Hans van Koolwijk

Tip! *Slipcase edition, 200 copies: three LPs in an offset printed slipcase with a 16-page booklet* Hans van Koolwijk is a Dutch artist and instrument builder, and the Bambuso is his own creation: a large organ made of bamboo and played by air. Timo van Luijk, who runs Metaphon, first heard it in 1993 at a festival in the Czech Republic and remembers being blown away, literally and figuratively. Their paths kept crossing in the following decades, among other things through van Koolwijk's work with Noise-Maker's Fifes, and after Timo organised a concert for him an edition on the label was the obvious next step.

The three LPs gather some of his finest recordings, most of them live and previously unreleased. The twelve tracks are named after the places where they were played: three studio sessions in Amsterdam and a concert at the Westergasfabriek, then Den Haag, Heerlen, Woensdrecht, Utrecht and Warsaw, with three pieces titled ZWEEF!, DRUK! and OER! in between. Several run past ten minutes, and the longest, Utrecht, takes more than twenty-five. The music moves from delicate acoustic drones to a loud, dissonant orchestra of air and bamboo, over more than two hours of music, a sound world that could only come from an instrument nobody else plays. Hans van Eck, Pawel Romanczuk and Pawel Szczepaniak contribute on some of the recordings.

The 16-page booklet has texts by Frans van Rossum, Henk Heuvelmans, Jerzy Kornowicz and van Koolwijk himself, translated by Elise Reynolds. Mastering by EARLabs, design by Meeuw, production by Timo van Luijk. The set comes in two editions, a screen printed linen box of 150 copies with a download code and a slipcase of 200 copies.