A biennial festival celebrating music from Belgium (1830–2026)

In November 2026, the beautiful city of Ghent will host the Belgian Music Days. You can expect to hear music by Belgian composers spanning the period from 1830 to the present day at this festival. Four days. Four venues.

On Saturday 7 November, the Dr Guislain Museum will host two concerts of electroacoustic music on the ‘akoesmonium’ by Musiques & Recherches.

• At 7.30 pm, a concert by Musiques & Recherches: ‘Intersecting Electroacoustic Soundfields’
• At 9.00 pm, a concert by FeBeME-BeFEM

You can find the programme for these concerts further down this page.

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19.30 Concert by Musiques & Recherches: ‘Intersecting Electroacoustic Soundfields’ (until 8.15 pm)

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21:00 FeBeME-BeFEM concert (until 21:45)

Information about the pieces to be performed at the BeFEM-FeBeME concert

Dimitri Coppe : Da mihi ex ista arbore quos seram surculos

Da mihi ex ista arbore quos seram surculos is a sound performance designed for the Makaronic festival (Geneva). Based on Cicero’s quote “Give me cuttings from that tree so that I may plant them (with me)”, this live performance utilises a laptop setup with twelve horns to create a half-mineral, half-vegetal abundance — an unspectacular fragment of time, space and life.

Dimitri Coppe is a composer of acousmatic music. He improvises and collaborates with dance, film and radio. His concerts and performances are based on spatial representation. Movements on touch controllers create an immersive experience that evokes the audience’s most primal instincts. He does not release albums and prioritises live concerts – that is to say, the encounter with the audience, listening together and the live performance. He develops his own concert set-up, which is more expressive and poetic than linear and precise, using spatial representation tools he has developed in collaboration with the Centre Henri Pousseur.

Valery Vermeulen (hommage I.M.) : OGLE-2005-BLG-390LB_01  &  OGLE-2005-BLG-390LB_08

Mikromedas is an interactive electronic music project by Valery Vermeulen in which compositions are constructed from data from our solar system and deep space. Radio-astronomical signals from, amongst others, the Voyager probes and pulsars, together with synthesised sounds and sonified satellite data, form the source material. Mikromedas depicts a hypothetical journey from Earth to the exoplanet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, 21,500 light-years away near Sagittarius A, in successive phases from departure to deep space. This journey to the exoplanet is described in various phases. The phases in this concert are 1) Departure from Earth, OGLE_01, and 2) Uranus, OGLE_08.

Valery Vermeulen is a composer, performer and researcher from Ghent who works at the intersection of electronic music, mathematics and data analysis. He obtained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Antwerp and develops musical systems that utilise algorithms, artificial intelligence and physical models. His work encompasses data sonification, experimental electronic music and audiovisual performances in which science and art converge. Vermeulen has performed both at home and abroad and has built a reputation through projects centred on cosmology, financial markets and machine-learning-driven soundscapes.

Léa Roger : Sous la surface du boyau zélé

This sensory and organic work explores the interior of pipes that turn out to be a gigantic digestive tract. The work is primarily composed of the sounds of pipes (mechanical and drainage pipes) and draws a parallel between the pipes in our homes and the organic networks that run through our bodies. It also evokes the creative power of the imagination in times of loneliness, when our connection with living things – humans, animals and plants – is lost under the influence of an increasingly technology-driven society.

Léa Roger is a radio producer, field recordist, harpist and electro-acoustic composer. She studied anthropology, ethnomusicology and acousmatic composition (Mons Conservatoire). Her work explores the subtle, vibrational dimensions of sound and its relationship to living beings. Since 2022, she has been developing projects centred on acoustic ecology in Bolivia, where she records ecosystems and the stories of local communities as part of species conservation efforts. These recordings reveal both endangered fauna and the ways of life and worldviews shaped by these territories. Her practice is informed by fascial therapy, Kashmiri yoga, qi gong and meditation, which she shares in workshops on field recording and deep listening.

Charo Calvo : Alas

Alas is an acousmatic work, inspired by the experience of sitting for hours watching birds in flight inside a cave; the sound of their wingbeats is unusually loud there and echoes off the cave’s many rough walls. You can literally feel the air vibrating to the rhythm of their wingbeats. The birds often seem to vanish into invisible cavities, or into thin air, as if they had evaporated. After a while, the promise of floating becomes reality. Then, the music comes into play.

Charo Calvo (Madrid, 1960) is a Spanish composer and sound artist working in electroacoustic and acousmatic music. Following a career as a dancer with Ultima Vez, she studied electroacoustic composition with Annette Vande Gorne. Her work is presented internationally in dance, theatre, film, radio and multi-channel concerts. She has received, amongst others, the Palma Ars Acustica, Phonurgia Nova, Prix Marulic and Grand Prix Nova. Calvo lives in Ghent and works as a lecturer on the film programme at KASK. Her practice explores listening dramaturgy, spatiality and the poetic power of sound.

Dirk Veulemans : Ceremonie

In this composition, Veulemans explores slow, spatial FM sounds that evoke in him a state of ‘perceptual resonance’: a blend of alertness and tranquillity, even when the soundscape suddenly shifts. Some sounds are reminiscent of a fire ceremony he witnessed in 2019 at a temple in Nikko. The combination of this resonant experience and the ceremony forms the inspiration for the composition, which is due to be followed by a second part at a later date.

Dirk Veulemans (1956) is a composer specialising in electroacoustic music. After completing a course in Electronic Music Composition with Joris de Laet, he collaborated with numerous ensembles and arts organisations both at home and abroad. His work is rooted in sound research and spatiality. The computer is his instrument and algorithms are his language. He has built his own multi-channel concert instrument and computer-controlled acoustic instruments such as pipe organs and loudspeaker flutes. Veulemans is active within ComAV and FeBeME–BeFEM, where he works to promote the recognition of contemporary electroacoustic music, amongst other things by organising concerts.

Practical information

Dr Guislain Museum
https://www.museumdrguislain.be
Jozef Guislainstraat 43B, 9000 Ghent

Further information: 2026 Line-up – Belgian Music Days