The collaboration between Gareth Davis and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) is the kind of partnership that thrives on curiosity, sonic experimentation, and the occasional question of whether they are making music or just seeing what happens when sounds meet.
Machinefabriek has been creating expansive, immersive sound worlds since 2004, blending ambient, drone, noise, minimalism, field recordings, and electro-acoustic experimentation. At first, the music can feel deceptively minimalistic, but a closer listen reveals layers, textures, and hidden depths, not dissimilar to Gareth’s bass clarinet, really, which can feel like it has a mind of its own.
The duo first worked together in 2009 on what was supposed to be a soundtrack. It never quite became a soundtrack, but ended up being the seeds to 15 years of collaborative process. Since then, they’ve continued to explore, creating new pieces, reworking existing ones, and performing alongside composers including Alvin Lucier and Bernhard Lang, all while keeping a sense of fun firmly in the mix.
On stage or in the studio, their collaboration dissolves the lines between acoustic and electronic, composition and improvisation. Sounds stretch, overlap, and transform; silence becomes as expressive as tone; and the audience is invited to wander through the sonic landscape as if following breadcrumbs left by intrepid guides.
Gareth and Machinefabriek’s work is immersive, thoughtful, unpredictable, and occasionally mischievous, an invitation to listen deeply.
Standards (of sorts) are, as the name describes, sort of Standards. They take the most simple idea of the Jazz Standard, of improvising on a given theme, and puts this in a new perspective.
Using both ‘standards’ and how we can ‘misremember’ as starting concepts, rather than dive into the Great American Songbook, Gareth Davis and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) chose to use pieces of contemporary classical music as the material for their point of departure.
Tiny fragments of a few notes, sometimes misremembered, from various works, became the starting sounds to create something new. Five new pieces that explore not the idea of taking a theme and making a variation but rather remembering an idea and creating something out of that memory.
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