swellS

A gleaming cascade, a silver waterfall. Mountains quiver like a mirage on the horizon, dissolving into a tranquil lake – a mirror, or a portal to another world.

Taking two forms – a 50-minute live show and a standalone installation – swellS is an audiovisual collaboration between the band Spill Gold (Rosa Ronsdorf and Nina de Jong) and Studio Noralie (Noortje van den Eijnde). Blurring the lines between sculpture, textiles, and performance, the piece recalls the ripple effect – a metaphor for ecological entanglement, or the interconnectedness of all living beings.

At the centre hangs a monumental curtain: a vast sheet of reflective material whose surface becomes a kinetic landscape – a kind of visual instrument – animated by robotic beaters triggered by MIDI signals. Each strike sends waves across the cloth, transforming it into a luminous terrain that breathes and shimmers in unison with Spill Gold’s music. In this immersive interplay, the curtain is not merely a backdrop, but a living entity: a restless creature that sways, jolts, and dances to the polyrhythms. Sometimes the music leads, sometimes the fabric, their exchange spiralling into a haptic feedback loop.

Thematically, the work is drenched in watery imagery, becoming a raging torrent one moment, a languid pool the next. Sound and colour bleed outward until musicians, stage, and textile merge into a single body. Like water, it flows cyclically rather than in straight lines, suggesting ways of being that unsettle anthropocentric, progressive time. In this sense, the artists draw on Éliane Radigue, whose drone-based electroacoustic compositions are inspired by natural processes. Radigue remarked that “moving stones in a riverbed does not change the stream itself, but alters its fluid shape” – an attentiveness to environmental shifts and fluctuations that also runs through swellS.

The piece represents an ongoing line of exploration at Studio Noralie, where tactile analogue hardware is combined with digital technologies, probing the slippery boundary between virtual and physical. The satin curtain embodies this tension: its sheen catches projected lights, swirling in hues of blue, green, and purple to produce an iridescence that seems digitally rendered. What appears computer-generated is, in fact, a hallucinatory apparition.

Similarly, Spill Gold’s sound world – woven from acoustic drums, analogue synths, and digital samples – loops through dream states and uncanny realms. At once meditative and explosive, their songs are populated by female figures from history: Delia Derbyshire, electronica pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; Arachne, the mythic weaver; and Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. For the band, swellS marks a logical next step, building on their work releasing records and composing for theatre – their first venture into a large-scale audiovisual project.


Nest – the contemporary art space, based in The Hague – presents swellS within AM.PM.AM., a series of interdisciplinary weekenders where art, performance, music, and nightlife merge into one continuous experience. Over the course of three days, Nest is transformed into a space where new realities can be imagined and tested, from morning to late at night.


Made possible with support from the Stimuleringsfonds.