Roel Meelkop
Roel Meelkop has been pioneering experimental music and sound art since the 1990s, although he studied visual arts and art theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. During a post-graduate course at the same academy, he decided to dedicate his work to sound and music. His musical activities date back to the early eighties when he started THU20, a Dutch sound collective that has performed regularly in Europe and released ground breaking musical works. This period was crucial in forming Meelkop’s ideas and concepts about sound and how to organise it, but it was not until the mid-nineties that he was able to fully realise these ideas. The purchase of a sampler and later a computer radically changed his possibilities of working with sound, offering infinitely more control and freedom. Since then, he has worked steadily on a body of work, most of which was received enthusiastically in the small but dedicated world of sound art. In recent years he has started collaborating with visual artists in the fields of video, film and theatre, including filmmakers Esther Urlus and André Schreuders, video artists Marco Douma and Michiel van Bakel, and theatre director Tea Tupajić.
