TRANSMISSION
Installation
Touki Delphine dives into the subterranean world of fungal networks below us. These living beings are mysterious and there are constantly more questioned being raised than answered. Are they an organism, or a collection of organisms? Do they have a brain-like control center, or are their actions the result of millions of years of evolutionary programming? Using recycled car transmissions, break fluid reservoirs and car door speakers, Touki Delphine recreates and explores what is possibly the oldest and most enigmatic organic system on the planet.
TRANSMISSION is an auditory and visual work of art. It premiered at OEROL festival, 2023.
Financially supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunsten
upcoming dates
no upcoming dates.
MACHINE
Installation
Together with guest composer Eblis Alvarez and featured musicians Joachim Badenhorst and Nora Fischer, Touki Delphine explores the distorted balance of humans and nature using a machine created by humans to produce thousands of plants per hour – each in their identical plastic pot – as their vehicle.
MACHINE is an auditory and visual work of art. A concert giving a voice to an unlikely suspect. An introduction, meditation, requiem, and dance party all in one.
upcoming dates
no upcoming dates.
Touki Delphine and guest band members are on stage in musical conversation with the agricultural potting machine JAVO Standaard 2.0, programmed into an instrument. The concert is inspired by the work of explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who discovered the concept of climate and explored connections between man and nature. In the JAVO machine, Touki Delphine finds this connection in a new way: a machine that once reproduced nature, now as a fellow musician on stage.
We wanted to work with Alvarez for MACHINE not only because we think his musical approach is genius, but because we had a strong feeling that he could convey the absurdism of the human/nature/technology relationship well in music and words. We feel strongly that our intuitions were proved correct. – Touki Delphine
The machine and its relation to nature became the basis for the music, both in sound and subject matter. There was much inspiration to be found in the polyrhythmic cacophony of squeaking conveyor belts, hissing air hoses, and clattering metal gears. It sounds like order, chaos, people, nature, and above all like the unparalleled Javo Standard. The story of the machine itself – a mechanical beast created by humans to mass produce plants – fueled the lyrical content of the compositions. The result of putting this absurd story and distorted human-nature-technology balance into music and words is an eclectic mix of musical styles and approaches, and a truly unique ensemble and sound.
“Touki Delphine purchased a classic potting machine: the Javo Standard 2.0. They have placed this centrally on the stage and programmed it, so that it can serve as a full-fledged percussion machine. The Javo puffs and clicks and rattles during the concert. Touki Delphine joins in, performing a varied mix of choppy jazz, space pop and metallic synths… Beautiful, how Fischer sings a touching elegy to a dying machine halfway through the concert.”
– The Volkskrant
“At center stage the machine is the pacemaker. The device propels the musicians (without exception multi-instrumentalists) to great heights. A leading role is reserved for the two guests: the excellent Belgian saxophonist and clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst and the captivating Nora Fischer.”
– Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant
RELAY
Installation
1848 recycled relay motors originate from approximately 300 scrap cars, where they served as electronic circuit breakers for turn signals. These relay motors, which click and buzz independently of each other, are mounted on fourteen old corrugated steel panels and create the basis of a 40 minute audio-visual experience performed by the 12-meter-wide and 4-meter-tall art installation.
upcoming dates
no upcoming dates.
Inspired by the distorted balance between man and nature, Touki Delphine uses technology to reflect the power and beauty of nature. Allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the deafening fragility of technology and the astounding violence of nature. An investigation of our ever-changing self image, from vulnerable and subordinate to superior and untouchable. From prey to plague.
“We want to show the unpredictable with RELAY, nature’s elegance and might. That concrete material and technology can create such a poetic experience is a contrast which to us resembles the tense balance between humankind, nature and technology. We constructed RELAY using recycled relay motors. A relay is an electronic switch: with relatively low voltage an electromagnet is activated, moving a small piece of metal, which makes a clicking sound. If not quite enough current is applied the piece of metal vibrates back and forth 115 times per second, creating a buzz instead of a click. The resulting sound is a tone, around a B-flat, and by combining several with each other (in this case 1848) one achieves a sea of overtones with which to compose.” – Touki Delphine
RELAY is an auditory and visual work of art. A composition exploring development and transience. A performance that solicits modesty.
