january 23th, 2010 :: Rowland S. Howard † :: Just before the turn of the decade, on december 30th 2009, Rowland S. Howard died. Some thoughts and some relics: a couple of b&w pictures that I took on one of the evenings The Birthday Party hit the London Venue (july 16th, 1981). [ read more __ ]

january 13th, 2010 :: Art fleas :: Pushing last Christmas we set up a table at the Générale's Puces de l'Art. Even though we failed to sharpen my toppling cassettes world record, we still were the tropical spice in the Art fleas' ice, and joined forces with Blenno and the Wurst-Brücke for a memorable rendering of the Dutch national anthem. Our Wilhelmus Van Nassouwe is the edition's podcast. [ read more __ ]

january 01st, 2010 :: Y've got the music in ya :: Here's some good news to kick-start you off into a new decade: we're all musical! It's a matter of scientific fact! And I got it from the horse's mouth, as I spent Christmas with Dutch music cognition pioneer Henkjan Honing's book. It carries the message as its title: Iedereen is muzikaal. About rhythm and auditory perspective. And how we landed within time. [ read more __ ]

december 05th, 2009 :: Naughty noughtie (-) / chop shop (-) :: Will that day be warm and bright? Or will it snow? It's not-another noughties flashback, but a firm jump ahead to an even earlier future: that of the 1990s and my chop shop crammed with its n(a)(o)ghties. Well... anything for you, dear !... So now hush, and get me that recycled cassette tape necktie ... [ read more __ ]

november 11th, 2009 :: Waiting in the Wings, often :: I asked Maja whether she could get me a typewriter.
"I have a Hermes Media 3," she told me ...
And thus I sat in my writer's bin, Waiting in the Wings, the first weekend of october, in the Wunderkammer that is the Maastricht Artspace Het Rondeel, at the time of this writing sadly threatened to soon no longer be ... [ read more __ ]

october 26th, 2009 :: Minisec :: A yellow Trabant Tropicale, contemplating Musikhaus Hans Tappert, and how, in order to record the conversations that passed along the evergrowing number of tapped telephone lines, the East-German Stasi (the Minisec) stole the musicassettes that friends and family sent over by mail from the West. [ read more __ ]

october 10th, 2009 :: Project Icarus OST :: On the last minute/short notice mini RjDj sprint we did in cooperation with Mediamatic at this year's Amsterdam Picnic, lots of reactive theory, and all about the ookoi's second RjDj scene: a reactive version of their original soundtrack for Project Icarus, part of Dick Tuinder's feature-film "Winterland", which on september 29 had its sold-out premiere at the NFF in Utrecht. [ read more __ ]

september 20th, 2009 :: Found Lost Sound :: Earlier this summer in London I met John Smith and Graeme Miller, who, almost ten years ago, made a short film in 28 tableaux, showing discarded cassette tapes caught by a variety of objects in the streets of the north-eastern part of London where they live. Together with the soundtrack consisting in a mix of the sounds of the city with that on the tapes, it makes for a great city-portrait, that I knew about, but never yet had the chance to see. But now I did. I found Lost Sound. [ read more __ ]

august 24th, 2009 :: ookoi ShakeNRoll - s/t :: All about ShakeNRoll, the scene that the ookoi cooked up for RjDj's 'reactive music iThing application' during last month's Music Hack Day in London. ShakeNRoll is now available for download from the RjDj scenes list. Learn about the 28 states of 7 sound-bites, and how ShakeNRoll splits the atom ... Enfin bref ... Go find how-to-ShakenRoll. With or without your iThing ...[ read more __ ]

august 08th, 2009 :: (Le) CLeUB, Placard, CLeUB :: From july 24th till july 27th, Paris saw its 12th grand placard. Back from Sèvres this year, and anew someplace around the 20th arrondissement. Entering Au Vaisseau (Le CLeUB's new space in the rue Stendhal), which contained le placard and arriving au placard which was au CLeUB ... It was a true homecoming, indeed. A unique event, impossible to faithfully picture. Still, this entry's much just like that: a 12th Grand Parisian Placard Picture Book. [ read more __ ]

