Dutch-born Belgian resident Esther Venrooy has been working as an experimental composer/sound designer since 2001. She creates eerie, filmic works, collages of disparate sound sources that have social and also spatial concerns, encompassing her interests in sound / space / image / light. She says of her work: "My compositions are created very much in the way that films are edited...juxtaposing aural images and snippets of noise into an overall impression."
 
For her recent project Shift Coordinate Points (Entr'acte), Venrooy was invited to create a work with source material culled from the renowned and unnerving Conet Project, Irdial label’s anthology of encrypted shortwave messages, (generally believed to have been) originally broadcast from intelligence agencies to operatives in the field. Venrooy weaves the collections of unintelligable recitations of numbers, letters and blips onto delicately structured dronescapes, imbuing them with a sinister charge. The context of international intelligence and conspiracy theory surrounding the so-called numbers stations adds an invisible non-sense dimension to her work, creating an altered space for contemplation.
 
Venrooy is currently developing a number of projects, mostly collaborations with visual artists including: a composition for image and sound, with Iris Rombouts;
a composition for space, light, electronics and recorder, with Tomma Wessel; and a new work based on the phenomena EVP, a collaboration with QO2.
 
She has also been working on a piece titled “Vertigo”, based on Hitchcock's masterpiece and the architecture of the Concertgebouw Chamber Music Hall (Bruges) where it will be performed.
 
Venrooy (1974) studied classical saxophone at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem, followed by a composer in residence program at the European Dance Development Center. During this period she started using digitally manipulated sound in dance and performance-oriented pieces. To date she has released 2 cds, To Shape Volumes, Repeat (2003) and a collaboration with classical pianist Frederik Croene HOUT (2005) on Roborecords (BE), and the LP of the Shift Coordinate Points project on Entr'acte (UK).
 
> www.esthervenrooy.com
 
Appearances:
> CTM.07 > ARTICULATING SILENCE & SOUND