ABOUT
(c) Wouter Van Looy
The Wilderness is a place where everything can grow wild and free; trails search for hidden areas, and the most imaginative beasts and plants can emerge. In this playground, Lieselot De Wilde has grown over the years into a standout vocal artist with a unique creative language and a very personal voice.
She explores songs and song cultures from all over the world, focusing specifically on how all these different languages influence vocal color, expression, and technique. Apart from simply singing songs, she also places them in different, sometimes unexpected contexts, ranging from whole objective universes in which sound and words can function independently of their meaning, to worlds that take the human or ritual context of songs as inspiration.
Her research leads to a number of projects. The ensemble Bel Ayre, through which she juxtaposes self-written songs with personal interpretations of the song repertoire. The Barrel Organ Project, which is an ever-growing song cycle featuring songs from around the world that she arranges for voice and barrel organ. Or the Figurines series, in which she places the female voice within the human or ritual context of songs. These she bends into her own compositions that she performs in physically, visually, and scenographically challenging music theatre creations.
Lieselot started her career as a singer of mainly early music, with ensembles such as Correspondances, Servir Antico, Zefiro Torna, Encantar, or Apotheosis, among others. However, she grew into a singer with influences of both jazz, classical, and ethnic vocal music, which led to collaborations with production companies such as LOD, Zonzo, Christina Vantzou, Ben Frost, Sofie Vanden Eynde, or Frederik Neyrinck. She is an artistic and coordinating member of WALPURGIS, a workspace that organizes residencies for the development and research of music theater.
In 2021, Lieselot won the Flemish Culture Prize Ultima for music.
