Billy Bultheel

Billy Bultheel is a composer who’s work lies at the intersection of performance art and music. He composes for site-specific projects that bring together sculpture, installation, performance art and live and synthesised music. His music is rooted in the electronic tradition, but deeply inspired by renaissance music, early baroque and medieval polyphony. His compositions are dark and melancholic and translate through noise, ambient metal and experimental orchestration. 

Deconstructing the architecture of the concert hall and embedding music in unexpected location, Bultheel’s performances become platforms where the experience of music is renegotiated, and 

Amongst his works 'When Doves Cry' at the Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin, 2019), 'Spat from My Mouth, a piano concerto' at KW (Berlin, 2019), ‘The Minutes of Olomouc’ (PAF 2020), ‘Songs for the Contract’ (folia.app 2021), ‘Athens Songs I-IV’ at the 7th Athens Biennial (Athens 2021) and UNTER for Schinkel Pavilion (Berlin 2021) and Halle für Kunst Steiermark (Graz 2021). 

In 2012 he started his collaboration with the German performance artist Anne Imhof, working as a performer and composer in Imhof's early performances, movies and installation. He composed music for Imhof's exhibition-as-opera Angst (2016), Faust (2017) and Sex (2019) alongside with Eliza Douglas and Anne Imhof and received major acclaim. Furthermore Bultheel composes music for the choreographer Michele Rizzo and has recently written for the Satire IXNEYTAI/TRACKERS (2021) by Sophocles which was presented at the ancient amphitheatre of Epidavros, Greece. 

Bultheel studied composition at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, Holland and performance and choreography at the Institute for applied theatre science, Gießen, Germany.