june 27th, 2009 :: "Whatever we can describe at all ..." :: A patent recently granted to Apple warped me back 13 years, to when I sat in front of the telly, graphing soccer matches into a notebook and ruminating on the elegant jiggling of little specks of dust in the hot summer air, whose coming into existence (their 'being the case') we can track down to a point at some near infinitesimal distance from an alpha (that might be also an omega) where, like in a meta pure data patch, time and space got load-banged into being . ... [ read more __ ]

june 18th, 2009 :: A Table! au Brass (sketches) :: Unseen to the public, playing his sopranino like a pied piper trying to lure their two little girls away from the quarreling couple, Jean-Jacques was to arrive in the catacomb below the first table, the sax sounds whirling and drifting up the holes in the floor through which run the big pipes of the old machine installation ... [ read more __ ]

may 30th, 2009 :: "Also high bridges over the river" :: As part of the Maastricht Kunsttour this year visiting artist Jodi Rose recorded and played her 50th bridge: the Hoge Brug across the Meuse, for pedestrians and cyclists only.
"There’s something about the scale of my obsession that sets it apart," Jodi was cited saying last year, and indeed there is ... Read about bridges all over the world, excited into collapsing, like the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, that was brought into torsional vibration by aeroelastic fluttering in november 1940 ... Maybe also Jodi one day will pluck a bridge's strings, like with some God or Overlord's fingers. For now she's content chasing her love as this world's one and only Bridge Punk, doing them with whatever means she finds at hand ... [ read more __ ]

may 23rd, 2009 :: It feels like summer in the city :: a first quick report on what's happening in Maastricht at the 10th - jubilee - edition of the Kunsttour, where, in one of the two glass rooms overlooking the large former production hall of the Timmerfabriek I set up a Foundtaping Consultation Space, and started spinning a tape web ... [ read more __ ]

may 13th, 2009 :: strange things with and without electrickery :: Along with an awful lot of fun, the main lesson that was to be learned at last month's Scrapyard Challenge workshop was that pretty much anything that moves can be used as a switch. And wherever you've got a switch at hand, it's you that's in control ... modulo some wiring, an Arduino board, a patch and a laptop, but soit ...
Watch a concise uTube, summarizing the 6 hours workshop, which was the final in a series of events organised by Dorkbot Paris at the Palais de Tokyo on the occasion of the Gakona exposition, full of an awful lot of awfully strange things, with and without electrickery ... [ read more __ ]

april 23rd, 2009 :: Martin Bril (1959-2009) :: Yesterday, searching for some papers in a cupboard I found a file that I had long forgotten about. On it there was written "Bril en v/d Grond". Inside I found print-outs of old e-mails and of a number of texts by Martin Bril.
There was also an audio-cassette.
Only few hours later I was reached by the sad news that in Amsterdam Martin had succumbed to the cancer that he had been fighting for so long ... This podcast - Witte knieën, Rok 'n' Roll - is an extract from that audio-cassette.
We will not forget Martin. [ read more __ ]

april 16th, 2009 :: Friday the 13th :: On friday march 13th of this year La Comète 347 in Paris became the arena for displaying a vision of Jean Bordé's, who invited Diktat, Nozal Cube and La Brocante Sonore - three different, but musically related, groups - to together realize a simultaneous EAI performance. What was intended as a Triple Entente became a wondrous audio kermis, in which - as a matter of fact - the audience were the big winner ...
This soundblog edition's podcast is a recording of Diktat's unplugged live performance in the monday-before-that-friday's edition of Radio AligreFM's Songs Of Praise. Here you find Diktat at its best: three dictaphonists weave a polyphonic texture out of deconstructed discourse, while the double bass acts as the spinal cord around wich the three voices (r)evolve ... [ read more __ ]

april 01st, 2009 :: A Block with a Name :: When I hopped over from Amsterdam to Maastricht for the weekend starting on friday march 20th, I forgot to bring my toothbrush. As a result I discovered the inside of the brand new suburban MFA, Centre Manjefiek Malberg, also home to the Tijdverkijker, an interesting interactive video installation by Dutch artist Geert Mul.
At the Rondeel, I admired the inside of the gigantic red hot air balloon, which has become a second, an interior, skin for the ArtSpace, that visiting artists may get under. In between the meeting with old friends, as one might have expected, the evening there brought quite a bit of noise.
The noise made me wonder ... it led to some lines on Edd Noi$ and Willy Fistw€ll's performance, and then some more on an heroic attempt by Kim Laugs and Rinus van Alebeek - none though really concerns this or that duo, or such or such group in particular: it addresses the pathetic impotence of 'fringe noise' as a contemporary (bourgeois) practice in general ... [ read more __ ]

