Willem Heylen

Willem Heylen is a guitarist and producer based in Mechelen. As an artist he is mostly characterized by his diversity. His broad interest in musical genres, performing arts, music theatre, dance and beyond has led to his presence in a big scala of projects. Multidisciplinarity and collaboration are a central element in many of those projects. 

As a composer and producer he has written music for several of the projects he is part of. For the past couple of years he has also been exploring solo work. Mostly experimental ambient music. This is a source of meditative and sonic exploration in which he finds a lot of inspiration as an artist. In the season 2022-2023 he is artist in resident in RATAPLAN where he has the opportunity to develop a couple of projects throughout the artistic season.

Some of his recent artistic collaborations include : Eric Thielemans, Kurt Van Herck, Jozef Dumoulin, Joachim Badenhorst, Mark Giuliana, Stef Kamil Carlens, LEKI and many more. He has performed at a diversity of clubs and festivals in Belgium and across the world

Currently he is most active in the projects AKI, Cinema Paradiso, LEKI, SARGAM, Claroscuro, and KRANKK. Projects that range from world music to atmospheric jazz and electronic music