From “Resident Advisor“:
Earlier this year, I traveled to Amsterdam to attend a unique listening party for one. Paul Oomen, the 31-year-old head of a project called 4DSOUND, picked me up at Amsterdam Centraal, where we hopped in a taxi and headed east. The quaint houses and canals of the city center gave way to newer apartment blocks and offices and, eventually, low-slung warehouses. The taxi dropped us off, and Oomen led me around the side of a warehouse through waist-high weeds growing by the water. At some point the brush got too thick, and we had to turn back and wind through the parking lot; the route had been for dramatic effect, Oomen admitted with a wry smile.
Eventually we reached a building at the back of the complex, where Oomen slid a key into a nondescript door and led me up a flight of stairs to 4DSOUND, his brainchild and current devotion. Once it came into view, I felt like I’d walked into the scene in a science-fiction film where the crazed physicist shows you the thing he’s really been working on all this time. In a word, it’s a soundsystem, but that doesn’t really do it justice: it’s also an art installation, a site-specific performance space and, for the producers who have been invited to make music for it, an instrument unlike any they’ve encountered.
