Recent projects Roland Emile Kuit

Sonologist- composer Roland Emile Kuit balances on the interface between research, music and sound art. The new listening.

Roland Kuit has been exploring and broadening the language of sound for over 25 years. In search of new forms of listening Kuit started to create synthetic environments of sounds in the '90's. Resulting in sound exhibitions in art galleries followed by publications in art magazines as l'Orbe and Avenue Magazine, Sound On Sound Magazine and WIRED. To free these sound concepts from the traditional speaker boxes Kuit began the transition of his sounds into installations. Visualizing sound. F.i. The Electroacoustic Domestic Pet and his cityscape Paris, a Centre Pompidou rebuild tubed speaker wall. 

Roland Kuit started studying the flute and piano at the Royal Conservatory The Hague but very quick switched to study electronic music at the Institute of Sonology in the 80's. With teachers/inspirators as Gottfried Michael Koenig, Werner Kaegi, Stan Tempelaars and Jaap Vink.  Among analogue studio techniques, Roland learned to develop programs for algorithmic composition and digital sound synthesis. 

The electronic possibilities in music and sound are infinite and were the right tools for Kuit. Analogue and digital modular synthesizers and the KYMA system, a super computer for sound, are the instruments for Kuit. Sound is typically a 'time thing'. With this system, Kuit can influence the present by events that will happen in the future. And vice versa. This is called Time Warping. And where an acoustic instrumentalist can create twenty articulations per second, the Kyma can do a thousand. Real-time analysis of sound of acoustical instruments or other sounds can be done perfectly with the computer algorithms, creating composition possibilities that are very interesting in the spectral realm.

In his early years Roland made the connection between the other disciplines as painting, ballet, sculpture and architecture. In the 1996 Roland Kuit composed 'The Rajlich Concept' for the painter Tomas Rajlich. A work for violin, viola, double bass and synthesizer. Archives Center Pompidou.

On 23-06-2017, a special world premiere took place in the Kampa Museum - The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation in Prague (CZ). This in honor of the exhibition Tomas Rajlich: Zcela abstraktní retrospektiva. An overview of the work of Tomas Rajlich. For this occasion Roland Kuit composed a KYMA extended string quartet. With this three part work “Tactile utterance”, Roland succeeded in expressing the 50 years of painting by Tomas Rajlich. The new ways in composition and research of physical modeling in spectral music Roland had experienced at the IRCAM in Paris and the computer algorithms came together in this work.

Part 1: BRUSH, from a pianissimo-bowed wood sounds to noise, to an elaborated crescendo of 8 minutes ending in a broad fortissimo textural cluster. The KYMA system producing spectral echoes of the strings sounds.

Part 2: MAZE, when we look at a grid, we see first concentrated - to open - to condensed again. This goes for both horizontal and vertical. The string quartet interpreted the 'intersections' by means of percussive violin sounds.

These sounds as a type of particles copied 100 times with the KYMA system, resulting in a noise wall. A riterando to the center of the piece made that these particles could be distinguished as single sounds. Of these single sounds, Roland made "spectral pictures" that could be smeared as suggestions to complement the grid lines. Followed by an acceleration to prestissimo particles again.

Part 3: SURFACE, multiphonics morphing to airy flageolets. The KYMA system creates algorithmic multiplexed sounds and dissolving into a muffled softness.

The audience was captivated for 24 minutes by the music produced by the famaQ string quartet and Roland Kuit.

To celebrate the centennial of the founding of the art movement De Stijl (2017), Kuit created a triptych for Dutch radio station Concertzender.

Roland Kuit is a creative expert in De Stijl movement and electronic music.

We have a responsibility so see this with contemporary eyes and ears. To be radical as well with respect to the past. Kuit’s research started in the Mondrian house, House of Birth of the painter Piet Mondrian: Monads and  Beyond. Together with the Dutch Light artist Karin Schomaker, researching Mondrian and movement in digital visual arts (2013).

All started with the special relationship between Piet Mondrian and composer - pianist Jacob van Domselaer. Between 1913 and 1917 van Domselaer composed Proeven van Sijlkunst (Samples of Style in Art, for piano, 1916). The first combined relation between the horizontality and the verticality in music. Relating to the passivity and activity. A static balance. The tension lies into the metre, the perpendicular element. Supplemented by quasi-chaotic tone clusters.

Between 1950 and 1955, the Belgian composer and founder of the musical serialism Karel Goeyvaerts, managed to broaden this principle of the standing sound structures. Goeyvaerts stacked electronic created sinus tones on each other as sound objects. Additive synthesis.
CAHIER-M published by the Dutch composer Dick Raaijmakers (2000) is about the morphology of electric sound. This inherently single-layered type of sound is discussed in the light of 'neo-plastic' music as suggested by the painter Piet Mondriaan in the 1920's. He advocated a kind of music that consisted of single-layered, 'single-colour' electric sounds. 

Roland Emile Kuit invented sound and elaborates upon this. He engages in research as a ‘sound architect’. Kuit constructed between 2010 and 2017 virtual electronic systems where spectral chaos was converted to serial sound constellations. Sounds that are captured at the atomic level and reduced to algorithmic trajectories. He used pure tones to create spectral building blocks. This means stacking energies to build harmonic sound planes. The diagonal aspect is obtained by phase differences. The spatial modus is setting this weighed points conscientiously in space to divide this spectrum and display it on a speaker maze.

On 9 July 2017 the World Premiere of Rietveld Pavilion took place in the sculpture park of the Kröller-Möller Museum in Otterlo. The Netherlands.

With this work Kuit makes a connection between, De STIJL constituted ideas, architecture, and today’s art.

Kuit’s output spans composition through sound art, sound-architectural installations, collaboration with experimental artists, designers and scientists, acousmatic performance and live electroacoustic improvisation.
Research, imagination and technical association made him write his books about combined synthesis techniques. Lecturing at diverse universities and creating radio programs about electronic music giving him a platform to discuss his conceptual worlds. 
Roland Kuit performs on concert stages, art galleries and museums.
His books about research in modular synthesis techniques, music and sound art are published by Donemus, Publishing House of Dutch Contemporary Classical Music.