Drummer and percussionist. Musical thinker.
Travelling across music scenes and disciplines, Thielemans navigates by means of his own compass.
Most known for his resonant solo works like a Snare is a Bell, Sprang, Aural Mist and Bata Baba Loka, and many collaborations with musicians in the experimental music scene as well as the Jazz scene and indie folk/pop/rock scenes, Thielemans keeps on pushing the borders and expanding conscious aural spaces and territories.
Recently, and in some recent past, Thielemans has collaborated in trio together with the late Mika Vainio & Charlemagne Palestine (PVT released on Godbear April 2020), a trio together with Oren Ambarchi and Charlemagne Palestine (PAT released on Godbear July 2022) , a duo together with Oren Ambarchi (album to be released 2023), a duo with Billy Hart (Talking about the Weather), Chantal Acda (The Sparkle in our Flaws, Bounce Back, Puwawau, Saturday Moon), Marshall Allen (Sun Ra), Tape Cuts Tape, Distance Light & Sky, Jozef Dumoulin, Trevor Dunn, Shahzad Ismaily, Vaast Colson, Nico Dockx, Laurie Anderson, and many more.
More and more his personal research and output crosses the borders of music discipline to borrow practices and ways of thinking from mainly the performative arts, architecture, and the contemporary visual arts.
It also pushes him to dive ever more deeply into site specific work, where the very specific yet eternal now is collectively (both the musicians/artists and public/participants) explored and experienced through our ears and spatial awareness, bringing the experience of the music inside of the larger question of what it means to be an embodied spirit, a human being, in our everyday spaces and places.
In November 2022 Thielemans released a book publication On Resonance: Scores, Notes & Conversations, a culminative work that encompasses and surfaces the underlying currents within his life in and with music.
Within r-e-s-o-n-a-n-c-e he investigates the everyday magic through conversations, note writing and score writing to invite as many souls as possible to experience and co create the magic in the everyday.
To explore such a vast problem, Thielemans is convinced it requires multiple vantage points and knowledge registers from which to approach the matter.
For the occasion of the release of the book Thielemans curated a 48 hour score for CASSTL (the art space of contemporary Flemish painter Luc Tuymans and artistic collaborators Arocha-Schraenen) with talks, concerts, performances, art work, sculptures and installations.