Beginnings in Noise and Rhythm
My musical life began as an adventure. At thirteen, my brother and I started a hip-hop group, scraping together enough money to buy a drum machine: a Yamaha RX8. By any conventional measure it was clumsy and limited — but for me it was a doorway. Each stiff kick and brittle snare opened a possible world, a place I could step into, somewhere larger than the room I was in. I still keep it, not because of its sound, but because it was my first machine for world-building.
Music, from the start, was about storytelling, about creating an environment I could inhabit when the given world felt too narrow. The forced recorder lessons in primary school, taught without passion, nearly killed the spark. But my RX8 drum machine rekindled it.
When I entered art school, music came rushing forward with urgency. It became part of my final exam work, woven into installation and moving image. From that point on, music changed from side hustle into a constant thread in my creative practice.
Hadamard: Scores for Nonexistent Movies
Much of my music has been released under the alias Hadamard. Here, I approached electronic dance music as if I were writing scores for films that do not exist: soundtracks for speculative futures, parables of science, morality, the human condition. Sometimes bleak, sometimes playful, sometimes ironic — as in my alter ego Studio Gangster, with its satirical fascination for sex and violence.
Hadamard’s music has appeared on craft electro labels worldwide, mostly on vinyl. I’ve played live across Europe — from underground parties in Berlin and Paris to unlikely venues in eastern Poland and western Belarus. I don’t DJ, and never really have; my interest is in live performance, in the act of building and dismantling sound in real time, in sculpting electricity into experience.
Stylistically, Hadamard has always been electro, but not in the narrow sense. It has veered from experimental electronic noise to club-ready beats, to spacious ambient landscapes. Always circling the edges of the genre, always pushing toward something that feels cinematic, like a scene half-glimpsed in a parallel world.
Janko Bartelink – Ambient Music
Parallel to this, I release music under my own name: mostly ambient, often performed live with a hybrid setup of electronic and acoustic instruments. I think of these setups not as collections of gear, but as one great instrument — networks of circuits, resonances, and hands.
Here the emphasis is less on rhythm and more on space, on unfolding durations, on textures that drift and collide. Improvisation is central: I build soundscapes live, letting the system guide me as much as I guide it.
I also work in collaboration: remixing, co-creating in the studio, improvising live. One example is Einder, my duo with Danny Jeroense (aka Doolcirkel). Together we build immersive sonic landscapes, always in dialogue with the space and the audience.
Sound as Possible World
I have been making electronic music for more than twenty years. It began with a cheap Yamaha drum machine and a teenage need to make beats. It has led me through underground vinyl releases, festivals across Europe, countless hours of patching synths, coding instruments, sculpting frequencies.
For me, music is a way of thinking and feeling in sound. A way of making places that do not exist, but can be inhabited through listening.
Music is environment, consolation, catharsis. It is how I confront the tragedy of being human and still find it worthwhile. To make music is to take what is fleeting and raw — the pulse of emotion, the weight of existence — and sublimate it into something eternal.
