Merijn Bisschops

Merijn Bisschops was born in 1981 in Deurne (NL), grew up in Eindhoven and currently lives in Tilburg. After a study accordion and a preparatory study composition he is working as a composer, maker of interdisciplinary performances and cultural producer. He played accordion in the bands Morus and Casus I and performed as a poet. His work was performed at Theaterfestival Boulevard, November Music, Festival Cement, Het Orgelpark, De Toonzaal, De NWE Vorst, Museum Beeld en Geluid, the Van Abbemuseum amongst other places in The Netherlands, in Belgium at Logos (Gent) and Q-O2 (Brussels), in Germany at festival Facing True North (Berlin) and at festival Procembalo in Italy. As a producer Bisschops realized art projects and concerts, like the project ‘Volume 1, new music in abandoned buildings’ and the performance ‘Simultaan’. Since 2006 he is coordinator of DE LINK, contemporary stage for uncommon chamber music and since 2007 he is guest curator for the Redecorators concerts of independent cultural festival Incubate.

Clear concepts, a skewed perspective and bold experiment are the most important features of Bisschops work. Diverse influences are audible in his music, which led to a sound world with filmic associations and auditory oddities: from industrial structuring to crippled virtuosity, from unpredictable rhythms to catatonic immobility. Coincidence plays an important role in the process of making and interpretation of Bisschops’ work. By giving the performers a wide birth concerning free interpretation, the unpolished sounds he is searching for as a composer come into being.

He often uses a subject outside music as a starting point for his compositions. Atom tests in the United States in 1955 inspired him to writing ‘Operation Teapot’ a composition for violin, electric guitar and tape. In ‘TIC’, written for prepared table top guitar and video, the performer reads the music score from a screen: a black and white movie, recorded through the window of a driving train. Lantern posts, trees, bridges, electrical wires etc. are provided with sound at the moment they pass the window.

This theatrical method is also present in interdisciplinary performances, for which he writes the concept, music and text. The performances are an associative state the audience is part of, where story or chronology are secondary. The theater texts are implosive, language stutters, rasps, can be businesslike, harsh and painful. They are philosophical considerations with a special interest for the imperfection of humans and society: heavy themes, brought with subtle humor.

By connecting an interdisciplinary concept to the theme, Bisschops is exploring the interaction between different art disciplines: do they influence or strengthen each other and where do they obstruct each other? In the performance ‘Simultaan Gevierendeeld’, about imprisonment, repetition and rut, he placed an actor, dancer, musician and video artist in four separate cells. The audience divided itself over the cells and experienced the same short performance four times, each cycle trough a different discipline. In his new film music project House of Fun the subject he shows diverse associations about torture. Not by visualizing the torture practices itself but by making an objective observation of the phenomenon torture and the disguising language that is used to mask physical and mental pain.

Nederlandse biografie in Press kit