july 26th-28th, 2009 :: "You, a bed, the sea" :: "I arranged for the squirrels to come and eat those walnuts that they have eh ... they look like walnuts, but they are not, because they actually have condoms inside. If you break them, if you smash them, there is a condom inside" ... A series of 3 consecutive daily posts bringing you the story of a Greek Eloise who after a 1994's summer of love left her Dutch Abelard behind in Amsterdam. Read it on the beach, preferably a Greek one ... ! [ read more __ ]

july 18th, 2009 :: Pure . Reactive . Music . Hack Day :: Over the weekend of july 11/12th I joined a swarm of digital music hackers that, on the occasion of the London Music Hack Day, occupied the first floor of the brand new offices of the Guardian near King's Cross, for a full and busy 32 hours in-one-stretch. I crossed the Channel for one of the workshops that were part of the event, the one that was held by deferred form and inter/re/active music prophets RjDj, who - after all these years - managed to provide me with a great excuse for learning PD. It was with the help of RjDj's Florian and Frank, that within less than 24 hours, early sunday afternoon I had a test-version of ookoi's ShakeNRoll up and running on the iPhone ... Pure Image _ Pure Sound _ Pure Data ... It makes a lot of sense ... [ 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 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 __ ]

february 05th, 2010 :: syntax, semantics and landscape with trains (Audiotoop [ii]) :: About Alessandro Bosetti's The Pool and the Soup, a fine guided spoken improvisation (as performed october last year at Extrapool in Nijmegen), which actually reminded me of Diktat. That same day at Extrapool there were Jason Zeh and Ben Gwilliam, the view of whose BromBron table suddenly reminded me of a small room in the flat of friends of my parents, in the very early 1960s. [ read more __ ]

february 04th, 2010 :: Médium Hang Esztétika :: The first part of the ongoing study on EAI as a metalanguage, that, together with Rébus, I embarked upon a couple of years ago, just recently was published as part of an Hungarian book called Médium Hang Esztétika - Zeneiség a mediális technológiák korában. (That Google-translates: "Medium Sound Aesthetics - Performance in the medial age of technology".) [ read more __ ]

february 01st, 2010 :: Sound Maps :: A sound that sounds will do so at a certain place and at a certain time. Phonographers therefore have always had a natural interest in sound mapping (the linking of acoustic and geographical data). [ ]

february 01st, 2010 :: 18 x 100 Sec. Sound <.best_before.> Letters :: "Yesterday's a work in progress" ... Wrapping up the 2009 Best Before Sound Art Tour with a fine free CD for your download-ing pleasure, and the evocation of ghosts and voices from within the electromagnetic field on a path, rough 'n' lonely, towards an art built from sole fact and nil fiction... [ read more __ ]

january 05th, 2010 :: ookoi: onderood :: You dug it while it was happening, live on twitter. Now read the full report on the ookoi's blitz-appearing in the Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, as opening act for last sunday's live broadcast of Moritz Ebinger's Radio Red, hitting the pitch and setting the tone for pop and social media, new and old, in the early tens. [ read more __ ]

december 12th, 2009 :: years will have to run out sometime (Audiotoop [i]) :: About the weekend that the good people from the Nijmegen Extrapool descended upon the Amsterdam Occii. About guitars, drums 'n' tape; and about the audiotoop that I performed there: why did that particular piece become the way it was? In the mindbogglingly deep faraway end of it none of this would have ever been, were it not for the right honourable, for the baroness Thatcher. [ read more __ ]

november 17th, 2009 :: Soli Deo GLoria ! :: Quote from Sandberg's director and art tycoon Jos Houweling's speech at friday 13th's launch in the Amsterdam Paradiso: "The first Dutch use of a device like the iPhone as a platform for works of art such as RAUDIO IIIII is a shake without precedent" ... You were there, you had a blast. Now read all about it. Available on the iTunes app store. Free. Grab it! ... [ read more __ ]

november 15th, 2009 :: Prof. dr. Cassette :: "How do you do it?" asked Cecilia A. (from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) in a recent email. "What's the best method? Crack open a cassette shell? Reel-to-reel?" ... Cecilia posed honest questions. Here they get honest answers ... [ read more __ ]

november 08th, 2009 :: A found tapes meta-map :: More dates with Penelope Audela, and a first mention of the writing of "Alle Geluid Van De Wereld", my dutch/english monograph on the noble art of foundtaping (to appear early 2010 at the very latest). Acoustic fingerprinting is the method that underlies commercial audio search applications like Shazam and Midomi. We spent a little time with both of them. [ read more __ ]

