Harsmedia (SoundBlog - Feed and Podcast)

Syntax, semantics and landscape with trains (Audiotoop - ii)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:11:11 +0100

[february 05, 2010 | #347 ]

The second installment of 'A Little Rouge', the Audiotoop I did for Extrapool, was at Extrapool meme, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, the friday before the saturday that I railed on to das kleine in Leipzig. That was on october 16th, 2009, as part of a combined BromBron/Audiotoop event.

I took the picture that follows during Alessandro Bosetti's Audiotoop contribution of that evening, which was a performance of his piece "The Pool and the Soup" (2007).

As is explained on his web site, "The Pool and the Soup" is a spoken improvisation, in which a conductor guides a number of players through a pool of instructions. The piece may be performed by any number of people, starting from 2. At Extrapool, including Alessandro, there were 7. If I remember rightly, the role of the conductor that evening was not fixed, but rotated among the members of the ensemble, who were seated on chairs in a little half circle facing the audience. Maybe a disposition not so much as in a talk show (recommended in the piece's score), as in some sort of group therapy session. It was intimate, indeed. And effective.

The instructions (which are all described in detail in the score) are given to the players by means of a number of gestures, and apply to those players that before have been pointed out by the conductor. The score describes 15 instructions and corresponding gestures. Some of these are merely formal ('softer', 'louder', 'faster', 'slower'), but all initiate a certain kind of action by the indicated player(s). Except the four 'formal' ones, all come with a corresponding 'closing gesture'. This enables the conductor to stop the execution of the action, though it is not necessary to close an action before starting a next one.

Here are pictures of some of the gestures, that I took from Alessandro's score for the piece.

The first gesture (a karate chop) is that for free speech, one of a couple of possible starting instructions for the piece, upon which the player that has been pointed out must start to speak from scratch about the first thing that comes into his or her mind. The corresponding closing gesture (quickly closing the hand) is that in the second picture, which the conductor also may use more generally to 'stop' a player.
The third gesture (lock) tells the players involved that they should start listening, and interact with each other.
Then come three gestures that enable the conductor to musicalize the improvisation. The first of these (fourth picture) tells the player to choose a small sound fragment (a sample) from the speech flow of one other player speaking at that moment, and freeze the sample into a longer event. The second one (fifth picture) instructs a player to exactly repeat what (s)he is doing at the moment, as in a loop. The third one (sixth picture) asks the player to apply one musical characteristic (like pitch or rhythm) to his or her current speech flow.
The final three gestures depicted I find particularly interesting, as they in one way or another will interfere with the semantics of that what is being said. The gesture in the seventh picture instructs the players to systematically misunderstand what the others say, while the final two ask for translation into another (real of fictional) language, either of what the player him- or herself is talking about at the moment (eight picture), or of the words of another player (last picture).

Performing "The Pool and the Soup" is far from an easy task for the players involved, and it is clear that the final outcome will largely depend on their alertness and inventiveness. With only the one day of preparation, the Extrapool ensemble was admirable, and did come up with a nice flow of mime, (minimal) music and words, that at times managed to be hilariously funny.

Not unsurprisingly, and despite the very different sonic texture, the melange of words, languages and sounds reminded me a lot of Diktat, where we have the words in many different languages stored on our tapes, and manipulate them - indeed also in ways comparable to those included in Alessandro's instructions - on dictaphones. Combining this with actions performed by live speakers, as in "The Pool and the Soup", strikes me as a fascinating future option to explore.

Towards the end of the performance one of the players embarked upon a lively description of her reading of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. That was sort of interesting, and as I only recently had read the book myself, at several points I felt this strong urge to raise my voice from within the audience, and enter the discussion. The score indeed does include an instruction enabling a player to engage in a conversation with the audience, but - except by shouting, I guess - there is no way that an auditor can take the initiative to do so.

Maybe some next time we can be allowed to raise our hand?

...

In the triptych below there's Benjamin Gwilliam and Jason Zeh who that same evening at Extrapool presented the outcome of their BromBron work, for which they used a large table studded with a swell collection of vintage cassette and other tape-equipment. In the Extrapool's dim lighting, a few hours before the concert, with nobody else around to watch it, it was like an imaginary, deserted landscape (click the middle picture to enlarge), that for me evoked a very old memory.

