Dick Raaijmakers
Under the pseudonym Kid Baltan, a anadrome of "Dik Natlab" – Raaijmakers' nickname, he realized three tests of popular music with the help of electronic means.
[1] Using the alias Kid Baltan (Dik NatLab reversed), he and Tom Dissevelt formed Electrosoniks and produced some of the first electronic pop music.
In 1983, Ping-Pong was created, a stereo radio production about a table tennis game between Louis Andriessen and Cornelis de Bondt.
The following year, Ecstasy (in memoriam Josine van Droffelaar) was performed, for which Raaijmakers received the Matthijs Vermeulenprijs.
In the 1990s, a series of works for music theater was created: Intona (1991), Dépons / Der Fall (1992), The happy hand / open (1993), Der Fall / Dépons (1993), De promenoir van Mondriaan, (1994 ), De val van Mussolini (1995) and Scheuer im Haag (1995).
Raaijmakers' oeuvre covers a wide variety of genres and styles, varying from sound animations for films to extremely abstract pulse structures, from "action music" to infinite voice patterns, from electro-acoustic tableaux vivants to extracts of music theatre.
For instance, in his latest publication Cahier M (2000) Raaijmakers elaborated upon the connections he saw between the 19th-century French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, composer Pierre Boulez, architect Iannis Xenakis and the musical views of Piet Mondrian.
One of his most important books is The Method (1985), in which he describes in an exact but also poetic way how motion, cause and effect and their perception are interrelated.After obtaining a diploma in radio technique, he decided to deepen his theoretical knowledge and was particularly interested in mathematics, physics and acoustics.
), composed of a kind of bicycle accompanied by a complex system of sensors placed on its actuator, and which aims to reproduce in sound form, on the scale of the auditorium, the efforts of the latter (tension muscle, shortness of breath, heartbeat etc.).
Designed in 1979, the instrument was exhibited throughout the month of November 2008 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK.
Raaijmakers received several awards for his contribution to the development of visual arts and music in the Netherlands: Much of his early work has been re-issued on the Basta label:
