Instrumental Romance
Kim David Bots (NL 2025)
45 min
In 2023, while walking with his dog friend Miemel, Kim found a CD in the river Maas near Maastricht. The CD was clearly unplayable, but its title still readable; Instrumental Romance. It felt like a question from a not so distant past. What is romance as an instrument? Romance instrumentalized? At the same time he was experimenting with text to speech voices and recognized something that you could call an instrumentalized form of romance. These voices 'work' because they use pauses, timbres and intonation your ear recognizes as human. At the same time they can’t convince completely. In them exists a sort of auditory uncanny valley. From the idea of the uncanny and romantic in sound/music/story he started experimenting and writing and out of it came 'Instrumental Romance’. It consists of a chain of 11 narrative, musical vignettes (some more narrative then others).