Remy van Kesteren moves on 'After The Known'
Hailed by the New York Times as a ‘brilliant harpist’, the instrument sounds like never before when Remy van Kesteren (1989) plays it. Remy has established himself as an internationally renowned artist and has won numerous awards and competitions. And yet he has completely changed direction. This can be heard on his album ‘Leave What You Know’, released last year via V2. He now follows this up with the remix EP ‘After The Known’, released today.
LOVE IS ALL I HAVE ARTWORK
The inspiration for the title ‘Leave What You Know’ came from the idea of leaving everything you know behind. But also from the tendency to become less open-minded as you get older. “As a child, you look at the world with complete open-mindedness. As we get older, that diminishes. We decide what suits us, what we like and what we reject,” says Remy. Curiosity always wins out over mistrust for Remy, and that’s exactly what he did when he set out as a solo artist: stepping aside and looking further afield to discover what, in his view, needed to be discovered.
And so, for him, ‘Leave What You Know’ was an album about letting go, whilst this new EP, ‘After the Known’, is what comes next – six artists (Feiertag, Fink, Favour, Mark Novas, Wannes Salomé and Moods) who take his music to places he himself would never have gone.
Wannes Salomé (Klangstof, Bente, Janne Schra and many others) produced the original album and is now delving into it once more. He’d already collaborated unforgettably with Fink on ‘Shadows’ from 2019. Mark Novas, Favour, Moods and Feiertag are artists he has long followed and admired, so the fact that they agreed to this idea feels like a real gift to Remy, as if he were unwrapping his own tracks all over again to discover something completely new within them.
Remy says: “A remix isn’t a copy. I really see it as a conversation. Someone else hears something in your work that you can no longer hear yourself – after seven years, certain melodies and chord progressions are so ingrained that you can no longer hear past them. And then someone drags a track into a completely different genre, or unlocks a melody that was always there but which I’d never found. Every version lets you hear the original in a new light. The fact that others are now doing this with my work, I think it’s absolutely brilliant.”
