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"Without music, life would be a blank to me." - Jane Austen

Jaap Blonk (b. 1953) is a self-taught musician, voice performer and sound poet. He took up the saxophone and started to compose music, at first mainly jazz pieces and music for experimental theatre. In reciting poetry, especially the works of Antonin Artaud, Lucebert and Kurt Schwitters he discovered the directness and flexibility of vocal utterance, whether using meaningful words or not. At present, he has developed into a prolific writer / composer and a specialist in the performance of sound poetry, supported by a powerful stage presence and an almost childlike freedom in improvisation. He has performed in many European countries as well as in the U.S., Canada, Indonesia and South America. Besides working as a soloist, he has collaborated with many musicians and ensembles in the field of contemporary and improvised music like Tristan Honsinger, Malcolm Goldstein and The Netherlands Wind Ensemble. He is the founder and leader of Spinks, a 13-piece orchestra playing his compositions and Braaxtaal, an avant-rock trio with synthesizer and drums. Jaap Blonk keeps on searching the rich field between speech and music, always after new sounds and combinations of sounds, without abandoning completely the semantics of language. His live performances combine music, poetry and performing art all at the same time. In recent years, he started to make larger-scale drawings of his scores, which are being exhibited.