Roel Meelkop’s career as a sound artist stretches back some 40 years since he started the post-industrial project THU20 with four other musicians in the early 1980s, and later decided to dedicate his career to investigating sound and music while studying visual arts and art theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Among other things, his discography as a solo artist and collaborator with others (including Kapotte Muziek with Franz de Waard and Peter Duimelinks) is staggeringly huge, and Meelkop’s recorded output since 2022 has been consistently steady and prolific. “Viva in Pace” is one of two solo albums Meelkop released in 2023, and its title (in English translation from Italian, “Live in Peace”) expresses an anti-war theme and Meelkop’s own frustration that, as one person out of billions living on Earth, he has very little control or influence over global events and the processes and decision-making that lead to outbreaks of conflict and war between nations or groups of nations.
Organised in four parts, of which three are quite lengthy, “Viva in Pace” is dominated by synthesisers though Meelkop makes use of electronics, modern and vintage, in parts. The album has a very minimal presentation in which passages of quiet or even silence are as important as bursts of angry noise or insistent drone. Listening to the four tracks, I do get the impression the album is bursting with conflicting tensions and feelings, all related to Meelkop’s own state of mind and anger when he recorded this work over 2022. What is the role of the artist or musician in situations where the world appears to be heading inexorably towards war because some parties with their own agendas, backing and manipulating governments and politicians, plan to profit financially from the outbreak of conflict? How can artists, musicians and others try to lead people back to the path of peace when everything appears to be against them? There is a lot of anger and despair in the music, especially in “Viva in Pace II”, there is loneliness and frustration, but there also seems to be some hope and a determination to keep going, to keep trying, if only to keep one’s head clear of confusion and one’s spirits from falling into depression.
Accordingly the album can appear uneven, starting very loudly on “Viva in Pace I”, maintaining a steady flow of noise and drone on “Viva in Pace II” and then going quiet or introspective on the remaining tracks with more fragmented sounds and noises. The album doesn’t exactly end on a triumphant note but perhaps the point of the work ending as it does is that we as individuals who care about the state of the world must make our own decisions as to what appropriate actions we should take to protest the directions and decisions politicians and other so-called leaders are taking and making that are dragging nations – and us – into unnecessary wars, violence and mass deaths.