march 22nd, 2009 :: The Meaning of Life [ii] :: Much of modern art is very much like music: its essence, like that of life, does not reside within eternally existing material objects ... It is one of the reflections that somehow arose from the sudden crash of my MacBook hard drive about a week ago, and from attending a meeting at the Netherlands Institute for Media-art in Amsterdam, on the conservation of the continually expanding dutch national heritage of video- and other media-art, the originals of which all are threatened by a sudden death sooner or later, due to the degradation of their obsolete physical carriers and the ongoing changes in technologies and formats. Whereas the dutch dat-art curatorial institutions brace themselves for a costly periodical migration (every 7-10 years) of the entire collection to whatever are the then-generation standards to come, I think we just should let them die in peace. And set them free, by allowing the potentially unlimited distribition of their digital copies, in whatever format. This is not a popular opinion ... Neither (yet) is KorggroK, our analo-electronic trio that made its debut on sunday march 1st, when we performed La Fin des Temps at La Guillotine in Montreuil ... "It no longer is. Nonetheless it continues to be." ... [ read more __ ]

march 04th, 2009 :: The Meaning of Life [i] :: We all know that Kurt smelt like teen spirit. For similar reasons (though it admittedly makes for a less brilliant song title) I smelt like opium ...
On sunday february 22nd, without really having wanted to, in the Grand Palais in Paris I was part of the crowd of gazers that were shuffling along the treasures that were collected by fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent during his life time ... Almost of all it was auctioned away by Christie's in the days that followed, for a total amount of more than 350 million euros. Reason for me to continue contemplating the sense of it all, even more than I had begun doing already in the days before that .... [ read more __ ]

march 10th, 2009 :: A weekend at the Ateliers Claus :: The old tape machine on the table made me feel like Krapp. I walked up the stage carrying the Grundig TK20 like it were a valise and put it down. I plugged the tape recorder into a socket, and unlocked and lifted its cover. I blew off some of the dust that over the years it had collected. When I then turned the large switch to set it in motion, I found myself mumbling the old man's memorable first words in that fabulous monologue by Samuel Beckett: "Box . . . thrree . . . spool . . . five .... Spool! .... Spooool! ..." [ read more __ ]

february 19th, 2009 :: Time and the weather :: It was storming and it was raining. "Alle mensen wat een weer!", I overheard a woman exclaim in dutch, who was struggling on along the wet pavement and looking up at the sky from under her broken umbrella. It was like that: the weather of Holy Fuck, le temps de Bon Dieu, het weer van Alle Mensen ... So why not stay inside, and get creative with crassettes? ... Read about belt buckles, trendy shop window deco, urban DJ gear and Florencia Viton's collection of amazing tape necklaces (lots of Elvis, and quite some Shirley Bassey's as well) ... [ read more __ ]

january 15th, 2009 :: Kassettenkopf ; then Montreuil, Brussels, Amsterdam :: I already imagine myself later this year, when, as a latter-day Leopold Bloom, I will try to find my way through the city of Dublin, following a path traced by Kassettenkopf. But for now, in Brussels, from january 19th-24th, I will be working my Found Tapes in the rue Crickx straat, in '? Footage or Fetish', followed by a weekend of performances: as a quartet with Jonas Kocher, Raed Yassin and Jean-Jacques Duerinckx, and with JJ in A Table! ... And though ookoi's 1024 and l'Ecoute are projected throughout january in the Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, you will not find me there... From Brussels I'll be driving back up to Amsterdam, where we will be checking connections, streams and servers, transporting a barrel organ from there to here, scratching our heads and comparing notes, while setting up and rehearsing for Raudio's ookoi@E@rport in the Theaterzaal of the Amsterdam Conservatory, on saturday january 31st, from 12h until 17h ... [ read more __ ]