The view reminded me of a small room in the flat of friends of my parents. I called them uncle and auntie, but they were not, really. In the very early 1960s we went to visit them every other saturday evening. While the adults watched the saturday evening show (on German television; we did not yet have a television set ourselves at the time), I sometimes caught a glimpse of the inside of that special - nearly, but not quite 'secret' - room, when its door was ajar. The room's window was obscured, and it smelled of glue, paper, paint and plastic. Almost all of its surface was taken up by a large low table, on which there was a vast miniature mountain landscape, with houses, tunnels, forests, roads and a dense entanglement of railroad tracks. With nothing moving, in the dark of the room, the small frozen world was dominated by the ragged outlines of gray paper rocks in the distance. Closer up there was the platform of a meticulously modeled village railway station, where stood a couple of small plastic figures, that cast dim and strangely long shadows, because of the low light that penetrated from the flat's hall. I remember the figure of a man running and holding a suitcase, another one waving a folded newspaper, a woman bending as if to pick up something that had fallen, and a train conductor raising his 'ready for departure' sign. ( * )

I always remembered my watching of that still, cold and dark scene, from which somehow all life had been removed, as the second of two of the earliest moments that I vaguely became aware of something like a notion of 'death'. Fortunately, that evening in Extrapool, there were Jason and Benjamin to breathe some life into the scene, though all along the couple of short sets that they manned their landscape, the long tape loops that they set into motion continued to feel a lot like the little trains on my uncle's table.

notes __ ::
(*) In Dutch one calls the thing I mean a 'pannenkoek' or 'spiegelei'; I do not know how one would call it in English. [ ^ ]

tags: Audiotoop, Extrapool, Nijmegen

Medium Hang Esztetika

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:11:11 +0100

[february 04, 2010 | #346 ]

As some of you may recall, already for some years, together with Rebus, I embarked upon a still ongoing study of electroacoustic improvisation (EAI) as a metalanguage. The first in a series of texts that we are writing on the subject, called "Electroacoustic improvisation as metalanguage and fixed point (i)", recently appeared as part of a nice looking monograph, edited by Barnabás Batta, and published (I think) by the Department of Communication and Media of the University of Szeged. The book is called Medium Hang Esztetika - Zeneiseg a mediális technológiák korában (which Google-translates into English as "Medium Sound Aesthetics - Performance in the medial age of technology"), and it comes along with a dedicated web site of the same title.
All of this - book and web site - are (exclusively) in Hungarian.
Rightly so, I'd say.
On the other hand though, and as a consequence, all the fine work done by Barnabás and his collaborators, as well as the other articles in the book remain completely inaccessible to me. Except, that is, through the Google or some other translator. (Which of course indeed will bring across some of the meaning of a text; it also is kind of a fun thing to do, as we all know. But as I did indulge in the copy-pasting of auto-translations at least once before, let me leave it here up to you.)

Apart from the 23 pages written by Rebus and myself, the 271 pages of Medium Hang Esztetika contain contributions by Ignász Ádám, Danczi Csaba László, Frank Ilschner, Philip Sherburne, Rolf Grossmann, Batta Barnabás, Mihály Kamilla, Markó Barbara, John Chowning, Kovács Balázs, Fransisco Lopez, Douglas Kahn, Simon Waters, Rónai András and Bram Timmers (for the Hungarian authors I suspect the order of first and last name to have been inversed systematically, unlike for the non-Hungarians).

You will find our paper, consisting in 17 + 1 numbered paragraphs, on pp. 57-80, under the title "Az elektroakusztikus improvizacio mint metanyelv es rogzitett pont". It was translated from English into Hungarian by Danczi Csaba László.

Just to give you an idea - and to make you curious :) - here are, in English, the article's summary and its opening (the Oth) paragraph:

[ Show someone a picture of a rose, and then ask that person: “What do you see?” It will almost always be the case that the person replies: “I see a rose,” though in fact she sees (and knows that she sees) merely the picture of a rose. Now play someone a recording of a buzzing bee, and then ask that person: “What do you hear?” It will almost always be the case that she replies: “I hear a bee buzzing,” though in fact what she hears is merely the recording of a buzzing bee. Contrary to appearances, though, the two cases are not symmetrical: in the case of hearing it may very well be that the person listening does not realize that she is listening to a recording of a buzzing bee, because that fact has been kept hidden from her. ]

0. Music needs music to explain music.

Now this is how that same fragment reads in Hungarian:

[Mutasd meg valakinek egy rozsa kepet, majd kerdezd meg tole: "Mit latsz?" Szinte mindig azt fogja valaszolni: "Egy rozsat latok" – bar valojaban (es ezt tudja) csupan a rozsa kepet latja. Ezutan jatszd le neki egy felvetelrol a zummogo meh hangjat, majd kerdezd meg: "Mit hallasz?" Majdnem mindig azt fogja valaszolni: "Egy zummogo mehet hallok" – bar valojaban csupan egy felvetelt hall a zummogo meh hangjarol. A latszat ellenere azonban a ket eset nem szimmetrikus: a hallasnal konnyen elofordulhat, hogy a hallgato egyszeruen nem veszi eszre, hogy csak egy felvetelt hall a zummogo mehrol, mivel a teny rejtve maradt elotte.]

