— Serial Drummer Girls | 2016
Koen Theys

In SERIAL DRUMMER GIRLS, as in much of Koen Theys's work, live performance serves as a foundational element, giving way to a complex cinematic exploration.

For this piece, Theys assembled a group of thirty young women, including percussionists and vocalists, staging them on a set purpose-built to enhance the film’s visual and auditory impact. The music, specifically Western atonal and modern classical compositions, plays a central role in the work. In seeking to merge sound and image seamlessly, Theys collaborated with ChampdAction, a pioneering platform with extensive experience in multidisciplinary, experimental sound-based productions, lending a nuanced depth to the film’s sonic landscape.

SERIAL DRUMMER GIRLS represents the concluding chapter in Theys’s so-called Zombie Trilogy, a series of films where music acts as the structural backbone, yet is stripped of its original social and cultural contexts. The trilogy opens with Death Fucking Metal, which draws on rock and heavy metal, moves through My Dragon Brother, focused on traditional Chinese opera, and culminates with Serial Drummer Girls. Each genre presented in the trilogy retains its recognisable form, yet, devoid of its initial vitality and meaning, exists as a hollow, “zombified” shell.

This detachment emphasises the work’s critique on the hollowing of contemporary cultural symbols, rendering the musical genres as relics stripped of the original energies and ideologies they once embodied. Through this meticulously staged, sonically immersive work, Theys invites viewers to consider the spectral presence of culture's forgotten meanings, preserved yet strangely bereft of life in the echo chambers of modern media.