january 06th, 2009 :: The Voise of Noise :: Little will make me as happy as happening upon a good idea, be it my own, or somebody else's ... Therefore this edition of the SoundBlog is dedicated to (at least) three (3) simply wonderful (and wonderfully simple) ideas. First, there are the (many) fine ideas of dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf, now on show in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht ... We then reflect sort of heavily upon the craftful and enjoyable music of british electronician & band-leader Matthew Herbert, who in his polit-pop does not allow himself the use of sounds that 'exist already'. Matthew creates much of his sound from field recordings, often obtained during pretty extravagant recording rituals. I argue that the logic that leads to him to doing so, in fact is a logic of magic ... In the third and final part we then reveal the true 'voise of noise' by partly erasing it, in 'denoising noise music' with Richard Eigner ... [ read more __ ]

december 31st, 2008 :: Thinking can be Fun! :: 2008's final SoundBlog edition begins by explaining how Donation's debut CD Nouveau chemin de guerre surprised me, and thus managed to become my favorite 2008 album. Then LTM's re-issue of The Fruit of the Original Sin, a classic Crepuscule post-punk compilation from the early 1980's, takes us back all the way to the London of 1981 and the recording of Furtive Tears - my first ever (and most probably also last ever) Christmas song - in a St. John's Wood basement right next door to Paul McCartney's mansion. Here's to a genuine ghost of Chrismas past ... [ read more __ ]

december 04th, 2008 :: Elderly artists, some of them sleeping :: From the Zoo de Vincennes I went straight on to the Hotel Kube, in the 18th arrondissement, only to roll on to Brussels the next morning. There I performed with J.J. at the Festival des Sons Liberes, where we shared the stage with Charlotte Hug, british improv veteran Terry Day and Camusi from Bologna. This sweet italian duo performed again on sunday, during a great party at Marco and Patrizia's superb Brussels loft, where I met a belgian double bass player wearing a smashing neck-tie, who told me how, fifteen years ago, one very early friday morning he had performed for four hundred mooing belgian cows ... [ read more __ ]

december 01st, 2008 :: Monkey Business, etc. :: On the afternoon of friday 24th we performed in the parisian zoological garden, the Zoo de Vincennes, dressed at our sunday's best. Our first set was for the zoo's community of Baboons. We then turned around for a second set, performed explicitly for Chimène the Gibbon, a very shy ape, but a fantastic singer. It was very special indeed to experience the mingling of the sounds from our dictaphones, the sound of Anthony's guitar, that of Jean's double bass, and the metallic percussion hit and bowed by Rébus and myself, with the sounds of the zoo around us. The garden and the animals were very much like a fifth musician, and the whole performance indeed spun itself into the intricate web of relations that we had intended, heralding in its own modest way the transition of contemporary art into a new altermodern era ... [ read more __ ]

november 26th, 2008 :: Kings, Queens & Koons :: "In for a penny, in for a pound "... With the family we went on a saturday outing to the Versailles Palace that until the 4th of january 2009 is home to a selection of seventeen kandy-colored sculptures by american postpop- and kitch-art star Jeff Koons.
Though very windy and sort of cold, it was a nice day, lots of blue in between the clouds ...
Riches to riches ... from surface to surface ...
Because of course that it is, and of course that it's not" ... [ read more __ ]

november 12th, 2008 :: Neurosen der Präzision (Tuned City, Berlin _iii :: On the second Tuned City day we again walked for far more than two hours, up to the Staalplaat store in the Torstraße. There we met a charming young japanese musician who 'knew about the festival since coming', and Rinus van Alebeek wrote a radio memory on Brandon Labelle's white tablecloth. We then embarked upon the long march back down to the Weserstraße ... The first stage of that journey led us to food and the second one to music. With its third stage we came to knowledge, as we arrived at Udo Noll's place, who that evening was just about to test his upcoming presentation of the radio aporee soundmaps, played by means of a GPS enabled cell phone ... We thus listened to the many sonic ghosts lurking in the neighborhood, while Udo shared with us his passion for maps and the history of surveying ... [ read more __ ]

october 29th, 2008 :: Light budget, heavy thinking (Tuned City, Berlin _i :: For the time of Tuned City, an exhibition and conference project in Berlin, Germany, which took place between july 1st and 5th of this year, I joined Rinus van Alebeek and his das kleine, which in 2008 went into asymptotic Zen mode ... In this first of several reports, read about the sirens in Berlin, about Ryijo Ikeda's Spectra/Matrix installation next to the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, and about the two old ladies that were with me on the bus from Hauptbahnhof to Neukoelln ... "Wherever you go, there you are" ... [ read more __ ]