16 sept | Nacht van de Ontdekkingen | Meer info en tickets
FIREBIRD
Installation
Inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 Firebird Suite, Touki Delphine presents FIREBIRD a century later, this time for an orchestra of light; no musicians, no performers
619 recycled car tail lights illuminate the dance of the firebird
A rule-breaking concert program and an extra-terrestrial installation in one
A thoroughly hypnotic experience
upcoming dates
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October 10, 2025
Bentonville, AR
Momentous Festival -
October 11, 2025
Bentonville, AR
Momentous Festival -
October 12, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 13, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 14, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 15, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 16, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 17, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 18, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 19, 2025
Bentonville, AR
the Momentary -
October 24, 2025
New York, NY
Governors Island -
October 25, 2025
New York, NY
Governors Island -
October 26, 2025
New York, NY
Governors Island
We first had the idea for a Symphony of Light in 2016; a light installation that would perform a symphony in which each instrument is replaced by a light source. Preferably outdoors, perhaps in the forest, the installation would surround the audience with a fluorescent orchestra. We planned to premier this in 2019 and began our research and creation period in the Fall of 2018. Touki Delphine member John van Oostrum then first posed the idea of using car tail-lights as the light source. He built a prototype with which we experimented in the spacing of the lights and the coupling of various audio sources.
Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 Firebird Suite, although not a symphony, quickly presented itself as an ideal musical match for the installation. A fiery mythical creature that rises from the ashes, rebirthing, tempting, guiding, rescuing, overseeing; a lone renaissance every 100 years. The Firebird ballet was first performed in 1910, but Stravinsky continued to temper with the music and created the renowned 1919 suite version with a new instrumentation for Swiss composer Ernest Ansermet. Our Firebird is an homage to this suite. 100 years later, on recycled tail-lights from the Dutch salvage yards, a re-invention of Stravinsky’s re-invention.
Modern music for modern times; Stravinsky borrowed and combined the melodies and timings of Russian folk music, the inspiration of his mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the state of the world around him, and proposed a new encasing for the age-old legends, this time with provocative sounds and arrangements, presenting a new future in music and how it tells our story. We salvage Stravinsky’s melodies, odd time signatures, and relentless flutters of harmony juxtaposed with sudden points of ultimate rest, and take in the world around us; introducing technology, 100 years of industry, the melting, combining and clashing of cultures, and propose our own message to the future.
Humankind has been busy, we’ve entered space, we’ve learned about the micro and the macro on levels that make us as gargantuan as we are infinitesimal, and now we stand with one leg in a new technological era. We are reinventing ourselves, and as many times before, welcoming the unknown horizon. Re-birthing out of the ashes of our current state, bringing the ancient traditions with us, and soaring at a previously impossible pace through and towards an uncharted future. With these thoughts and themes in mind we actualised our prototype into what the Firebird has become; A 32 square-meter communicating being, a collaboration between human and machine, a narrator, a fable and fortune teller, a mirror and a screen.
Firebird premiered on top of a grassy hill on the West Fresian Island of Terschelling with a pre- and post-performance 1-kilometer-long audience procession through the dunes and forest. It was a critical and creative success and has been met with enthusiastic international interest.
Firebird has also been presented as a standalone performance in an empty warehouse on the banks of the IJ river in Amsterdam, and a 35 minute loop version in an old abandoned school building as part of a Covid-proof art exhibition. In each version of the performance and in each space it inhabits, the installation finds its own way to enchant the audience and offer its cosmic communion.
“An immersive experience, a phenomenal experiment in form, a pagan ritual.”
– The Theaterkrant
“As if God were video-gaming on stained glass windows from the scrapyard.”
– The Volkskrant
“An epic update of Stravinsky’s Firebird.”
– The Standaard
