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Awesome Foursomes (ix - No. 329)

december 16, 2023
latest update: december 23, 2023

« Milling wormholes to our not-so-'the-Jetsons'-like future, from there then up to here now and after. »

[ Stduio Numbr pages' contents continue to evolve. Stories in, on, over and around the numbrs, part of the b.ookoi, over time will be added upon, adjusted, refined, retold, re-deconstructed, in a dynamic process, shaped whatever way memories may make them be. ]

No. 329

released February 17th, 2022

1. Re_1024 (1/8) [ookoi​]

There is a whole lotta elaboration and exegesis still to be written on '1024', a piece of work that more than anything else is pivotal in the ookoi's œuvre. However hard to pin this linchpin down, the work's inside and outside (the numbers, the sounds, the compositional methods & techniques, the emerging forms and the technological format) all point to « hardcore ookoi »...

[0 OK, 0:971]( * ) "The number 1024 is central to the ookoi’s pop. It is equal to the tenth power of two, to 2¹⁰, ‘binary-to-decimal’, hence symbolizes the fusion of the decimal and the binary. It is this brilliant metaphor for the amalgamation of analogue and digital, key to much of the ookoi’s work, that led the duo in the summer of 2006 to diligently ear-pick and hand-cut a collection of one thousand and twenty-four extracts, each lasting exactly seven seconds, from the archived recordings of the ookoi’s live acts and interventions in its decisively formative years, roughly between the summer of 2004 and that of 2006. This sonic kibibite was subsequently released, perverting, and abusing an at the time already near-obsolete media format, the Digital Video or Versatile Disc (DVD). Devious scripting and calculative trickery allowed us to force pseudorandom playback of the 1024 handpicked mini-songs, organised into 64 disjoint parts, each containing 16 markers corresponding to 16 seven-second films, that all were built from one of these 1024 soundbites, accompanied visually by a seven-second colour sweep around the soundbite’s random rank number in the kibibite collection. In our recent study on conceptualism in the ookoi's art, Towards an Unhearable Music (in: ‘Conceptual Approaches to Sound-Based Artistic Practices’, issue 21.2 of eContact!, the electronic journal of CEC, the Canadian Electroacoustic Community), we argued that in hindsight, this scripting tour-de-force within the DVD method format was among the duo’s first feats in their quest for an unhearable music (the resulting curious and fascinating but rather mysterious digital data carrier was deemed by many users to be “unplayable"; this though, as a matter of fact, was not the case), a quest that, arguably, they truly kicked off in December 2006, when on the occasion of the yearly BvKU (Beurs voor Kleine Uitgevers, the Small Publishers Fair) in the Amsterdam Paradiso, the duo attempted what they refer to as “uptime publishing” — the act of publishing (in casu of a four-hour long piece of music) seemingly without the use of any supporting media, — by directly accessing audience members’ long-term memory. (Note that “publishing” is an act of making something available. Also recall that in telecommunications and reliability theory the expected uptime of a system is represented by the product of A/(1-A) and the expected downtime, where A denotes a system’s availability.)"

...

2. Re_Gesprek (1) [ookoi]

This is the first in a set of tracks based on 'Het Gesprek', a collective improvisation by twelve musicians in Paradiso, Amsterdam on November 24th, 1982, guided by Peter Mertens and Ronald Heiloo. The performance of course was recorded. And that (20 minute) recording was released as one side of a vinyl album. The credits mention: recording by Wally van Middendorp, mixing by Wijnand de Groot. The album was part of (or better said: it was surrounded or even: covered by) the 'Een Tijdschrift over Gesprekken', A Magazine about Conversations, a beautiful arty vinyl album sized magazine, that came crammed with text and images. The project was 'initiated' (these days we would say 'directed and/or curated') by Jan Dietvorst, Henk Groenendijk and Peter Mertens. The Magazine + vinyl came in one single edition of 500 copies. The release date mentioned inside the magazine is April 12th 1983. The number of my personal copy, stamped next to that little bit of text: 001. No joking :-). To the right there's a pic to prove. (Well, yeah, sure, I know that in these days picture no long prove anything. But you will believe. Else come and check for yourself :-) ...)

