Machinefabriek
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Barker
Behind the Music
Machinefabriek'Storming The Thunder' was the first story I read in The Outlaw Ocean, and it immediately stood out to me. As a reader you can just feel the excitement of discovering the Thunder and chasing it. There's plenty of other brilliant stories in The Outlaw Ocean, but this one originally got me inspired, so it was an easy pick for my musical motivation. Since it is such a cinematic story, in my track, “Barker”, I try to evoke the tension and thrill of the hunt from the perspective of the Bob Barker chasing the vessel. Pursuing something after a lengthy search must have been an intense experience. Reading about it, I could almost hear the heartbeat of the ship's crew racing. That's the feeling I try to capture in my music.
About Machinefabriek
Machinefabriek is the alias of Rutger Zuydervelt. His music combines elements of ambient, noise, minimalism, drone, field recordings and electro-acoustic experiments. Finding tension in texture, tone and timing, the result can be very minimalistic at first glance, but reveals its depth upon closer listening.
Zuydervelt was born in 1978 in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands and now resides in Rotterdam. His official debut “Marijn” was issued in 2006, with great critical acclaim. Since then, a solid stream of music was released on labels such as Western Vinyl, Type, Important, and 12K, among others. He performs all over the globe, from Canada to Israel and from Russia to Japan.
Zuydervelt has collaborated with numerous artists, such as Marissa Nadler, Jaap Blonk, and Dead Neanderthals, and scored films for experimental filmmakers like Makino Takashi, Mike Hoolboom, and the late Paul Clipson. He has composed soundtracks for various documentaries, such as “Sol LeWitt” (Chris Teerink, 2014), “The Red Soul” (Jessica Gorter, 2017), and “African Mirror” (Mischa Hedinger, 2019). Zuydervelt also composes music for dance pieces, such as Alix Eynaudi and Kris Verdonck’s “EXIT,” and Alexander Whitley’s “The Measures Taken and Beheld.”
Zuydervelt has done installation work, in which the dialogue with the environment plays an important role, for places such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Villa Zebra children’s museum in Rotterdam. And in 2016, Zuydervelt worked on his first video game score, for the hugely successful American sci-fi adventure “Astroneer,” launched in December that year.