The Paper Ensemble is the brainchild of artist and composer Jochem van Tol. Ever since his time studying art and music in The Hague (at the interfaculty now known as ArtScience), Van Tol has been exploring the sonic potential of paper – with astonishing results. #17, the group’s seventeenth work, is inspired by the idea of a Japanese garden. The audience is seated throughout the space, in a ‘garden’ of paper sculptures in various shades of white, blue, grey and black. Six performers build, work and play, creating sounds reminiscent of the rustle of leaves, the wash of waves and even whale song. Sometimes intimate and close, then ominously grand. And time seems to stand still. After a visit to The Paper Ensemble, your view of paper will have changed forever.
#17 is a further development of #16, the short music film that Van Tol and director Jiska Rickels made in 2022. For this purpose, Van Tol, together with multimedia artist and member of the Paper Ensemble Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, developed the special paper instrument sculptures that now play a leading role once again. They have prosaic names: to start with, there is the ‘sheet’ – a sheet of paper that is made to vibrate in all sorts of ways, from blowing to fluttering. Then there is the ‘wad’: a wadded-up piece of paper with a surface area of no less than 100 m2, with which Ferragutti enters into a dialogue. The ‘moped’ is a rolled-up piece of paper that produces a low, squeaking sound, “a bit like a trombone”, according to Van Tol. Finally, there is the ‘horn’: a tube 3.5 m long that produces a plaintive tone. “There is a progression in terms of shape, from sheet to horn, and also from noise to tone,” says Van Tol.
The horn is the most fragile and difficult to transport, which is why it is replaced regularly. But the big wad is also thirteen years old: “We’ve used it a lot, but it’s made of a strong kind of tracing paper. I think it’s almost finished now,” says Ferragutti. In addition to the big wad, the ensemble also uses a series of small wads.
During a trip to the Japanese city of Echizen, where sustainable paper has been made in a traditional way for centuries, the makers were inspired by the concept of the Japanese garden. The physical gardens they visited led to the idea of a ‘speculative’ garden, which the ensemble enters during the performance. Ferragutti: “The Japanese garden is a praxis, an exercise in disappearing: man disappears from the foreground, finds himself among things, not as a consumer but as a witness. It is a conscious, sensory way of being, in which you give things space. In the performance, we are musicians, but also stones, also the wind, the seasons that pass by.”
New in #17 is that the ensemble also uses percussion and amplification: two percussionists play on wood, metal and stone, and the innovative sound artist Ale Hop transforms the paper sounds into something new through live sampling with a modular synthesizer. “The collaboration gives us possibilities with sound and tempo that we don’t have with paper alone. It also ensures that you hear the paper in a different way,” says Van Tol.