Back in the Raudio days, in 2005, I cut up the 20 minute improvisation into a number of about 200 separate 'phrases', which together made an 'index of Het Gesprek'. This 'index', a collection of, short to very short, separate sound files were the bulk of the Raudio #04 playlist. Instead of the original silences (there were, as in most conversations, quite a few of these during the performance of 'Het Gesprek') I added a set of recordings of myself, not doing anything in particular, as 'colored silences' and 'breaks', parsing the instrumental 'multilogue'. Raudio listeners were invited to launch three random playbacks of the thus created playlists, and listen to their superposition.

The text.
That was conversation.
Or conversation about conversation.
One side of the vinyl album had recordings of conversations acted out by young Dutch actors. Here's what they talk in this Stduio mix-track:

"-...[ik weet] best dat die dingen tijd kosten, maar duurt het dan nog godverdomme vijf of tien jaar...?"
"- Er zijn gewoon maanden dat je minder verdient en minder te doen hebt; er zijn maanden waar je heel veel verdient en als je dan eenmaal aan het toeren bent, verdien je meer dan duizend gulden in de maand."
- [...]
"- We hebben maar één optreden gehad deze maand! Wie kan er van dat geld twee maanden leven, of drie maanden? Je zou gewoon iedereen vrij kunnen geven! Er is net genoeg geld om één maand rond te komen. En als je daar twee of drie maanden nog van moet leven... dan kom ik er niet meer uit. Ik heb de laatste tijd nou net niet een rooskleurig bestaan gehad, als je me kunt volgen."

Funny that only now, forty years later, this bit of text rang a bell, as it is very obviously based on something I am and also back then was pretty familiar with: the 'If we'd all been living in California' conversation between Frank Zappa and Jimmy Carl black, recorded by Zappa and included on his 'Uncle Meat' album from 1969. ( * )
And these are the names of the three young actors that did it, back in the early 1980s: Mathias de Koning, José Alders and René Eljon.

3. ookoi wint [ookoi]

Een waar en waarachtig wapenfeit. Recorded live at E@rport, at the Royal Conservatory, Amsterdam, January 31st 2009.

[...]

4. Re_Schaman (hardcoamb mix, 1) [fpcm]

First in a set of brandnew fpcm mixes from the original "Schaman gaat voor Goud" (Schaman goes for Gold) soundtrack, produced in 1995 by fpcm and composed by Hardcore Ambient, featuring performances by Roes Rausgift & Rache.

[...]

notes __ ::
(*) Here is a transcription of (the most relevant) part of Zappa's track:
JCB: [...] I realize it takes a long time, but God damn does it take another five, ten years from now?
FZ: There's some months when you're not gonna work as much as other months. There's some months when you're gonna make a lot of money, and if you average it out, you do make more than two hundred dollars a month.
[...]
JCB: [...] We worked one gig this month, Frank! What's wrong with getting two months in a row of this good money? Or three months in a row? Then we can afford to take three or four months off and everybody can... After the first month I can get just enough ahead, but if I had two more months, man, I'll get ahead. 'Cause I'm not living very extravagantly, I'll tell you for sure... [ ^ ]
(**) This paragraph is part of 'Green-tainted Hyperbole, Qualish Quirks and Summer-flies. The inscrutable genius of the ookoi', in: The Annual 2023, published by Korm Plastics, december 2023. [ ^ ]

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Bandcamp is our preferred platform, but you can also listen to Stduio ookoi's No. 329 on streaming music platforms, like YouTube Music or Spotify ... :

The b.ookoi are coming!

—wordt vervolgd—

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tags: ookoi

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