FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Wim Daeleman

Musician

When Wim Daeleman (°1947) was 16, he started taking oboe lessons at the Municipal Music Academy of Turnhout (Belgium) with Michaël Scheck, who also taught him the principles of solfège. It was around this time that he wrote his first compositions, including a Duo for two oboes.

In 1978, he came into contact with the Studio voor Experimentele Muziek, Antwerp (SEM, led by Joris De Laet). A few electronic compositions emerged from this contact, including Semmelet (1979) and Integrated Parametric (1980). The latter work was performed several times in Belgium and also during a concert tour by some members of the SEM ensemble (Joris De Laet, Leo Verheyen and Wim Daeleman) in the then Yugoslavia (Zagreb) and in Canada (Montreal, Kingston and Toronto). Later, the concert was broadcast on Radio3. Because of professional and family commitments, as well as a critical view of his own work, he stopped composing in the second half of the 1980s.

From 2011, he has been studying cello with Jan Sciffer at Mol Music Academy. And since his retirement, Wim Daeleman has started composing again and more and more, both acoustically and electronically. He is currently taking the Techniques d'écriture sur support course with Annette Vande Gorne. At the Music Academy of Mol (Belgium), he is also taking courses in Experimental Music (Dagmar Feijen) and Music Production (Tom Van Achte).

With regard to his recent electronic work: starting from a limited number of sounds (recorded with a microphone), Wim Daeleman tries to create a composition by combining arrangements of these sounds (lengthening, shortening, raising, lowering, reverb or not, ...). He finds it important not just to create sound panoramas but to arrive at a certain progression in the structure of his compositions.

(source: a.o. Flavie Roquet 'Lexicon Flemish composers born after 1800' (2007))

Water, 8’ 53″ / 2020

“Water belongs to a series of musical pieces I composed using software, which can be downloaded for free (Audacity). All these compositions had as a starting point a chosen sound material in which I committed myself to using only that material for the whole composition. The sound material I worked with for Water is almost exclusively a recording of the sounds of water from our kitchen tap.

Like the others of this series of pieces, Water is a playful quest in a garden of possibilities offered by electronics. It is a medium, which I (re)discovered not very long ago and whose often self-created richness of sound continues to amaze and delight me."