Lukas de Clerck

Originating in ancient Mesopotamia, and remembered best for its preeminence in classical Greco-Roman vase paintings, the aulos is a double-reed double pipe, which produces a sound likened to the buzzing of wasps or a “shrill, roaring lotus.” The aulos went extinct over a millennium ago, but in its time, the instrument was often characterized as the dark, Dionysian foil to Apollo’s sweet, harmonic lyre. Its microtonality and rough timbre were out of place in an era that ascribed the highest aesthetic value to mathematical perfection; accordingly, Horace derided the instrument as vulgar and impetuous, while Pratinas said it was fit to accompany “only door-to-door carousels and the brawling of drunken young men.” Though distant descendants persist, including the oboe and the bassoon, there are only fifteen extant aulos pipes or pipe sets remaining.

Lukas de Clerck, a musician and sound artist based in Brussels, has spent years on the archaeo-musicological project of reviving the aulos. But while classicists and luthiers have often been interested in conserving auloi as historical artifacts or creating exact replicas, de Clerck has focused on designing a living instrument, liberated from traditional expectations about how it should look, sound, or be played. To de Clerck, the aulos’s anachronism is essential to its character. Like his labelmate Timothy Archambault, whose work for flute introduced the indigenous practice of brontomancy into the discourse of new music; or the late composer Yoshi Wada, who integrated bagpipes into his minimalist compositions; de Clerck is crafting a new context for his chosen instrument in contemporary music. 

For his latest album, The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas (Ideologic Organ, 2024), de Clerck plays an aulos that has no tone holes at all; instead, each pipe is comprised of nested tubes that allow it to triple in length, creating a more gradual continuum of tones. With his telescopic aulos, de Clerck builds a unique vocabulary out of the instrument’s ficklest, most destabilizing edge cases, crafting a mesmerizing swarm of sound that seems sourceless. The resulting record melds alarming, industrial noise with pacifying hums, like those of cello strings or late summer cicadas. The chameleon quality of the sound suggests a trickster spirit, a certain delight in upending the listener’s expectations. Such playfulness recalls, aptly, the devious satyrs of myth, who of all creatures were said to like the orphaned instrument, the aulos, the best. 

Blank Forms presents this performance in collaboration with In vitro, supported by Flanders State of the Art.