Netherworld is comprised of songs, text recordings and experimental sound pieces about failure, depression, involuntary nomadism and the pathologizing of perfectly normal emotional responses to precarity and the ecological crises we are facing. It sounds bleak but it is actually entertaining! It achieves epic levels of mundanity and it will make you feel bad about the state of the world but your body will still want to dance to it.

Some of the material comes from personal experiences with capitalist/patriarchal relations and chronic disease. Other pieces have a utopian and post-humanist drive. As a conscientious objector to late-capitalist society, I am inspired, among others, by Mark Fisher, Silvia Federici and Franco “Bifo” Berardi in my search for the good life. Whether I sing of the mundane cruelties of neoliberal existence—performance benchmarks, employee performance reviews, psychiatric diagnoses—or write poetry interspersed with Norse mythology, found dialogues, recipe books, and Zen Buddhism—I am always propelled by an urgent desire for another world; reaching out to images of redemption, conjuring strategies for change like a manic witch; and often admitting defeat. 

This work premiered at LOL: The Role of Humour in Aesthetics and Knowledge an Exhibition and Radio Livestream opening in July 2021 at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland.

On of the pieces was included in the online and physical show (in Cleveland, Ohio) Coming Suddenly, Passing Strangely.

I also made a video that includes one of NetherWorld’s sound pieces (Defragment) for the Galerie de Jaloezie’s 48h film challenge. You can watch it here:

And finally one of the poems included as sound pieces in Netherworld was published by Alice Strete in the second number of her publication Magiun. The poem is called Christmas Dinner.

NetherWorld received a Droom en Daad grant in June 2021 and a Praktijkbijdrage from CBK in 2023.

It was performed in a rearranged version at an other world in September 2023.