0. A zenenek zenere van szuksege a zene magyarazatahoz.

I have to admit that it gave me a truly boyish thrill and pleasure when I opened the book and there saw my own words in a language that I was utterly unable to understand.

[ Medium Hang Esztetika - Zeneiseg a mediális technológiák korában, edited by Barnabás Batta. 2009. ISBN 978-963-88468-4-6 ]

tags: theory, EAI

18 x 100 Sec. Sound [best_before] Letters

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:11:11 +0100

[february 01, 2010 | #345 ] "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...

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Rowland S. Howard (1959-2009)

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:11:11 +0100

[january 23, 2010 | #344 ] Just before the turn of the decade, on december 30th 2009, Rowland S. Howard died. Some thoughts and some relics: a couple of black and white pictures that I took on one of the evenings The Birthday Party hit the London Venue (july 16th, 1981).

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Art fleas (puces de l'art)

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:11:11 +0100

[january 13, 2010 | #343 - sbpc/034] Hear Audio [ mp3 3MB ]
Pushing last Christmas we set up a table at the Parisian Generale'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-bruecke for a memorable rendering of the Dutch national anthem. Our Wilhelmus Van Nassouwe is the edition's podcast.

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New in the Found Tapes Exibition

Sat, 9 Jan 2010 08:04:37 +0100

[january 09, 2010] The Found Tapes Exhibition entered the new decade with seven (7) new acquisitions, numbers 109 to 114, containing finds from Belgium (Brussels), France (Aubervilliers, Bagnolet, La Courneuve, Montreuil, Pantin, Vincennes), Germany (Leipzig), the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Maastricht), bringing the collection up to date with the actual findings. Currently finishing the Google Maps interface, and the related book - analog, printed on good old paper - Alle Geluid Van De Wereld ("All sounds in the universe"). Thanks for visiting, stay tuned.

ookoi: onderood (#radiorood #boijmans)

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:11:11 +0100

[january 05, 2010 | #342] 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.

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Y've got the music in ya

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:11:11 +0100

[january 01, 2010 | #341] Good news to kick-start us off into a new decade: we're all musical! It's a matter of scientific fact! I got it from the horse's mouth, as I spent Christmas with Dutch music cognition pioneer Henkjan Honing's book, which carries the message as its title: Iedereen is muzikaal. Once more, this is a pretty long read. But I'm sure you will find it worth your while ... It's about rhythm and auditory perspective. And ("the way I see it, Barry ...") about how one day long gone we landed within time. Music is here to remind us...

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years will have to run out sometime (Audiotoop: little rouge [i])

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:11:11 +0100

[december 12, 2009 | #340] 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.

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naughty noughtie (_) / chop shop (-)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:11:11 +0100

[december 05, 2009 | #339] 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 ...

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Soli Deo Gloria !

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:11:11 +0100

[november 17, 2009 | #338] 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.

Raudio IIII is available on the iTunes App store.
It's free ...

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prof. dr. Cassette

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:41:11 +0100

[november 15, 2009 | #337] "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. They get honest answers in this illustrated guide to the fine art of trashed audio compact cassette repair.

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Waiting In The Wings, often

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:11:11 +0100

[november 11, 2009 | #336] I asked Maja whether she could get me a typewriter. "I have a Hermes Media 3," she told me ... Next 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 ...

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A found tapes meta-map

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:52:57 +0100

[november 08, 2009 | #335] Another date with Penelope, and first words on the writing of "Alle Geluid van de Wereld", my dutch/english monograph on the noble art of foundtaping (soon to appear). Acoustic fingerprinting is the method that underlies commercial audio search applications like Shazam and Midomi. We spent a little time with both of them.

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Penelope Audela: das leipziger kleine

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:52:57 +0100

[november 03, 2009 | #334 - sbpc/033] Hear Audio [ mp3 31MB ]
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 ...

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Minisec

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:52:57 +0100

[october 26, 2009 | #333] 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 relatives sent over by mail from the West.

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Foundeded Tapapes

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:52:57 +0100

[october 22, 2009 | #332] Die Kassette is a nice and cosy place in Leipzig-Lindenau (Germany), 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 tete-de-cassette, or a tete-de-tettine...

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Project Icarus 0ST

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:52:57 +0100

[october 10, 2009 | #331] 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, the Netherlands.

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Found Lost Sound

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:02:57 +0100

[september 20, 2009 | #330] 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.

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Summer Sagas Sale! (i)

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:02:57 +0100

[august 30, 2009 | #329] Some of the events and places I skimmed over in Amsterdam, Maastricht and Paris this summer: the salon d'amitie 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 Napoleon III in the Paris Louvre, with guards keeping a close watch on the devious things we were trying to do; and the prospects and exiles in the Maastricht Bonnefantenmuseum.