october 12th, 2008 :: Hanna's Sirens (Tuned City, Berlin _o :: Hanna Buhl came from Berlin to Paris, on a summer-sound-sabbatical, and re-discovered there a sound by her unheard since early youth: the testing of the sirens ... To capture that sound and its feeling, on the first wednesday of october, she sent out a team of 'siren hunters' to set up their microphones along the Seine ... [ read more __ ]

september 22nd, 2008 :: souvenirs de vacances ("hear what you think!") :: This summer I had tea at Rod Summer's, an audio artist of british origin who has been living and working for most of his life in my native town, Maastricht. I talked with Rod about his career and work, but most about the VEC Audio Exchange Program, an audio mail art project run by him between 1978 and 1983. It comprises a series of 16 audio-cassettes that provide a multi-faceted sound portrait of those years. The 16 1/2 hour collection of (mostly) 'home'-recordings nicely feature and illustrate several of the hang-ups and peculiarities of those years, as well as bringing to the fore the great overlap and intricate entanglement of the world of 'young and avantgarde art' with that of post-punk experimental pop in its bloom time, the late 1970s / early 1980s ... Back in Paris there was even more mail art: though it did not make any sound, it stuck thousandfold to the walls of gallery Art de Rien in the rue d'Orsel ... [ read more __ ]

september 18th, 2008 :: The Speed of Things :: "It was only after a while that it dawned upon me that she really thought that I was putting the tapes out there ... But isn't that wonderful ? Imagine me roaming city streets, carefully watching ... looking for suitable spots to drape strands of magnetic tape that I carry along in my bag ... around flowers, in fences, in gutters ... Oh, it would be so much better ... " [ read more __ ]

august 31st, 2008 :: " Le chasseur " (foundtaping in brussel_ii) :: when outside foundtaping, I'm like a hunter... So go and watch "Le chasseur", a 4 minute u-Tube clip shot last year at Recyclart in Brussels. Its soundtrack is an extract of the trio performance we did out there with Jean-Jacques Duerinckx and Fabrizion Rota at the end of the "Tape It : Found Tapes" event, june last year ... Read about the tape I stole from a parked red Toyota, and the audio cassette guide for christian pilgrims, found in the Rue Blaes ... Then hurry over to the Found Tapes Exhibition online store, to get your copy of "Found in Brussels" ... [ read more __ ]

june 18th, 2008 :: "Sing laping, sing !" (foundtaping in brussels_i) :: Somewhat over a year ago, during my 'foundtaping event' at Recyclart in Brussels, Belgium, I stood on the Place du Jeu de Balle and watched a man pick up a cardboard box. The box was among the rubbish left behind there at the end of the daily flea market. When the man turned the box upside down, out there came tumbling a lot of 16 cassette tapes. He took the box. I picked up the tapes. I found that once the tapes belonged to Willy's husband. Willy and her hubby liked singmusic. And they liked birds. Hubby used the cassettes to record Willy's gramophone records. To do so, he put the microphone of his cassettetape machine next to the gramophone player's speaker. Which was not far from the birdcage. Inside of that cage there was a shrieking singbird... Whence, 16 full cassette tapes long, we hear Willy and her hubby's domestic bird squeaking along to the music ... Now listen to all of it together in "Sing laping, sing!", which is this entry's podcast ... ... [ read more __ ]

june 30th, 2009 :: Pop is a very funny thing :: Were it not for the curious fact of what became of the party that my daughter threw for her friends on the occasion of her 12th birthday, in the Bois de Vincennes I would hardly have seen reason to mention Michael Jackson's over-mediatised demise ... But then read how the day after Jackson died I acquired a sound souvenir that I will not lightly forget: a bunch of pre-teen boys and girls dancing and moonwalking in line to Thriller in the streets and in the park, acting out and reflecting like mirrors a collective emotion that they picked up from their parents, friends and the media ... [ read more __ ]

