Bauke Meersman (be)

Pack your bags because this year, dunk!festival takes you on a trip to New York! That’s right, thanks to Bauke Meersman’s soundtrack, you’ll feel like you’re walking along NYC’s foggy docks looking for a bar and a whiskey, on the rocks of course! Bauke Meersman is a local jazz musician, specialised in meditative suites and loops. Bauke works his minimalist music using circular breathing on a saxophone and bass-clarinet combo, sometimes even playing the two simultaneously! Odd time signatures and build-ups-through-repetitions do the rest to entrance the listener in a tight evocative grip! If there ever was such a thing as “industrial jazz” this would be it, as Bauke Meersman’s sax “vocalisations” really do transport the listener back in time to industry workers’ bars and taverns. Categorisations aside, Bauke Meersman’s music is a captivating display of bizarre compositional wizardry, and the inextinguishable spark of human creativity. These sax loops are repeated and stacked up together and the result reverberated wall of sound is a spacious room that stimulates personal imagination. The “human factor” is as close as ever to being tangible in Bauke Meersman’s masterful executions. From the way his saxophone almost screams and the unpredictable structures of his compositions, a constant remainder that music is that collective voice we all possess and truly makes us “one”.

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