Painter, musician, inveterate traveler and Namahn's chief mechanic and "gopher" ("go for"), Erik traces the roots of his richly eclectic life to a small-town Ohio boyhood. When he's not composing music, painting or playing DJ at Walvis, he'll be found spending free moments with his fashion-designer wife and their one-year-old son.
I met Namahn's founder Joannes through Walter Hus, the firm's 'artist in residence' so to speak. Walter has set up a recording studio in one of Namahn's large work spaces and we co-produce music together. Namahn is a strangely familiar environment to me but I'll get back to that later.
I'm the guy who takes care of office supplies, reorganises storage spaces, manages the library cataloguing, coordinates events—including speakers, takes care of repairs, maintenance and mail deliveries—and gets you your coffee!
I grew up in central Ohio in a family of four children who moved a lot. My dad built racing car engines as a passion and kitchens for a living. He'd buy these houses and fix them up and I think I got that tinkering impulse from him. As a kid I liked to tear apart car engines and put them together. I got my artistic sense from my maternal grandmother, who was a self-taught portrait and landscape painter.
After high school I moved to California's San Francisco Bay area to study painting at the Academy of Art. It was really a second childhood for me. That's where I got exposure to the international scene, which stimulated my love of travel. I first went to Tokyo with my girlfriend for a few months, and later to Amsterdam for a year. Back in San Francisco, I organised painting exhibits in warehouses before moving to New York City in 1987 and then eventually Europe.
Ha, yes in London, I stayed in a squat for a while and met some French musicians, at the time, I was a huge fan of industrial music. They invited me to participate in a music group as a lighting and set designer and it was around that time, with no formal training, that I started co-composing electronic music. That experience taught me a lot about working in a collective. After five years, the entire group moved to Paris.
I lived in Paris for 10 years, alternating between painting and music, and started participating in a well-known Parisian residence for dancers, musicians and visual artists called the l'Hôpital Éphémère. We moved into their 2nd site called l'Usine Éphémère and recently, they've opened a new space in these old factory buildings that line the canal Saint Martin.
Life at Namahn holds a lot of these same elements. The company is located in an old printing factory with great creative spaces for music and photography studios. And apart from my musical collaboration with Walter, the notion of the collective is very much present in the Namahn work ethic. We're all very creative individuals but we all pull together as a team.