Sjoerd Martens

Video: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative and Dekmantel teamed up for the third time to invite artists to bring fresh music to a curation of Dutch archival films. This year Artificial Dance label boss Interstellar Funk teamed up with visual artist Sjoerd Martens and visual artist and composer Guenter Råler.

Instead of producers composing music for pre-existing films, Interstellar Funk teamed up with visual artist Sjoerd Martens who stylized and edited several 1930s films from the Sound and Vision collection resulting in a completely new visual work. As well, Guenter Råler, an accomplished visual artist in her own right, created a new film based on the Sound and Vision Natuurbeelden collection, a large open data-set of raw nature films.

Seasonshore Sequences, 1400×1080 / 4:3 HD color 00:15:16 Stereo. Supported by Mondrian Fund.

Dekmantel Records: V/A - Scores III: Dekmantel once again teams up with RE:VIVE, the cultural initiative setup by the The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, to pair modern electronic talent with Dutch archival footage. The third EP in the Scores series sees Interstellar Funk and Italian producer Guenter Råler create innovative, modular soundscapes to the graceful visual arts unearthed from the Sound & Vision archives.

As Interstellar Funk, Olf van Elden uses his production competency to craft a heavenly arpeggiated, synth composition to the amateur aquarium movies by J.L. Clement which are edited for this project by Sjoerd Martens. Filmed in the 1940’s, the video’s turn-of-the-century black-and-white style aquatic footage is reanimated through van Elden’s tacit polyphonic, modular sonic soundtrack. Layering together multiple sequences, van Elden pieces together the music as a whole, to mimic the way in which the film was created.

On the B-Side, Italian abstract artist and Dutch native Guenter Raler concocts a deeply introspective, and perfectly choreographed, ambient soundtrack to a select series of pieced together clips from the Collectie Natuurbeelden, [the Institute’s Collection of Natural Images]. The music plays against the depiction of multiple biological communities in transition; what is referred to as an ecotone. The title itself not only recalls that of a musical tone, but represents the ever-evolving aspect of life and nature as similar colours, along with movements of animals and plants pass on from one image to the next.

Within their own right, the new scores not only give the age-old films new context and sonic character, but exist as creative works as their own, full of resonance and individualism that highlight the retrospective artists’ voices to their fullest.

Dekmantel Records: V/A - Scores III is available on vinyl and digital.