Sonic Outpost — Live improvised ambient electronics

About

Sonic Outpost is a mobile studio: live improvised ambient electronics, played on the streets and among friends. No laptop, no backing tracks, no second takes — every set is built from nothing in the moment, loops and drones and rhythms layered on compact hardware and shaped by the place it lands in. The outpost moves; the map above shows where and when it plays next.

Behind the project is Jeroen van Vliet, a multi-instrumentalist from Utrecht whose productions run from ambient, downtempo chill, dub and techno to deep house, DNB, hiphop, funk, jazz and reggae. The music started early: at five he was already mixing and splicing tape on his father's Revox decks. By his early teens he was DJ-ing, saving up for a drive-in show of his own and playing it at school parties — and in his twenties in clubs around Amersfoort, playing acid house with two turntables and a strobe. Learning piano, percussion and melodica ran alongside it — all of it self-taught, in the hours around a career as a software engineer. Much later, in 2014–15, he ran a series of Sunday-afternoon listening concerts for Kytopia in the old Tivoli on the Oudegracht, Utrecht's pop temple.

He has always played on his own terms, and the engineering turned out to be exactly the skill he needed to build his own instruments: simple single-oscillator synths and hardware controllers, made from scratch. From there came the experiments: interfaces for talking to plants and other organisms in a musical way, algorithms for randomness and chaos, music that generates itself.

Sonic Outpost itself took shape in 2023, developed in his studio and designed to leave it: small enough to carry, built for dawless jamming, battery powered throughout — at least eight hours of playing with no outlet in sight.

Besides the hardware, Jeroen also developed three software instruments, free for anyone to use in a browser. The applications are not only instruments but also very extensive educational projects (see the manuals for BioMidi, BeatState and LoopState). Partly with classrooms in mind: no budget for instruments, plugins, licences or theory books, and a browser is enough to start making and learning music.

• BioMidi.net
  Generative ambient synthesizer driven by the bioelectrical signals of plants and fungi — simulated in real time and turned into notes, played in the browser or sent out over MIDI. It also works as a standalone synthesizer, played from a MIDI keyboard or controller — full MIDI in and out. 60+ instruments, 100+ scales, 25+ organisms.
• BeatState.net
  Drum machine and rhythm composer with its own synthesis engine and sample kits — step sequencer, parameter locks, euclidean rhythms and MIDI sync. 24 drum kits, sampled and synthesised, and 450+ rhythm presets.
• LoopState.net
  Modular MIDI sequencer — a clock-driven instrument whose tracks each play a musical behaviour: fourteen generator types including arpeggios, euclidean rhythms, chord progressions, Turing machines, Conway's Game of Life and DNA sequences. Tracks send program changes and CC as well as notes, so a whole studio of hardware can be driven from the browser.

“Expect the unexpected.” Randomness isn't a side effect here, it's the material — whether that's a plant's electrical signal shaping a melody or a set assembling itself on a street corner, the interesting part is the part nobody planned.