With Songs of Disconnection, Maarten Seghers searches for meaning in ‘unintelligibility’;

“The abstract-sounding libretto at the heart of Songs of Disconnection oscillates between involvement and indifference and explores what intensity this clash can elicit. The libretto becomes tragic in its unintelligibility, a central idea in my work: communication only becomes clear when it fails.

These new songs are a confused outburst, because everything ‘could be’ and nothing ‘is’; they are an exuberant statement that originates from an excited illusion of unattainable places and incomprehensible times; they are a generator that hatches out the absurd idea known
as ‘together’.”

In addition to their virtuosity in their grasp of, and performance of, musical writing, Aya Suzuki, Simon Lenski, George van Dam and Michael Schmid are also autonomous artists who - in their own work, each in their own way - fundamentally question music in order to arrive at sound and music as physical material. Seghers’ mainspring is to convert not only their profession, but also themselves and their bodies into matter.

This is where a contemporary music ensemble and a performance collective like Needcompany differ from one another, as well as intersect. The former starts out from the logic of the performative in order to arrive at music, while the latter starts out from the logic of the musical to arrive at performance.


Since ‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT DO YOU MEAN AND OTHER PLEASANTRIES’ (2014) Seghers has consistently had ‘the orchestra’ appear as the protagonist in his performances. First as a frontman and notional accompanying band. Later, in ‘O or The Challenge Of This Particular Show Was To Have Words Ending In O’ (2016), both as a contemporary bass drum ensemble, and as a lowing herd of cows and muzzled Gregorian choir, then as a rock band who’ve gone downhill in ‘Concert by a Band Facing the Wrong Way’ (2018), and now as a wandering chamber orchestra in Songs of Disconnection. In all these works, the orchestra – and therefore the ‘entertainer’ – becomes an almost archeologically excavated artefact.


Mike Lynch: “This dialectic of contrasting sounds, rhythms and tones is a recurrent theme throughout the performance and reflects one of Maarten’s artistic convictions: that communication only becomes clear once it fails. This piece is an experiment, testing the limits of vocal, musical and performative engagement.”