Now for some stern and unapproachable minimalist abstraction from the undoubted maestro of reductionism and conceptual press-moulding, Jos “death by drone” Smolders himself. To endure Textuur 2 [|||—-] (CRÓNICA 216-2024) is like entering into the very surface of a white canvas by Bob Law, while reading nothing but scientific diagrams plucked from the pages of a medical textbook on performing brain surgery by means of telekinesis.
Read his own liner notes to be drawn further into this strange looking-glass world where, by the ineffable Smolders logic, sound itself can be converted into a texture, and we draw more inspiration from the poetry and sculpture of Carl Andre than we do from the Book of Proverbs. When he speaks of a “texture” it’s evident our man is indeed thinking of a fabric much like tweed, twill, or the sort of heavy wool serge used for stage curtains, and hoping he can tame his machines to find a way of “weaving” sound as surely as working on a loom. Jos Smolders is even proposing to colonise the dry and dreary world of the “electroacoustic environment”, considered only fit for habitation by moths and weevils these days, and inject a spurt of life into this arid zone by drawing on samples, ideas, and borrowed rags from the world of dance music, where Techno is king and you can reach transcendence by means of relentless drumbeats and sequenced pulses bashing your frontal lobes. We’ve rarely heard modular synths and granularisation tools put to such devastating use, to say nothing of the way he handles a drum machine, which he does like a professional sniper armed with a precision rifle and a full magazine – easily surpassing all previous efforts made by presidential assassins in the past.
We can situate Smolders in the milieu of other Dutch minimalists and contemporaries, although he’s not as droney as the ultra-prolific Frans de Waard, not as washed-out as the aesthete Rutger Zuydervelt. Roel Meelkop enjoys life as a friendly yellow sphere, but Jos Smolders is a black chisel. A fine piece of precision engineering which ranks almost as highly as that of Ryoji Ikeda; digital abstraction so palpable you can sew it all into a book of samples and exhibit it in a carpet showroom. (02/04/2024)