Five Sound Questions to Zeno van den Broek

The recurring FIBER Festival, which is happening in Amsterdam on the 15th & 16th of May presents the forefront of audiovisual performances, interactive installations, artist and company showcases and cutting-edge electronic music in one unified experience. This year, the theme is “Subterranean; Exploring Networked Tools and Matter”. With this theme, the festival researches new forms of art that offer a peek into the networked, “smart” landscape which has emerged from a worldwide explosion of digital technology. With an exposition, workshops, a symposium, a club night, and several AV & Music performances, FIBER Festival will immerse the audience in all that is the Subterranean. During FIBER, sound artist Zeno van den Broek will premiere his new AV work Divergence, a synergy between sound, vision, and space.

Zeno’s work revolves around space, spatiality and time, using both the audial and the visual to influence space and spatial awareness. Trained as an architect, Zeno explores the richness and complexity through different modes of expression. His new album and performance “Divergence” explores the tension between space and sound and the sound induced by their manipulated representation. The album is based on pure sound waves such as sine waves and white noise, manipulating these with tape or physically to create a divergence between the perception of sound and space. Real and digital spaces interact with pure and altered sound sources, resulting in an intense sensory reaction and heightened spatial awareness through four movements.

We’re very curious to Zeno’s ideas about sound, and are thus very glad to be able to a Five Sound Questions interview with Zeno!

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

One of my strongest memories of sound is the echoing of sounds between the apartment blocks where I grew up. The sound of a motorbike or the claxon of a car was never just the pure single sound but a multiplicity of claxons and motors, moving through the neighborhood which made it often impossible to link the sound to its source.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

Because I’ve spend so much time intensely listening and analyzing the sound in relation to its surroundings such as reverberation and reflections I have a hard time shutting of this kind of active listening. I often find myself paying more attention to the sound of a space than to the actual subject such as a concert. This does give me beautiful and interesting experiences but sometimes I wish I could just simply enjoy the music. 

3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?

I don’t have a specific place I would like to mention but often when people warn me for ‘bad’ places to perform sound in due to things like excessive or weird reverberation. I love working with these places, using their characteristics to shape my sounds and to bring their qualities into expression. 

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

If we all would be more aware of the impact the sounds we create have for our surroundings we would be able to improve our living environment. A sound is not something you can just turn away from and it will disappear, sound infiltrates our bodies and minds and can alter our being. The spatial area sound interacts with is something that is often overlooked.

5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

Silence.

Thanks Zeno! See answers by other artists in the Five Sound Questions section, and be sure to Zeno out at the FIBER Festival on the 16th of May in Amsterdam or at the Divergence release party at Vechtclub XL on the 24th of May in Utrecht!