Douglas Bielmeier

Doug Bielmeier creates commercial drone and experimental electronic music tailored for boutique audiences and media. His 2017 release of “Betty and the Sensory World” on Ravello Records explores his technique of Windowing, which deals with the manipulation of found sound files by the stretching and compression of time, sample rate, bit depth, and window size. The layering and temporal placement of these windows create larger sonic landscapes for the creation of new musical works divorced of the source context. Bielmeier’s music has been described as, “hypnotically static yet ever moving within itself,” and not having, “a feeling of minimalism per se so much as an organicity of internal presence that rivets the listener through a natural world kind of difference and sameness in dialectic balance,” by Grego Applegate Edwards of Classical-Modern Music Review. Also, The Midwest Record explains Bielmeier’s music as “drone work that’s meant to shake you out of your shell of complacency.”

His love of combining technology and music was first cultivated while studying with composer Robert Carl (student of Iannis Xenakis) at the Hartt School of Music in the late 90s. In fact, Bielmeier’s music has been described as an extension of Xenakis’s early electroacoustic tape pieces. After going on to earn his masters in composition, Bielmeier shifted his attention to recording and popular music working as a staff engineer in Washington, DC and subsequently working as a freelance engineer in Nashville, TN. In Indianapolis, Bielmeier was a professor at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI and designer/manager of the C.L.E.A.R. Laboratory: designed for the creation, mixing, and mastering of new electronic works. Currently, Bielmeier is a professor at Northeastern University, Boston, and lives near his family in Somerville MA.

An advocate and practitioner of electronic music, Bielmeier has written several pieces that have been performed internationally including: The Circuit Bender’s Ball in Nashville, TN; The Brooklyn Arts Gym in Brooklyn, NY; The Art of Digital Show in San Diego, CA; The Illinois International Film Festival in St. Charles, IL; The Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival in Gainesville, FL; June in Buffalo in Buffalo, NY, and The Muse Gallery, London, UK. The mediums of his works include stereo and multi-channel tape, video, and live-instrument with computer. Though a loyal student of acoustics and technology, Bielmeier searches for the meaning and expressive quality sometimes ignored in electronic music.