Name: Sietse van Erve
Nationality: Dutch
Occupation: Sound artist, composer, performer, label owner at Moving Furniture
Current release: Sietse van Erve's latest release is a collaboration with his brother Tjeerd van Erve aka PONI. Titled Inheritence, it is out now. He is also one of the artists performing at the Moving Furniture Festival at Splendor Amsterdam on March 29th 2024. For more information and tickets, go here.



If these thoughts piqued your interest, visit the website of Sietse's Orphax project for more information.

For a deeper dive, we recommend our previous Sietse van Erve interview, in which he expands on a wider range of issues. We also spoke to him about the connection between autism and music.

For interviews with other artists appearing at the Moving Furniture Festival:

[Read our Coen Oscar Polack interview]
[Read our Fani Konstantinidou interview]



Can you tell me a bit about the importance of live performances for the music you make - both in terms of the experience of this music and maybe reaching audiences who might not otherwise listen to the recordings?

For me personally performing live is an important side to my work. Not only is my live music different from my studio work, with much more freedom in it. And it forms a playground for me to try out new things.

But also, in a live setting you can really reach the audience in a different way. More than in a home setting, live people can really surrender to the music. Where at home there can be various distractions from daily life, in a live venue these are, if properly done, taken away.

With my goal of the music being for the listener to lose sense of time and space, in a live setting it is much easier to submit to the sound to really undergo this feeling. Of course, in a home setting you can also create this atmosphere, but I can totally imagine it is much more difficult to reach the same state.

And indeed, I think for this music for some people it is easier to go to a live concert and experience it happening in such a setting, than listening at home. I am pretty sure there have been various people to my concerts who really enjoyed it, but at home would never listen to such music.

Ten again, with my studio work often being more concentrated, and not improvised, listening at home to my music can of course also become a special experience. It might just take a bit more effort.

What are directions in experimental music and sound art which interest you in 2024 – and how does Moving Furniture fit into these?

My interests are still with drone, and minimalism, and experimental ambient. But more and more I am also listening to contemporary music, and related electro-acoustic compositional music. I am very much interested in how these two worlds can grow closer to each other, and would like to see a role for this on Moving Furniture Records.

While the coming 1 1/2 year are as good as fully planned and booked, mainly with musicians from the current MFR roster, there will also be some new names to the label that all work at the cusp of contemporary music and electro-acoustic music, while also having their hands in the world of drone and minimalism.

After 2025 this might be something I would like to explore more with the label, and also with my own music. I am interested to see what the musicians I have worked with so far think about this, and if they develop in a similar direction.

On the other hand, I also just want to release stuff I enjoy listening to, and what I think fits with the label and not just force it into some kind of direction. I love how so far it has grown very organically.