june 13th, 2009 :: More Best Before :: Highlighting more sound art presented at the 2009 Maastricht Kunsttour, we visit the Feedbacksociety's Feedbackstructures, and rifle through the first edition of Stichting Intro's Auditive Atlas ... there we learn about 150 million years of Maastricht's History, in just little over ten minutes ...[ read more __ ]

june 11th, 2009 :: Circuit #1 et Frites Sonores :: On the evening of june 6th, the association "Douche Froide" (that means: 'cold shower') organized an interesting festivallette in lower Montreuil, with parallel performances and installations at four different places: a yellow store, a van, a wig maker's atelier and a garden. I spent the evening in the Boutique Jaune, a former confectioner's store, together with tapes that over the years I had picked up in the neighborhood ... At the same time in the the Land of Giants, Ana-R participated in yet another festival. That one was organized by "c Dans nos cordes", which means "it's In our strings" ... or rather: "Yes we can" ... [ read more __ ]

june 1st, 2009 :: Playing the Popular Classics :: Though the field of 'loosely related practices' that nowadays is labeled 'sound art' may seem to lack a 'core practice', there are a number of core techniques that have been applied throughout much of its history. Signal feedback is one of them. Among the many sound/art events in the ArtSpace Het Rondeel during this year's Kunsttour in Maastricht, the Netherlands, there were (at least) two examples of classic feedback sound art. On friday evening Séamus O'Donnell set up a vintage reel-to-reel tape machine feedback-loop system. The next evening Rébus & myself stretched some 8 meters of thin metal measure ribbon across two grand piano's, and did a variation on Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire . [ read more __ ]

may 28th, 2009 :: A sound is a sound that sounds :: Sound art was the main focus of the 10th edition of the Kunsttour, this May 21st-24th in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Though abundantly used as a label (hence much talked and written about) and widely 'practiced', there is little consensus on what is *sound art* or what it is not, what it should be, and what it should not ...
In Maastricht last week sound art was *klankkunst*, and there was a lot of it. Read about trees falling in a forest, inverted vacuum cleaners, an old violin and a modified electro-motor; about Hans Otte's Buch der Klänge and the Feedbacksociety; about Xavier van Wersch and Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and a little about circuitbending. [ read more __ ]

may 18th, 2009 :: petit tour de table, grande bouffe :: First in a series of entries describing my recent adventures with Jean-Jacques Duerinckx, in our fine and growing series of post-alter free style junk- and sax-o-logy exercices, dedicated to Daniel Spoerri ... Most of this took place in the Kingdom of Belgium, surely a most curious among the pearls in the chain that over the past couple of decades has been strung into a 'United States of Europe' ... Belgium is a small country, but hopelessly divided because of the ineradicable mutual distrust that opposes the two main linguistic groups making up its population: the (sort of) Dutch speaking Flemings, and the Walloons, who speak ... eh ... French. This first episode takes you to that what has remained of one of Belgium's finest breweries, those of Wielemans-Ceuppens, in Vorst/Forest, one of the nineteen municipalities of Brussels-Capital Region. [ read more __ ]

may 03rd, 2009 :: twitter.com/meesterwerk :: There is nothing inherent in a tool or a technology that will make the results of using it necessarily and beforehand trivial and of little interest. That is why there is no reason whatsoever that not - maybe soon, maybe later - someone will produce a masterpiece using Twitter ... (which, as you will know, is the social micro-blogging site that recently somewhat suddenly became immensely popular; it is based on the serial publication of sms-like status messages by its users, messages whose content is limited to at most 140 characters).
But then someone has to do it ... And if someone has to 'draw' that Twitter masterwork then why not me? ...
So, do come and see!
Follow me @meesterwerk, follow me @meesterstuk ... [ read more __ ]

april 26th, 2009 :: le petit paris : das kleine, ici :: On saturday march 14th the fine fleur of Paris-based phonographers gathered at Radio AligreFM near the Place de la Nation for the first French edition of Rinus van Alebeek's renowned das kleine fieldrecordingsfestival. It was a memorable afternoon, that saw a series of six fine examples of (applied) (radio)phonography, produced by Rébus+Kim Joeun, Gaël Segalen, Emmanuel Mieville, Julie La Rousse, Jean-Philippe Renoult and Seth Cluett. They took us on a sonic roundtrip that started in Paris, Montmartre, led down the river Danube, and through out-of-Europe places like Peru, back - literally ! - into French soil ...
Surprisingly few of the artists, though, managed to smile during their presentation.
But when they did, that was a happy view ... [ read more __ ]

