HAROLD SCHELLINX Post-Post-ULTRA

ABOUT HAROLD With roots in experimental post-punk music and the anarchist squat and DIY culture with which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new generation of musicians and artists sought to lay alternative foundations for a future that seemed to be gradually crumbling away; as co-initiator of ULTRA, about which he wrote, thirteen years ago, a fine book (in Dutch); through the anti-rockpop of the Amsterdam Amphibious mini-label; the formally strict serialism and its freer variants that he learned at Utrecht’s Institute of Sonology from Gottfried Michael Koenig and at Karlheinz Stockhausen’s summer courses in Kürten, Germany; pseudo-random soundings of the first generations of home computers; via intuitionist constructivism, proof theory, and the foundations of mathematics as a conceivable path to music as pure, soundless structure, Harold Schellinx became the architect of a still-unrestrainedly expanding edifice, a universe in its own, erected in the trenches alongside and at the margins of academia and official art & culture institutions, from a long series of little known, non-public works, extensively documented in a labyrinthine web of writings, on a handcoded website, online for over twenty-five years ( harsmedia.com ), on the American Medium, and in the extensive series of his ‘Hoofd Stukken’ in Gonzo (Circus) Magazine. For most of a lifetime, Schellinx continuously moved between here and elsewhere, and thus, all that time, was neither here nor there. His place NOW, post-post-ULTRA, as a musician, scientist, writer, and an artist, is that of a Babylonian alchemist, a Catweazle, who tirelessly continues to attempt the fusing of his babelian (in Borges’s sense) and sudokist extremes into one, perhaps wise, stone. The evening of June 21 at WORM, the longest of this year 2025, will be a resounding example. Players: TIM BENJAMIN (Amsterdam) – painter and musician, was, like Schellinx, member of the ur-ULTRA band ‘The Young Lions’ and, along with Ronald Heiloo and Harold Schellinx, post-ULTRA, co-directed the Amsterdam mini-label AMPHIBIOUS RECORDS, which, among other things, released the album COMMUTERS at the beginning of 1983. *JEAN-JACQUES DUERINCKX *(Brussels) – saxophone wizard, key figure in the Brussels free improvisation scene, forms the duo ‘À Table!’ with Schellinx. In the early 2010s, together they reconstructed Daniel Spoerri’s Carcassonne table as a ‘musique concrète’ instrument. That tiny table is the protagonaist in a still-unreleased masterpiece, ‘{Topographic (Table} Topographique}’. SHIH-WEN LEE (Brussels) – Taiwanese double bass player, studied at the Paris Conservatory and at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels (graduation 2024). Since 2023, Shih-wen has been a member of the free dictaphony quartet DIKTAT, with Schellinx, Rébus, Rinus van Alebeek (‘the Ronettes of the dictaphone’), performing since 2006. HUIJUN YI (Brussels) – Chinese singer and guzheng player, studied jazz vocals at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels (graduation 2025). Huijun, among other things, is a member of the Rotterdam-based quartet PIN. The ‘DOUX MASSACRES’ performance at WORM will be the third musical collaboration this year between Schellinx and Lee & Huijun. EMMANUEL RÉBUS (Paris) – Mathematician, musician, social activist, specialized in the use of obsolete analog devices and circuit-bending. For more than twenty years, Magister Rébus has been one of Schellinx’s loyal ‘partners in crime’. Together, as ‘independent scientists’, they regularly present their ideas on free improvisation, non-academic speculative music, and ‘urban folk’ at scientific conferences worldwide. Both are active in the Parisian artists’ collective ‘La Générale Nord-Est’. There, in 2013, they launched ‘unPUBLIC’, a series of concerts without an audience. The series has had more than 110 editions worldwide, with 220 participating artists (this week also two next unPublic editions in Rotterdam). Cellist NINA HITZ (Rotterdam) – can be found on stages like the Roadburn Festival and the Grote Kerk in Amsterdam. Musically, her sounds range from baroque, contemporary and conceptual music, improvisation, drone rock and sound art to the more therapeutic sorts.