Composer and performer Jan-Bas Bollen is, by his own account, deeply fascinated by the Fokker organ. Thirty-five years ago, he bought a copy of Adriaan Fokker’s booklet Rekenkundige bespiegeling der muziek at a second-hand bookstore. It became, for a time, a sort of bible for him, especially when he began working with spectral sounds. All the more reason, then, to combine this long-standing fascination with his latest invention, the HyperTheremin: an electronic instrument of his own design that bears a strong resemblance in playing technique to the classical theremin. In this thrilling concert, Jan-Bas Bollen blends the microtonal sounds of the 31-tone organ with his own sonic universe, with the organ being controlled via a laptop, operated by Bollen through carefully coordinated hand movements in the air. It is a truly special experience, as Bollen not only generates an enormous range of sounds but also creates breathtaking abstract visuals.

“Born in Amsterdam in 1961, Bollen specialises in electronic music. A limitation of conventional—or so-called “traditional”—electronic instruments is that their interfaces almost always rely on a keyboard. The drawback is that your hands are occupied with playing, leaving no possibility to simultaneously manipulate the sound, which usually requires adjusting parameters via buttons. Of course, a mouse or joystick offers more possibilities, but for Bollen, that was still not ideal. What fascinated him were the “hands” of Michel Waisvisz—a device that converted hand movements into sound, but was still bound by plugs and wires.
A sensor that detects hand movements and can control a computer—simply available off the shelf in an electronics store—was the key breakthrough, and after several years of experimentation, Bollen was able to present his alternative interface, and, of course, its sounds. The system is no small feat: it reads 60 frames per second, and in each frame processes 330 streams of information, including the smallest finger movements, the position of the hands, the space between them, their angle relative to the audience, and much more. He has demonstrated this at the Uitmarkt and during concerts at the Amsterdam Orgelpark, among other venues, and in December 2020 in a duo concert with violist Oene van Geel at Splendor.”