april 21st, 2009 :: Junk me up, Scotty! :: This sunday april 19th I was part of a 4 (wo)men crew led by captain Rébus that went out into the rather more than less well-to-do south-western suburbs of the french capital, on an afternoon and evening long junk-hunt expedition, collecting stuff for Jonah Bucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, who had just come flying in from New York, to use in their Scrapyard Challenge Workshop, this thursday april 23rd in the Palais de Tokyo ... We filled up the back of a mini-van with toys, minitels, dvd players, record players, foam, printers, assorted pieces of metals, skis and much more, all of which, later that evening, we dumped at the Palais ... Also, read about the many letters written to Denise, and the diary of a young Dutch girl that Rébus picked up near a tube station in the very middle of Paris ... "Tout mari même non médecin est capable de percer une boîte de conserves de champignons ..." [ read more __ ]

april 07th, 2009 :: "Blood and Bottom" (RaudiOGaGa) :: ookoi's Soundtrack for Icarus is firmly rooted in our strong belief in 'jam karet': that time is elastic ...
This is reflected in the composition's global score, which, in fact, is a 'book organ' based on a track based on recordings made during the first Winterland sessions, in our Amsterdam studio, december last year ... The title of the book is RaudiOGaGa, and you may watch us play it on the little Heesbeen, right in the midst of one of those typical Dutch landscapes somewhere between Amsterdam and Utrecht, in a jubilant salut to our roots and motherland.
As part of the RAUDIO directs ookoi@E@rport-event on saturday january 31st, we took the Heesbeen down with us into the Theaterzaal of the Amsterdam Conservatory, where we gathered with old and young artists from Amsterdam and elsewhere for a five hour long multimedia extravaganza that provided an 'underground' to Paul Oomen's post-fusion symphony playing overhead ... From time to time that saturday we turned the Theaterzaal into Winterland, most notably in the event's final hour, when with mezzo-soprano Cecile Zylberajch we performed the Winterland Aria, now available as Raudio's 41st podcast ... [ read more __ ]

february 21st, 2009 :: Insular Arithmetic (ookoi toont) :: In '2525' fPcM and myself each randomly hit 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 50 = 1275 guitar chords, which makes for a total of 2 x 1275 = 2550 ... That was a lot of hard work! Fortunately we then could spend the rest of our residency - part of Archipel's Razende Bol project - the way popsters of our advanced middle age are supposed to: we hosted an evening-long retrospective of our own work on Archipel WebTV, and the remaining of our time on the island we were at the golf course ... [ read more __ ]

february 10th, 2009 :: Sweet dreams à la Comète 347 :: On thursday february 5th I went to the opening of Michael Ghent's new expo and installation in La Comète 347, on the rue du Faubourg du Temple in Paris, and I loved it. "Sweet dreams" is both rough and poetic, convincing in its choice of materials and through its many layers of overlapping meaning ... "Like a room in a fairy brothel where some Ice Queen soothes hers johns ..."
And while talking about La Comète, I take you back to our Diktat Big Band's "Sturm der Liebe" performance there, on the saturday of july 13th, 2008. Now available on bootleg DVD ... quirky, cheesy, abstract, absurd, concrete, brilliant, stupid, silly and resplendently illegal ... [ read more __ ]

february 07th, 2009 :: Mok mok jaha für das kleine in Berlin (Tuned City, berlin_vi) :: In this final article on das kleine and Tuned City, last summer in Berlin, I finally take with Rinus to the Wriezener Freiraum, late afternoon of friday july 4th, after that day's episode of 'Sturm der Liebe'. "I still wonder how it would have been if the weather had been different ..." How a drizzle not became a rain, and a row not managed to turn into a riot. About Composed City, metal containers and fly papers. About contingency and necessity. About explicit gesturality being an artist's responsability. About listening in the undergrowth ... [ read more __ ]

january 30th, 2009 :: A Tingel Tangle Tape Machine :: In this first report on a well-spent week in Brussels you'll find a description of my 'tingel tangle tape machine'. It was one of the items in "? Footage or Fetish", the found tapes exhibition and installation that between january 19th and 25th was the appropriate decor for my diligently getting ahead with the preparation of new acquisitions for my still evolving collection of cast-away sounds ... The entry comes with a five minute YouTube clip, in which you can see how it 'tingels' and 'tangles' ... [ read more __ ]

