Jaap Blonk

Jaap Blonk (born in 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a composer, poet, musician, and performer.

He initially studied mathematics and musicology but later abandoned these studies. In the late 1970s, he started playing saxophone and composing. A few years later, he discovered his vocal potential, first reciting poems, then improvising and performing his own vocal compositions.

For almost 20 years, voice remained his primary means of discovering and researching new sounds. Around the year 2000, Blonk also began incorporating electronics into his work and, from 2006, he again had recourse to mathematics to generate sounds, texts, and visual works. Jaap Blonk has performed on all the continents of the world. Alongside his solo performances, he has worked with an extremely wide range of musicians and ensembles from the fields of contemporary and improvised music.

To date, his music has appeared on 27 CDs on his own Kontrans label. Other recordings have been released on labels including VICTO (Canada), Monotype Records (Poland), Relative Pitch Records and Balance Point Acoustics (both USA). Books containing his visual works have been published by publishing houses in Germany, the USA, and Canada.