MADEONEARTH

Sound Effects

“Music comforts me,” says sound sculpturist Jeroen Diepenmaat of the Netherlands. “By introducing music and sound in my pieces, I can give other people that comfort.”

A self-professed vinyl addict, Diepenmaat’s favorite sound-makers are records. In his work entitled Pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines, he rigs a record player so that the bill of a stuffed bird, rather than a needle, releases the sound from an old LP.

In his Deventer home studio, which is subsidized by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Diepenmaat creates sculptures born of materials gathered from secondhand shops and ideas picked up in unusual science books.

He also relies heavily on coincidence. Case in point: Pour des dents, shown recently at Gigantic ArtSpace in New York City, was inspired by a stuffed bird that his taxidermist father made for a friend.

Diepenmaat looked closely at the bird bill and realized that it could easily play a record if positioned

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just right. His dad stuffed a peewit for the job, and Diepenmaat wired the bird’s feet to a thrift-store record player. Under the peewit’s bill, he spun a record from his vast collection of birdsong LPs (yes, entire albums of twitters and trills are available).

While the record player’s arm and needle remain eerily locked, the bird bill releases a scratchy, distant chirping from the vinyl’s grooves. “I like the image of a coincidental character,” Diepenmaat says. “Like the bird just flew in and was attracted to the spinning vinyl, and put his bill on it.”

Of Diepenmaat’s other sound sculptures, Loop/ loop transforms records into wheels, while The devil wears those hypocrite shoes wires a pair of speaker-sneakers so that when the wearer walks, the shoes make noise. These days, the artist is working on a mechanical orchestra activated by bicycles.

—Megan Mansell Williams

>> Sound Sculptor: jeroendiepenmaat.nl

Photograph by Jeroen Diepenmaat