december 23rd, 2008 :: « das kleine, Intiem », on the first saturday of july earlier this year, despite the finest of summer weather to me felt a lot like a Christmas eve ... Read about the Found Tapes Archiv at Cake and Coffee's, about the East German Funkhaus and its Laboratory for Acoustic Musical Obstacles; about the Subharchord (the socialist answer to our capitalist Trautonium); about Ben Roberts who came flying in from Madrid with his Sounds of the Flohmarkt, about Soinu Mapa (an online sound map of the Basque Country), and about general and specific conditions relating to the toilets in art museums all over the world. [ read more __ ]

december 08th, 2008 :: un-Tuned City (foundtaping in Neukölln) :: My third day at Tuned City in Berlin, first week of july earlier this year, was an un-Tuned City day ... Instead of walking up and down to Mitte I walked up and down Neukoelln's Sonnenallee, and brought six found tapes home to Cake and Coffee. There I finished writing my favorite found found tapes quote onto the gallery's freshly whitened walls. Letter by letter, word by word, and all of it in tape. Some thoughts on iPod culture along the way, and a short animation. [ read more __ ]

november 19th, 2008 :: Steal this for the love of god ... :: On a thursday morning earlier this month I went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. For a while I there stood skull-to-skull with For the Love of God, a postart extravaganza signed Damien Hirst and bearing the London platinum hallmark of 2007, exposed in a small dark room in the midst of our old dutch masters.
"Underneath the physical skill there is always a very dark and cruel view of life ... The weak won't inherit the world ... "
With pictures of Hirst's complete selection of 16 works from the museum's collection of 17th century paintings, and a couple of hints on how to steal this ... [ read more __ ]

november 07th, 2008 :: Cake & Coffee (Tuned City, Berlin _ii :: the first night of Tuned City, this summer in Berlin, led Rinus van Alebeek and me to a night shop at the border of Kreuzberg. We bought some drinks and sat down next to two big but friendly Germans. "Mok mok jaha!" one of them cheered in Klingonisch ... "Ruhm und Ehre: Mok mok jaha!," he said. "You can learn it" ... The next day my feet hurt a lot ... Mok mok jaha! for das kleine in Berlin was still lying ahead. [ read more __ ]

october 02nd, 2008 :: the right to be slow :: Last week, with the ookoi, we went to PICNIC, the annual Amsterdam new-media-mega fest, as embedded artists ... Ex-pressing our im-pressions of precisely how our future was created, we sat on a vibrating couch, were lifted sky-high by a pair of scissor lifts, met old friends, made new ones and were rewarded with free drinks. We discovered the latest in e-Art and claimed our right to be slow by making a new number: 11:01.4 ... About iPhones, RFID-tags, digital things, collaborative creativity, mechanical turks, the sheepmarket, and music as a metaphor for business ... [ read more __ ]

september 14th, 2008 :: Psycho/Geo/Conflux in Brooklyn, NY _i :: While this year's edition of Conflux, the annual New York festival dedicated to contemporary psychogeography, just came to an end, here's me reporting on last year's edition, when I went foundtaping in Brooklyn, NY. I just finished "Found in Brooklyn, NY", which documents the 25 tape clods that I picked up there, and in this and following SoundBlog reports I will try to retrace my 2007 steps in sunny Williamsburg and elsewhere by means of the map of my Williamsburg tape finds ... In this report: read about Sander Veenhof's "SL Walkie Talkie Walks", and the Shua Group's "Intersection Play" [ read more __ ]

august 29th, 2008 :: Rags 'n' riches :: got up-cycled and RFID-triggered at the brand new Mediamatic Bank in the Amsterdam Vijzelstraat, a street that for some reason I continue to associate with depression, wind and rain ... Watch me in a fine pair of sekppku pants, hand-tailored from formerly owned trousers drawn from a huge pile of rags provided by the Salvation Army. On the pile there was a sign: "Do not climb the mountain" ... [ read more __ ]

