers are euphoric. I have to admit, though, I feel personally very lucky in how I'm connected to the city. I came here with an idea of what I wanted to do and kept focused. The opportunities that this city has been given to me, I feel, doesn't always happen for everyone, so not everyone can be so positive about it. Then again, the city is also what you make of it.

Tracklist
Tracklist
Mix 08 by Billy Bultheel is broadcasting on Aeyde Radio now.

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