Touki Delphine
SUPERDRUM X
“A hundred unique heartbeats that together create ominous and wondrous rhythms” – de Volkskrant
The drum is a primal instrument. For thousands of years, people have used rhythm to communicate: across long distances, with their surroundings, and with spiritual worlds.
With SUPERDRUM X, boundary-pushing Dutch collective Touki Delphine taps into this primal force. Making its world premiere at PS21 as part of Commonground Festival, SUPERDRUM X repurposes more than one hundred drums, sourced from the local community via a myriad of second-hand ways, creating one giant interconnected self-playing machine.
The drums are fitted with lights, controlled by electronics, and struck by twigs and sticks collected from the woods of PS21. Each drum has a different shape, size, and timbre, and tells the story of their previous lives through their dents, band logos, and discolorations.
Developed partially in residency at PS21, the work blends groundbreaking techniques from the modern avant-garde with world music, playing with sound masses: layers of sound that form a dense, living texture. It sounds like Steve Reich interrupted by a swarm of bees, Caroline Shaw writing for A Roomful of Drums, or Edgard Varèse interpreted by a hundred woodpeckers.
SUPERDRUM X leaves the spectator under a blanket of rhythm with a refreshed sense of time, and the feeling that they’ve taken part in a ritual communication with another world, whether that be of the digital or the spiritual form. Or likely a little of both.
Commonground is PS21’s annual free festival of contemporary spectacle, where renowned international artists explore the boundaries of what’s physically possible in surprising and participatory performances across PS21’s grounds. Commonground is a family-friendly celebration of the end of summer, welcoming the whole community to PS21 to be dazzled by the performing arts.
This year’s festival features the world premiere of SUPERDRUM X, a work featuring 100 self-playing drums by Dutch musical collective Touki Delphine. Plus: the world premiere of FIELD, a new performance by OBIE award-winning director, writer, and electronics artist Andrew Schneider, Sayer Mansfield’s DIVE BARN, and more.
Amsterdam-based Touki Delphine (Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest, Chris Doyle and John van Oostrum) is a boundary-pushing collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists making waves nationally and internationally with their monumental light and sound installations made from recycled materials. Their work creates poetic encounters between humans and machines. Inspired by natural phenomena, the climate crisis and the idea of nature as a living whole, they explore how technology can not only alienate but also connect.
Touki Delphine is known for transforming discarded materials into powerful musical installations. In FIREBIRD, a unique orchestra of over 600 recycled taillights unleashes a hypnotic choreography of light and sound, transforming Stravinsky’s classic Firebird Suite into an otherworldly experience. In RELAY, 1848 turn signal relay motors create rhythm and harmony. In MACHINE, a second hand plant-potting machine is transformed into the drummer of an ensemble. For TRANSMISSION, miles of scrapped wiring and pneumatic tubing mimic an underground fungal network that hums and vibrates electrically. And DRIFTING, the breakout hit of the 2025 Dutch festival summer, is a new ecosystem built from nothing but waste: ethernet cables from thrift shops, windshield washer fluid reservoirs and their pump motors from junkyards, and salvaged speaker cables from Touki’s own studio. The piece comes alive in live sessions, where musicians engage in dialogue with the installation.
Installation | John van Oostrum
Composition and music | Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest and Chris Doyle
SUPERDRUM was created in collaboration with Veenfabriek.
With funding from Performing Arts Fund NL
