Sol Sketches

Sketches of a score for a documentary by Chris Teerink about Sol LeWitt. Film director Chris Teerink asked me to make the soundtrack for a documentary he would be making about American artist Sol LeWitt. This was in 2009. Chris and I agreed that the music and the images should both be equally important in his film. We didn't want the score to overpower the images, but neither did we want it to become solely background 'muzak'. I searched for a certain openness in the sound, while at the same time keeping a directness to it. Musical references for me were the piano pieces of Morton Feldman (a friend of LeWitt), alva noto's collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Enrico Wuttke's music project Flim. I must admit that I was relatively new to LeWitt's work. Searching for more information and images, my admiration for his art grew and grew. I found it extremely inspiring, and I became so (over) enthusiastic that within a week or two, I'd recorded more than one and a half hours of music before any footage had been shot. These Sol Sketches can be seen as meditations on LeWitt's work. With some books of his work opened in front of me, I started improvising on the piano. This resulted in a few hours of raw material, which were then chopped up and edited into shorter pieces. I made about 40 of 'em, from which I've selected 21 for this release.