THE WELL TEMPERED CIRCLE
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS RHYTHM! 

​© ​Peter Staessens 2018
Stefaan Quix' The Well Tempered Circle features eight percussionists in a performance about primitive 'beats'. The percussionists form a circle in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The audience is positioned in the center of the circle, surrounded by musicians. From the primitive rhythm of stones through the overtones of triangles and the pentatonics of the kalimba, the performance evolves towards a modern hip hop rhythm on iPhones.

Man has been speaking for about 100,000 years, but has been making music for over 200,000 years. This very first music was rhythmic in nature: we banged stones together and listened to the rhythm of our hearts as we looked up at the monochrome blue heavens of Eden. The pulse has a very specific rhtyhm: 60 heartbeats per second form a human invariant. This human invariant across all cultures is a dear subject to Stefaan Quix. His earlier work also featured such phenomena: primary colours, the octave, the primeval rhythm … All of these are physiological phenomena that have a cultural impact.

​In his new project, The Well Tempered Circle, artist Stefaan Quix ponders why and how we ever created these rhythmic beats using stones. He concludes that we still hold to these practices today, albeit using different media such as computers and smart phones. In pop music, beats have never been as popular as they are today. In The Well Tempered Circle, Quix explores this phenomenon with the aid of eight percussionists (the new 'Quixtet') and a computer. With this project, he once again strives for a synergy between man and machine: man takes from and gives to the machine.

CREDITS
Stefaan Quix The Quixtet is Aya Suzuki, Rubén Martines, Birgit Eecloo, Wim Pelgrims, Jacob Vanneste, Simon Florin, Jelle Van Dooren, Simon Decraene, Andrés Navarro Garcia, Jelle Proost.
Production: ChampdAction
​Coproduction: Wilde Westen and deSingel
With thanks to VNK Percussion and Q-O2. 
​© ​Peter Staessens 2018
​Stefaan Quix is a postdigital artist working and living in Brussels. His work connects sound, colour, composition, space and mathematics. His oeuvre is mainly linked to postminimalism. Quix is interested in that which appears: the pixel in the image, the noise in the sound. He also shows that which disappears: the pixel on the iPod, the inside of the computer. In the past 5 years, he has made two experimental, non-narrative films which explore the boundaries of the contemporary image. 'Drie Monochromen: RGB' (Three Monochromes: RGB) focuses on the digital-pictorial element knows as 'the pixel' and its basic colours. The second, 'Not With A Bang But A Whimper' explores the notion of 'TV noise', showing the transition from stationary image to moving and smooth image.

In 2017, he received a development-oriented scholarship from the Flemish Community to take the next step in his oeuvre: integrating living actors and narrative lines in his work, which had, up until then, only featured software and hardware. To achieve this, he reached out to ChampdAction, which assisted him in finding the eight young percussionists who would form the Quixtet together. Although that development process has since been completed, the collaboration between Quix and the Quixtet percussionists has been going so well that the decision was made to create a ChampdAction-produced peformance. The Well Tempered Circle is set to premiere at deSingel on 28 February 2019, a day which will also see the premiere of the new performance by artist-in-residence Hans Beckers.
Plans for future Quixtet/ChampdAction projects are currently in the works.​