Eric Thielemans

a Snare is a Bell is a solo piece for snare drum, voice and the room in which it is played.
Inspired by some close encounters I had with African shamanic/trance musicians and my personal experiences with meditation and music, it also relates to a known-to-many-of-us acoustical wonder of sitting on the toilet and picking up the tone of that little room (often by accident while coughing or talking out loud to oneself) and enjoying to sing that tone and let the toilet become filled with an enormous
resonance. Well...it sure does happen to me from time to time... So the roll on the snare drum is my practice. My daily exercice and meditation.
Also, it is simple: I'm playing a roll on a snare drum, which has been done many times and a long time before me. Like baking cookies with a simple recipe, right out of grandma's cookbook. This basic aspect has the pleasurable result of freeing me from the idea of needing to be special. Or in other words, the fascination of this work, for me, does not lie in it's unique composition or incredible virtuosity to play a roll, but in how what I hear, when doing this roll, touches me, changes me, guides me, every time again.

EARR plays a Snare is a Bell, is a revisitation of the roll and it's overtones by an ensemble of musicians with very different musical backgrounds. The choice of musicians is above all a heart thing. I love hearing and seeing what they play. I like their recipes and the special cookies they bake. And I like sitting down and watching the stars with them.
"So It started again with my snare drum and voice in a room, and we all listened and added voices and sounds to what we were hearing. As if we were all fishes in a stream. Sometimes just swimming, sometimes wanting to show ourselves, wanting to be heard, making sounds and noises, adding to that stream, sometimes just floating, breathing, hanging in there. And sometimes we heard not only single sounds but many sounds together and sometimes we heard a song. And we started to think about where all these sounds, songs and noises were coming from. And where they were going to. And we thought of all those recipes in all our grandmas' and grandpas' cookbooks, and all their grandmas and grandpas, and we started to feel simple and happy. Happy fishes in a big stream, watching the stars."