Theme song for the short film, Heartbeat, 2012. Songwriter: Meryl van Noie, drums: De-wet Nagel, guitar and bass: Wikus Durandt, piano, other instruments, and vocals: Meryl van Noie.

Dusty Road

Little experiment with piano trying to interpret a beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda.

Proximity

This track was written in 2003 for a small Indie film project and sequenced with MIDI instruments.

Journey To The Lake

This song was co-written and performed by De-Wet Nagel and Meryl van Noie for the South African short film "Heartbeat" in 2012.  Lyrics by De-wet Nagel, Music by Meryl van Noie and De-wet Nagel, Guitar and drums: De-wet Nagal, Piano, string sequencing and other instrumentation: Meryl van Noie, Singers De-wet Nagel and Meryl van Noie. Bass guitar and mixing: Wikus Durandt.

Believe

Short film soundtrack for a theatre performance in 2008. Composer and sequencer: Meryl van Noie

Flying out at dawn

In 2013, I was lucky enough to be selected to participate in the Crossings International Artistic Workshop. The third edition of the Crossings International Artistic Workshop took place in Cape Town from 8 to 17 November 2013. Crossings #3 was hosted by the University of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, School of Dance and Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), with the support of Institut Français and The French Institute of South Africa.
The selection process brought together, three choreographers, three lighting designers, three composers, and 12 dancers. During a ten-day period, we worked and created together, in close quarters. During the first week we produced one piece of work everyday, which was performed at the end of each day, swapping dancers, lighting designers and choreographers. During the second week, we worked with a set group or people to produce a twelve-minute work. This was the project I worked on, and thoroughly enjoyed composing the music for, in a very collaborative and open way with the entire group. Composing, lighting design and choreography happened simultaneously, and the dancers impacted my musical work immensely. I even recorded their voices as part of the piece. All sounds except for the one-string bow was recorded in and around the venue using portable recording devices, contact mic's, a hydrophone, (courtesy of the composition facilitator James Webb!) my piano, iPad and laptop, my voice and those of the dancers. It is called Tabadol - meaning 'give and receive' in various languages that the group spoke, all combined.
Tabadol Credits:
Dancers: Gaelle Ikonda (Gabon), Manaho Shimokawa (Austria/Japan), Mohamed Yousri (Egypt), Marie-Adeline Choquet (France), Sylvester Thami Majela (South Africa), Tania Vossgatter (South Africa).
Choreographer: Mziyanda Mancam (South Africa)
Lighting Designer: Wilhelm Disbergen (South Africa)
Composer: Meryl van Noie (South Africa)

Tabadol / The Watering Hole

Melting Truth was composed and choreographed in unison between choreographer and composer. This collaboration between Mziyanda Mancam (choreographer) and Meryl van Noie (composer) made its debut at the Baxter Dance Festival in 2014, and has since been performed at Artscape, schools festivals, Cape Town Transgressive Arts festival and Infecting the City. The choreographer, composer and dancers, continuously had to negotiate the material throughout the creative process. It explores the journey artists undertake to find their own emotional truths, and the cyclical relationship between time and space.

Melting Truth

For most people, this is not possible. From cell phones to loud neighbours, noise is so pervasive, it stresses people out and can even create illness. Although we have little awareness of actually doing this, a large part of our lives is spent filtering out many of the sounds that permeate our lives, and acutely focusing on others – a phenomenon known as auditory selective attention. Musicians, in particular, focus on more ‘musical’ sounds, over what they perceive as ‘noise’. In this study, I have purposefully sought out ‘noise’ over ‘musical noise’ in order to suggest a different sense of musical perception, and in doing so, challenge the ‘scholarly hierarchy’ of what is perceived as, ‘noise’. I find it amusing, that my name is so closely related to ‘noise’ in such a literal way, which encourages me, for some odd reason. All noises recorded on portable devices, 2015

Tuning Out The Noise

DANCERS Thabisa Dinga, Nkemiseng Khena, Sasha Fourie Myburgh
and Kirsten de Kock. COMPOSER AND SOUND DESIGN Meryl van
Noie. VOICE ARTISTS Nkemiseng Khena, Tamsyn Spannenberg,
Kirsten De Kock, Thabisa Dinga, Meryl van Noie. MUSICIAN Thabisa
Dinga on nyungwe, uhadi and mrhubhe. PROJECTIONS Christelle
Dreyer

Our upbringing has shaped who we are today. We were raised and
taught to believe and follow certain value systems; we start following
these systemic constraints that were mostly man-made. Our history
is therefore entrenched through the education system (formal and
informal education). How does this understanding of the world affect
our understanding of ourselves, our reality, and our future? How do we
define our history, our heritage, our stories without the influence of our
inheritance? How do we become authors of our own lives if all we’ve
been taught is how we must and should exist; socially, traditionally or
religiously? Who would we be if all these inherited knowledge sources
were detached from us, would we still hold the same identity that we
hold now?

Autho(r)ise interrogates our existence and explores the freedom
of choice; choosing how to incorporate this and other knowledge
sources into our identity, tradition, and heritage and recognizing how
this knowledge can construct us, and choosing what to keep and what
to discard. Rewriting our past and re-defining future.

Autho(r)ise Mix

I live on planet Earth. Well... Mostly. I don't think I'm all that interesting. I just like to express myself creatively as a musician, pianist, and technologist, am eager to experiment with ambiguous textures, sound organisation, musical colours, and improvisational
structures, because this amuses me. I studied both classical and jazz music, worked professionally in many commercial genres, as a performer, writer and arranger, but these days I don't like to think of the boundaries so much and tend to just play around with whatever ideas pop up.

I'm currently working on personal projects, exploring various compositional tools, experiments with hard and software, exploiting various techniques and devices, all of which incorporates technology in some shape or form, to explore the frontiers of my own music composition.

But in a world where everyone shouts, I like it quiet, so feel free to connect the rest of the dots yourself.

Noisily

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