Tashi Dorji & Audrey Chen + Laura De Jongh

Raw vocal and guitar improvisations and stunning harp music: STUK presents two new albums from the Antwerp record label Klankhaven.

STUK in collaboration with Klankhaven

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PROGRAM

8:00 PM: Laura De Jongh (+ special guest: Jan Boudart)

9:00 PM: Tashi Dorji & Audrey Chen

+ Sounds & merch by Klankhaven

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Laura De Jongh

+ special guest: Jan Boudart

Lately, we in Flanders have been spoiled with young, classically trained musicians taking an experimental turn. Think: Suzan Peeters, Elisabeth Klinck, Nina Vanhoenacker, Nils Vermeulen, Maya Dhondt; the list goes on. Feel free to add Laura De Jongh to that list. The Antwerp-based harpist creates a sound world by combining her acoustic string plucking with effect pedals. After years of collaborations, such as with Adriaan de Roover aka Oaktree, she has now released her debut album  Fundus on the Klankhaven label. Soft harp patterns blend with shimmering delays, angelic echoes, and crackling  field recordings . Delightfully intoxicating, like a warm bath. Sonic Youth member and Big Mister of experimental music, Thurston Moore, thought so too, placing … Fundus by Laura De Jongh at #1 (one!) on his list of the best 350 albums of 2025.  Reasons enough to bring her to STUK, then.

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Tashi Dorji & Audrey Chen

Two luminous figures of contemporary music join forces: vocal artist and composer Audrey Chen and the iconoclastic guitarist Tashi Dorji, both leading representatives of this idiosyncratic music for over twenty years.

Audrey grew up in a family of doctors and engineers but found her own path in music. Through cello, electronics, and voice manipulation, she translates the precision and discipline that characterize her family into a highly recognizable musical language. Talking, blowing, screaming, growling, snorting, and singing mingle with electronic sound in which human and instrument are indistinguishable.

Tashi, born in the Himalayan country of Bhutan and living in the American Appalachians since the early 2000s, carries the mountains in his playing. His energetic guitar connects folkloric influences from his native land with American guitar traditions. Slow and soundscape, fast and pounding, electric or acoustic: Tashi can do it all and invariably leaves his audience speechless.

These two strong musical personalities met on stage in the summer of 2023 at Morphine Raum in Berlin. The fact that this meeting took place in one of the cradles of techno music seems to have propelled their performance toward an industrial, repetitive aesthetic of an almost danceable nature. But as the track titles suggest, that classic, pulsating rhythm so characteristic of electronic dance music is unashamedly bent ( Bending ) into something far more restless than teeth-gnashing ( Gnasher ).