Fluisteren met Otto Lindholm


Fluister presents a special column on our website: ‘Luisteren met’ (“Listening with”)… While ‘Fluisteren met’ (“Whispering with”) features in-depth conversations with artists, ‘Luisteren met’ invites them to share five songs that have inspired or moved them.

This time, we asked Otto Lindholm to reveal the five tracks that shaped his creative world. The Brussels-based producer and composer is a master of the interplay between analog machines and double bass. At the intersection of drone and modern classical music, he uses his double bass, along with loop pedals and electronic effects, to create a rich and lush sound palette

Otto Lindhom will bring soundscollages to Fluister on the 16th of November.

1. Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders – Promises 
A late discovery of a record that had already become a classic. I came across it by chance one night, driving home from a concert, and was instantly drawn in by its pattern of wide, hypnotic arpeggios. Open, fluid, and disarmingly simple. The use of the harpsichord gives it a dawn-like glow, sunlight rising at dusk. Then there’s Pharoah Sanders’ tone and phrasing, oblique yet tender, carrying a kind of melancholy that feels deeply grounded and never excessive. As the record unfolds, its narrative moves through calm and tension, shaping a profoundly human journey.
For me, it stands as the opposite of a flattened culture that tries to remove whatever disturbs or unsettles us: the erasure of what makes our experiences meaningful. Music like this makes me want to keep going, to keep searching, playing, and expressing. Free from expectation or result. Just doing, for the sake of doing, and sharing it.

2• M. Ravel (Cavani String Quartet version) – String Quartet in F major
This piece stayed with me for over three years, almost every day, around the time my second daughter was born. We used to listen to it together until we fell asleep. It grounded me, soothed me, opened up a clear, luminous space. It’s Ravel’s only string quartet, a gem of balance and precision, both in form and expression.
It deeply inspired me as someone who works with long forms. The four movements are distinct and autonomous, yet connected, speaking to and enriching one another. That idea helped me complete a long composition where I brought together several pieces written over the years, all different, yet sharing the same spirit. I finally managed to gather them into a single long form, a suite for solo double bass in eight movements, which I’m currently finishing mixing and plan to release in 2027.

3• G. Ligeti – Lontano 
I discovered this piece live in Brussels, performed by the Brussels Philharmonic. It was an absolute shock. A sonic mass of extraordinary density, written in 1967, entirely orchestral. No machines, no effects, just acoustic instruments, strong writing, and a clear, radical vision.
The music overwhelmed me: abstract yet tangible images, pulses, breaths, an organic tension. At the same time, it reassured me as a musician, as someone who faces a string instrument every day. I left the concert transformed, full of ideas and desire, with one thought in mind: play your vision.

4• Tortoise – Ten-Day Interval (TNT)
This piece, and the whole album TNT, completely changed the way I understood music. Trained in jazz in Brussels, I was living within a rather compartmentalized mindset – jazz, rock, electronic, classical – everything existed in parallel, nothing spoke to each other.
Absorbed and passionate, I was unconsciously searching for a bridge between these artificial categories. Then I discovered Tortoise and TNT, and as its title suggests, it literally blew open the walls I had built. Suddenly, everything became fluid and interconnected. I realized that genres are simply different ways of cooking the same ingredients: it’s all a matter of flavor. The essence underneath is the same, independent of form, and it moves us when it touches something true. Years later, I had the chance to open for them with an early solo project, a prototype of what Otto Lindholm would eventually become.

5• Garbarek, Haden, Gismonti – Folk Song
Unknowingly, this record has been with me through much of my life. My mother borrowed it from the public library when I was about thirteen. The opening theme stayed engraved somewhere deep inside me, like a madeleine from Proust. Years went by, the CD was r60eturned, and the tapes I had copied were lost in various moves… no physical trace left. Yet something had written itself within me.
One day, decades later, I was at a friend’s place and he put the record on. Suddenly, everything came rushing back: I was thrown twenty years into the past, listening on repeat, reliving that first vibration.
By then I had studied jazz, discovered Gismonti, Garbarek, and especially Charlie Haden, as a bassist myself. That theme had quietly and unconsciously drawn an inner line. Its color, lyricism, gentleness, and ardor still accompany me today, in the way I listen, play, and write.