Processing: Casimir Geelhoed
’25
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Processing Music. Album design by Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Art Cinema OFFoff welcomes the Ghent-based record label B.A.A.D.M. for the release show of Processing Music, the debut album by Dutch composer and electronic musician Casimir Geelhoed. The concert will be followed by a program of four analog films in which the act of ‘processing’ also forms the artistic or psychological core of the creative process.
Processing Music is the result of a series of live performances in which Casimir Geelhoed explores the poetic power of sound transformations through signal processing. A recurring approach of Geelhoed is to apply a certain digital process to a sound, over and over, until the original sound itself has become unrecognizable and you are hearing the process itself. In Processing Music, the poetic potential of sound transformations manifests itself as a metaphor for psychological and emotional processing. Operating at the intersection of overstimulation, introspection and fragility, the album unfolds as a deeply immersive and personal exploration.
Casimir Geelhoed
Rather than imposing a fixed compositional structure, ‘Processing Music’ follows a bottom-up approach, allowing form to emerge organically from the interaction of sonic materials. Digital signal processing is not used here as a mere technical tool, but as a poetic device: transformation as narrative, delay as memory, distortion as tension.
Through slowly eroding loops, gently collapsing textures and shifting layers of timbre and space, Geelhoed crafts a delicate sound world that is charged with friction. What may at first seem abstract gradually reveals an emotional core.
Casimir Geelhoed © Marysia Swietlicka
Phil Solomon
Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance
Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance is the result of Phil Solomon’s experiments with the Mordançage technique, a process that corrodes silver gelatin prints and gives them a ‘degraded’ effect. The method takes Solomon’s photochemical transformations of found footage to an extreme. In Walking Distance, the contours of the figurative source material only sporadically manage to show through the abstract landscape of chemicals. An obscure narrative weaves itself like a barely visible thread between, around, and through the textures.
Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance © Light Cone
Emmanuel Lefrant
Parties visible et invisible d’un ensemble sous tension
Emmanuel Lefrant explores the mechanisms of memory by entangling the image of a landscape in Africa with a film strip that had been buried and subjected to erosion in the same place the sequence was shot. With these landscapes in fusion, the invisible takes shape with the visible, where the first dissolves itself into the second and vice versa.
Parties visible et invisible d'un ensemble sous tension © Light Cone
Carl E. Brown
Quiet Chaos of Desire
The film manipulations of Canadian filmmaker Carl E. Brown bear the traces of personal processing. The expressive color palette in Quiet Chaos of Desire is steeped in the melancholy of the artist confronted with the death and loss of his father-in-law. Portraits rise fleetingly through the quiet chaos of chemically processed and hand-painted film.
Quiet Chaos of Desire © Light Cone
Esther Urlus
Konrad & Kurfurst
Konrad & Kurfurst is a fictional reconstruction of an incident that took place during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, in which Konrad fell from his horse Kurfurst. Konrad & Kurfurst was shot underwater with five Super 8 cameras, color toned and made with homebrew emulsion as a fragile metaphor for the heroism of Konrad and his horse Kurfurst.
Konrad & Kurfurst © Light Cone