november 03rd, 2009 :: Penelope Audela: das leipziger kleine :: While reading all about last month's das leipziger kleine, you may listen to the 'Broken Fieldrecording' that I made while travelling from Nijmegen to Leipzig, where my kleine performance was a bit of a coming out: I played, for the very first time, three tapes from the archive of Penelope Audela, a Dutch woman who had a hobby stranger than Arnold Layne's ... [ read more __ ]

october 22nd, 2009 :: Founded Tapapes :: Die Kassette is a nice and cosy place in Leipzig-Lindenau, dedicated to the ancient art of the personal mixtape. As part of a couple of days of foundtaping in Leipzig, I went there to present the Found Tapes Exhibition, made a Found Tapes Mixtape especially for Die Kassette, and had visitors experience how it feels to be a tête-de-cassette, or a tête-de-tettine ... [ read more __ ]

august 30th, 2009 :: Summer Sagas Sale! (i) :: Some of the events & places I skimmed over in Amsterdam, Maastricht and Paris this summer: the Salon d'Amitié on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Peter Giele's demise, in Arti Amsterdam; an antiNoise Brigade that led us into and around the former quarters of Napoléon III in the Paris Louvre, with guards keeping a close watch on the devious things we were trying to do; and the Prospects & Exiles in the Maastricht Bonnefantenmuseum. [ read more __ ]

august 14th, 2009 :: Les Favoris Favorites, Comelade ... and Faust :: After 36 years, this july 4th in Paris, I discovered that my favorite krautrocker is french. I sat at a wooden table in the sun next to Faust's Jean-Hervé Péron, who had come together with Zappi Diermaier and Rei Mayazaki to perform at the Schizophonic Cabaret, organized by Vert Pituite with and around catalan maestro Pascal Comelade. We talked about Faust, about the passage of time. And about Music with an Attitude, which, that sunny saturday in Paris, was plentiful indeed. [ read more __ ]

august 01st, 2009 :: Sound Souvenirs: Music Out Of The Moon :: I read 'Sound Souvenirs', a recent collection of articles edited by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck on audio technologies, memory and cultural practives. It evoked a whole series of personal memories, anecdotes, reflections and sound souvenirs for me to share with you, like how I found myself lying all greasy and smelling of mosquito oil that mother had smeared all over our faces and limbs to repel the buzzing blood suckers, breathlessly awaiting the sound bite that would come with the mission commander's stepping down the Eagle's ladder and into our moon's dust ... [ read more __ ]

july 21st, 2009 :: Schizophonic Cabarets [i] :: I set out to do a write-up on the Schizophonic Cabaret with and around Pascal Comelade, a couple of weeks ago in the Parisian Les Voûtes, organized by Vert Pituite. But then I found myself drifting off reminiscing on the 2003/04 series of la belle soirées, and dug up one (1) remaining shrinkwrapped copy of a historical document. For the highest bidder ...
More on Comelade, My Favorite Sideburns and (!) Faust in a next post ... [ read more __ ]

july 20th, 2009 :: General Acoustics :: Rébus phoned up, and asked us to come over to the La G. space in the avenue Parmentier, have an apéro, and test the acoustics of this fine early 20th century industrial building. After the drinks we set into an impromptu rendering of ookoi's "Winterland Aria", the atmosphere of which was quite remarkably captured by Rébus in this uTube ... [ read more __ ]

july 08th, 2009 :: Cover thyself :: Human anatomy made the table, pivot of two of our favorite activities: eating and writing. Both are best and most comfortably done while sitting, using a horizontal support for food, paper or - more recently - a keyboard to be posed upon. Homo sedens. We are sitting. A seated species. And tables are what we sit at ... By extrapolation any odd table will reflect all of our universe, but even superficial contemplation of someone's table is like peeping into that person's head.
Read on then, peep somewhat in mine ...

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 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 __ ]

so, wheresHar$?

jan 16-19, 2010 - [+/-] Lausanne (Switzerland)
jan 20-22, 2010 - [+/-] Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
jan 23-feb 03, 2010 - [+/-] Paris (France)
feb 04-06, 2010 - [+/-] Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
feb 07-09, 2010 - [+/-] Maastricht (the Netherlands)

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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

so, wheresHar$?

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