Jasna Veličković (RS/NL) is the Belgrade-born Dutch composer and performer based in Amsterdam. Her artistic output has been developed through an interaction between a life-long fascination with the sound, an enduring interest in an intricate encounter between music and technology, and an inclination toward experimentation. Since 2008 she has been exploring the musical capacities of the (electro) magnetic field – induction, interference – both as the source of sound and the compositional material. This preoccupation of hers became an ongoing research artistic project that she dubbed The Art of Coil.
Her first explorations included the ways of animating traditional instruments with electromagnetic waves and consequently playing these instruments without touching them. One of the pinnacles of this phase of her work is Last Song (2009–10) for percussion quartet. In 2013, she distanced herself from making music for and performing on traditional instruments and introduced magnets and metal objects into her works. That led her to the construction of a new instrument aptly named the Velicon – a specific electronic system consisting of a changeable configuration of magnets and metal objects animated by coils. In the orbit of the Velicon, the composer subsequently introduced discarded electronic devices and started using them either as the sole sound source, as in Remote Me (2018), or in combination with the Velicon, as in Opera of Things (2019). By virtue of the interference between the electromagnetic field of the objects she used, her compositional method did not necessarily assume creating the traditionally conceived definite sound as provoking the change of sound. Quite recently, Veličković has reintroduced traditional instruments into her work. The pieces Underneath (2021) for hyper-organ and coils, awarded with the Stevan Mokrajac Prize of the Composers’ Association of Serbia, and Adapting (2022) for Ensemble Resilience represent her most recent creations in that field.