august 23rd, 2008 :: Trashing, un(un(un(educated :: Noise ... sometimes it is white, sometimes it is pink; it may be brown, speckled, crackled or thermal ... even chaos is noise! Or should that be the other way round? ... Some lines on Portable Noise Kremator's Uneducated Trashing, a very limited edition 8-track CDr, produced by the author of the Noiseblog, with the help of a cracklebox that he just bought and a couple of effects ... [ read more __ ]

july 28th, 2008 :: Michel Waisvisz' Song of Praise :: On the evening of this year's Bastille Day, in the small basement studio of the parisian Radio AligreFM, a ten (wo)men strong 'Cracklebox Orchestra' gathered to perform a Kraakdoos Sinfonietta: a tribute to Michel Waisvisz, the inventor of the cracklebox (and much more besides), who recently passed away. Listen to our Sinfonietta in this entry's podcast ...
[ read more __ ]

july 23rd, 2008 :: Mind: the gap (Hommage à Nam Jun Paik) :: Musicians from the impromptu Ana-R chamber orchestra, in divers combinations, performed over the course of two separate evenings in june six times a parisian Sound CityScape, signed by the Korean artist Daily ... We used a flute, a toy piano, a Casio keyboard, an acoustic guitar and an ukulele on sunday june 15th at La Veilleuse; at the franco-korean Espace Han-Seine, on friday june 22nd, there were a double bass, a piano, and - again - Rebus's toy piano. I think I never ever before heard nor played anything as ephemeral. " "... As ephemeral as the nightly view of a city from within an airplane flying overhead. As ephemeral as the view of Paris from within a car that is speeding along its ring way ..." Such was Daily's 'Hommage to Nam Jun Paik' ... [ read more __ ]

june 29th, 2008 :: Diktat went double Swiss :: DIKTAT performed but twice over the last seven months or so. Twice that was in Paris, and twice we met a Swiss duo in concert. Late last autumn we played with BUG (Christian Bucher and Andreas Glauber) in La Comete (watch it on YouTube). And last month (hear a 20-minute extract in this entry's podcast) we met JEUDI (Benoit Moreau and John Menoud) in l'Ogresse, for the time of an intimate and concentrated two set performance. Then we mistook an egg box for a hat, and in the end went home with nothing but some change, and enough Mongolian Tugrik to buy us a couple of pieces of candy ... [ read more __ ]

august 27th, 2008 :: Spiegeltje, spiegeltje :: The star of the evening, on thursday july 17th, 2008 at the parisian La Miroiterie was a mysterious black box, called RT.220 ME. Jean-Philippe, aka Hawaiian Spasms, had found it in a dustbin on the parking-lot of a shopping mall in Marne-la-Vallee. It lay there, crying out to him like an abandoned child. Listen to this entry's podcast, and hear RT chit-chatting along with the lot of us in the Miroiterie's yard ... Then read about the Stig Noise Sound System (from Liverpool, UK) : "... some bands start to play, but Stig Noise exploded ..." Together with Rinus van Alebeek we were the final act on that memorable evening. "Large parts felt like a freeze within the sound of a huge mirror at the precise moment of its 'smashing' ..." [ read more __ ]

where? + agenda

july 1-10, 2009 - [+/-] Paris (France)
july 10-15, 2009 - [+/-] London (UK)
july 15-aug 3, 2009 - [+/-] Paris (France)
august 3-10, 2009 - [+/-] Maastricht (the Netherlands)
august 11-28, 2009 - [+/-] Amsterdam (the Netherlands)

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harS 은 누구 이는가?

this is an index the harsmedia.com domain (2000||2007) - it is sort of a welcome - thank you for reading you're welcome ... this here first page is sort of a lid - all content is below the blue colored words - much is about sound, about music - the homepage will lead you to archived content and it keeps you informed on recent changes - changes and additions in the soundblog, the found tapes exhibition, the amphibious records archive, to the sound chronicles - there are also links leading to parts and pages kept, for various reasons, from previous versions of the site and to some other domains - without links there's not much of a web - for syndication do use the feed - une partie du site est rédigée en français - cette partie n'est pas une traduction - ce sont des pages contenant des (anciennes) notes sur internet, le web et ses langages - nederlandstalig zijn incidentele verwijzingen naar geschriften van en over j.k. harsman - most pages on the site are written in english - so is harsman's london diary - thank you

where? + agenda

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