Name: Sietse van Erve aka Orphax
Nationality: Dutch
Occupation: Sound artist, composer, performer, label owner at Moving Furniture
Current release: Orphax's new album Embraced Imperfections is out now.

If these thoughts by Orphax piqued your interest, visit his official website for more information. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, bluesky, and mastodon.

For a deeper dive, we also recommend our previous Sietse van Erve interview, and our conversation with him about the link between music and autism, and our interview with him about the freedom of playing live.



Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

I guess it is a no-brainer that I like to listen a lot to Eliane Radigue's music.

Both her early works with feedback loops, her middle period with the ARP 2500, and her most recent work for acoustic instruments totally do it for me.



Furthermore, I just can’t get enough of my favourite album ever: Auburn Lull – Alone I Admire.



I listen to that album almost every week, and it just does something with my me. These are beautiful ambient / dreampop songs, delicately mixed. Mind blowing is maybe the wrong word, but WOW.

While I know quite some more ambient / dreampop albums there is really nothing that gets close to this.

Two other favourites I need to mention are Catherine Christer Hennix – The Electric Harpsichord. First time hearing it my mind exploded. And still each time I listen to it there is something happening.



There have been quite some reissues and other releases of her work, but this one beats them all. A very inspirational work.

And Harold Budd's album Avalon Sutra. CD 1 is already beautiful, but CD2 with Akira Rabelais is just something different. This could just continue playing for hours for me. I am not sure what is happening here, can’t really explain it.



This track on CD2 helped me a lot in the creative process when I was working on the album Movement with Kenneth Kirschner.



This started already before the covid pandemic, but during I got totally stuck. At some point I was really not happy with what I was doing.

One day when I was listening to this album I all of a sudden got it again. I started almost from scratch again. I completely rearranged the piano recordings from Kenneth, and used only a few synthesizer recordings I already made, and added new ones. Took me a couple of days to almost finish the album. That after having been stuck for over a year.

 And that all after listening to this 68 minute composition by Harold Budd & Akira Rabelais.

[Read our Kenneth Kirschner interview]