Tashi Dorji & Audrey Chen / Laura De Jongh

PROGRAMME

20:00: Laura De Jongh (+ special guest: Jan Boudart)
21:00: Tashi Dorji & Audrey Chen

+ Sounds & merch by Klankhaven

• Laura De Jongh
+ special guest: Jan Boudart

In Flanders, we have recently been spoiled with young, classically trained musicians who are venturing into experimental territory. Think: Suzan Peeters, Elisabeth Klinck, Nina Vanhoenacker, Nils Vermeulen, Maya Dhondt, it goes on and on. Now add Laura De Jongh to that list. The Antwerp harpist creates a hybrid soundworld by combining acoustic string plucking with effects pedals. After years of collaborations, such as with Adriaan de Roover a.k.a. Oaktree, she has now released her debut album Fundus on the Klankhaven label. Soft harp patterns mingle with tingling delays, angelic echoes and crackling field recordings. Deliciously narcotic, like a warm bath. Sonic Youth member and grand master of experimental music Thurston Moore agreed, placing our Belgian Laura De Jongh at number 1 (one!) on his list of the 350 best albums of 2025. Reason enough to bring her to STUK.

Here we have two luminaries of contemporary music, vocalist Audrey Chen and iconoclast guitar player Tashi Dorji, who both have proven themselves as key representatives of idiosyncratic music for the past 20 plus years.

Audrey, born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, channeled those family genes through un-processed hyperextended voice, consequently transmutating her family's DNA into her very own sonic language of equal precision, discipline and creative power as her kins' professions.

Tashi, on the other hand, carries the mountains in his spirit: born in Bhutan, Southeast Asia, now residing in Ashville, North Carolina, close to the Appalachians. That earthly power is unmistakably present in his energetic guitar playing, which also incorporates folkloric elements of both his native country, and his homeland since 2000.

Those two strong musical personalities met on stage in the late Summer of 2023, at Morphine Raum, Berlin. The fact that it took place in one of the birthplaces of techno music, seems to have pushed their performance towards an industrial, repetitive aesthetic of, at times, almost dancelike quality. However, as the track titles suggest, that classic forward pulsating rhythm, associated with electronic dance music, is bent at their hearts' content, as are its appertaining clean melodies gnashed to smithereens.