Dendriet is a group of musicians. We play live electronic music in different bands and setups.
We are not a band in the traditional sense, but we feel we are a group, so we put a name on it.
Also we needed a place to have our discussions and to
host our music, so we started www.dendriet.nl.
The word dendriet, dendrite in English, means several things. First of all, it's the fractal form like you find in maganese or iron oxide structures in limestone. The fragment I scanned in as the basic graphic of this site is exactly that. You can see the fractal in lightning too. Generating dendrite fractals can be done in several ways: as a variant of the julia set, or as a growth model. Furthermore, a dendrite is a part of a nervecell. There's a collection of dendrite pictures here. All these meanings of the word relate to our music improvisations.
Our instruments are networks of electronics with a certain amount of self-similarity. We solder tiny components, like opamps (which are circuits in itselves) into modules. These modules are then patched together to become synthesizers. And when we play live, we link these synthesizers in complex ways to become performance networks.
Some of the instruments we make are played by touching the electronics, which makes your body a thinking part of the electronic circuitry. Computers and acoustic/mechanical instruments are also part of these networks. A double bass, a guitar, a sax can be plugged into a computer, which we in itself program using a patch language like MaxMSP, Super Collider, or the Nord patch software. When we play together, we are not separate musicians playing separate instruments. You could say that we each have our own interface to one big synthesizer, in which everything is interconnected.
Although we are more connected to each other electronically, we are not as close as a regular band. We always play in different line-ups and projects. But we do feel we are one group, though. In the past, we often performed under our own names. Bookers and producers often took the titles of these projects for band names, which led to odd mistakes on flyers and posters. Also, we felt we should make our continuity more visible to the public.
So here's why we put a name on it. And as expected, that made us more of a unity.
Dendriet is a network of improvising electronic musicians.
We are based in The Hague, The Netherlands.
To email us, just take our first name and add @dendriet.nl
Aslaug Holgersen
Dave Krooshof
Ernst van der Loo
Juan Parra
Leon Spek
Thijs Scheele