Name: BLINK x BLONK
Start: 2026-02-05T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Cambridge Foundry

Non-Event presents a special double bill featuring the legendary Dutch sound poet, electronic musician, and improviser Jaap Blonk, and Jorrit Dijkstra’s newest group project BLINK. Jaap Blonk will play a solo set and then perform a collaborative set with BLINK.
About the artists
Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. He went to university for mathematics and musicology but did not finish those studies. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds. From around the year 2000 on Blonk started work with electronics, at first using samples of his own voice, then extending the field to include pure sound synthesis as well as work with analog synthesizers. He took a year off of performing in 2006. As a result, his renewed interest in mathematics made him start a research of the possibilities of algorithmic composition for the creation of music, visual work and poetry. http://www.jaapblonk.com
BLINK is
Jorrit Dijkstra | alto saxophone, compositions
Nate McBride | bass guitar
Eric Rosenthal | drums and percussion
Eric Hofbauer | guitar
Gabe Boyarin | guitar
Jorrit Dijkstra’s new group BLINK is the latest project of The Porch Trio: an electric guitar band that features the Trio plus Boston jazz veteran Eric Hofbauer, and young talent Gabe Boyarin on electric guitars. The band uses a microtonal tuning system between the instruments, which gives it a mesmerizing and dreamy sound, inspired by classic African High Life bands, Indonesian Gamelan and delta blues guitar players. Dijkstra’s compositions are full of collective melodic and multi-rhythmic layerings, and form a spring board for open improvisations. https://jorritdijkstra.com/groups/blink/
Dijkstra and Blonk first worked together in the 1990’s in Blonk’s group Splinks. After his move to Boston Dijkstra invited Blonk a number of times to improvisation concerts with local Boston musicians such as Pandelis Karayorgis, Jeb Bishop and Nate McBride. In 2015 Blonk was a guest to Dijkstra’s group The Whammies, featuring a set of Steve Lacy’s Dada-themed compositions. Blink + Blonk will play a set of pieces from the Blink repertoire, plus a few composition that Blonk wrote for his (unrelated) European band Blonk's Blinks.