The album, the first edited by De Werf, included an instrumental cover of Sting's Roxanne as well as two songs written by Thelonious Monk.
Defoort took part in the Octurn project in 1996 (he had already composed their 1994 album) and began to play with Mark Turner.
[4] In 1998, Defoort became a composer-in-residence at LOD, a production company specialising in contemporary music theatre in Ghent.
His first opera, created in collaboration with director Guy Cassiers was The Woman Who Walked into Doors, after the novel of the same name by Roddy Doyle.
[7] His second opera, again with Cassiers, was The House of Sleeping Beauties based on the eponymous novella by Yasunari Kawabata.
It received its world premiere at La Monnaie, in May 2009, as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, before touring the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
The old man visits a brothel to lie alongside the bodies of anaesthetized young women, to reflect on the poignant passage of time, the process of ageing and death.