Music for a performance by Daniel Linehan/Hiatus

1. The Wonder Of It All, part I
2. The Wonder Of It All, part II

cd/dl/stream, self released, September 2025

Preview and pre-order here
or stream a single edit on your platform of choice

Choreographer Daniel Linehan’s ‘The Wonder Of It All’ radiates joy and togetherness. From cerebral to wildly energetic, the piece feels like a ritual that slowly transforms into a euphoric dance party. Creating the music for this was a joy. It brought me back to the nineties, when I was discovering electronic (dance) music. That feeling of wonder and discovery seemed an apt comparative to the sense of awe that Daniel and the dancers convey in ‘The Wonder Of It All’.

Normally (if there is a ‘normal’), the music I score for dance performances is made scene by scene, and then stitched together. But in this case the approach was different: in line with Daniel’s ideas for the choreography, I decided to make one 50-minute composition, to make sure that the whole piece felt like one continuous flow instead of a sequence of fragments. From that moment on, the dance was created in response to the music, with only a few tweaks in the score.

So this was a weird one, with the music pretty much finished so early in the process. It felt like I was being lazy, not working until the very end… but each time I saw the performance during its creation process, I was amazed by the magical unity that movement, sound, light, and scenography seemed to form. I guess art doesn’t always have to be a struggle. 

Rutger Zuydervelt, May 2025


Reviews

Vital Weekly

Unlike years ago, Rutger Zuydervelt releases a lot less music. I noticed this before. His ‘day job’ is in compositing music for film and choreography. The problem for the reviewer is, I never see any of these movies or dances, and no doubt that’s on me, not going to our art house movie centres (and there’s a big one in Nijmegen) or modern dance performances (or concerts, to make sure you know I don’t go out a lot), which, I believe, have Zuydervelt’s music. In the information, there’s not much about the dance by Daniel Lineham/Hiatus, except that, unlike previous work in this direction, where Zuydervelt composes segments, scene by scene, and then stitches the whole thing together, this was formed as one, 50 minute piece of music, which somehow ended up in two tracks on the CD. The piece premieres in October, and the CD becomes available in September. However, perhaps Zuydervelt was afraid it wouldn’t make these pages, so this is a very advanced copy.
Of the choreography, we’re only told that it “radiates joy and togetherness. From cerebral to wildly energetic, the piece feels like a ritual that slowly transforms into a euphoric dance party”. For Zuydervelt, this means returning to the 1990s, when he discovered electronic (dance) music. So, via spacious segments of sustaining synthesisers, he slowly slips in arpeggios, and in Part II, there’s a full-on rhythm piece. This is indeed something out of the 1990s playbook for ambient house music, think music on Silent Records, or Pete Namlook (and whatever else was on his Fax Records label). In the first part, this works well, not surprisingly, other that we may not have heard this done by Zuydervelt. Smooth and pleasant music, atmospheric, yet not very dark. In the second part, the rhythm is very present, pushing around, bouncing, but not, I would think, something that would attract many people to the dance floor; not if one is used to straightforward 4/4 rhythms. In that sense, the music is something along the lines of music we heard on early Warp Records compilation, ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and the like. Music that, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t stand the test of time very well. It’s great to hear it again after so many years, after years of thinking about such music. No doubt, it sounds great on a big system, but at home, it all gets a bit lost.