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ookoi ShakeNRoll-s/t

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:02:57 +0100

[august 24, 2009 | #328] 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 ...

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Les Favoris Favorites, Comelade ... and Faust.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:42:57 +0100

[august 14, 2009 | #327] After 36 years, this july 4th in Paris, I found out that my favorite krautrocker is french. I sat at a wooden table in the sun next to Faust's Jean-Herve Peron, 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.

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(Le) CLeUB, Placard, CLeUB

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:02:57 +0100

[august 08, 2009 | #326] From july 24th till july 27th, Paris saw its 12th Grand Placard. back from Sevres 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.

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Sound Souvenirs: Music Out Of The Moon

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:42:57 +0100

[august 01, 2009 | #325] I read 'Sound Souvenirs', a recent collection of articles edited by Karin Bijsterveld and Jose van Dijck on audio technologies, memory and cultural practives. The book 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 sucklettes, 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.

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"You, a bed, the sea"

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:02:57 +0100

[july 26-28, 2009 | #322-324] "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 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 ... !

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Schizophonic Cabarets @ Les Voutes [i]

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:02:57 +0100

[july 21, 2009 | #321] 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 Voutes, organized by Vert Pituite. But then I found myself drifting off reminiscing on the 2003/04 series of La belle soirees, 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 ...

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General Acoustics

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:02:57 +0100

[july 20, 2009 | #320] Rebus phoned up, and asked C. and me to come over to the La G. space in the avenue Parmentier, have an apero, 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 Rebus in this uTube...

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Pure . Reactive . Music . Hack Day

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:02:57 +0100

[july 18, 2009 | #319] 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

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Cover thyself

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:07:57 +0100

[july 08, 2009 | #318] 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 ...

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Pop is a very funny thing

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:59:57 +0100

[june 30, 2009 | #317] 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.

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"Whatever we can describe at all ..."

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:57:57 +0100

[june 27, 2009 | #316] A patent recently granted to apple took 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 .

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A Table! au Brass (sketches)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:37:57 +0100

[june 18, 2009 | #314 - sbpc/032] Hear Audio [ mp3 8.5MB ]
A Table! au Brass in Brussels, Belgium ... Hidden from the public, J.J. would start playing his sopranino like a pied piper luring their two little girls away from the quarreling couple. He then was to arrive in the catacomb below the first table, improvising to the sounds of the microcassette, his sax notes whirling and drifting up the holes in the floor through which run the big rusty pipes of the former brewery's machines ...
Also : a little flower painting, six black-and-white negatives and an Akai CR-81 8-Track Stereo machine.

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More Best Before [KT2009, v]

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:57:57 +0100

[june 13, 2009 | #314] Highlighting more sound art presented at the 2009 Maastricht Kunsttour, we visit Arno Schepers and the Feedbacksociety's 'Feedbackstructures', and rifle through the first edition of Stichting Intro's Auditive Atlas for Limburg. There we learn about 150 million years of Maastricht's history in just little over ten minutes, from an elderly longhaired British artist who with a modest smile traces short trails across a little heap of marl dust posed on a small metal table top, in the cellar of the Marres gallery in the Capucijnenstraat ...

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Circuit #1 et Frites Sonores

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:37:57 +0100

[june 11, 2009 | #313] 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".

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Playing the Popular Classics [KT2009, iv]

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:37:57 +0100

[june 01, 2009 | #312] 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 Seamus O'Donnell set up a vintage reel-to-reel tape machine feedback-loop system. The next evening Rebus and 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.

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"Also high bridges over the river" [KT2009, iii]

Sat, 30 May 2009 17:37:57 +0100
[may 30, 2009 | #311] Not only did we celebrate the 10th edition of the Kunsttour, last week in Maastricht, but as part of the annual Euregio Kunstfest 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 ... Also 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.

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A sound is a sound that sounds [KT2009, ii]

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:37:57 +0100
[may 28, 2009 | #310] 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 Klaenge and the Feedbacksociety; about Xavier van Wersch and Emerson, Lake and Palmer; and a little about circuitbending ...

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It feels like summer in the city [KT2009, i]

Sat, 23 May 2009 12:47:57 +0100
[may 23, 2009 | #309] 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 ...

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Petit tour de table, grande bouffe [i]

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:47:57 +0100
[may 18, 2009 | #308] First in a series of entries describing our recent adventures with A Table!, our fine 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.

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Strange things with and without electrickery

Wed, 13 May 2009 11:08:57 +0100
[may 13, 2009 | #307] [may 13, 2009 #307] Along with an awful lot of fun, the main lesson that was to be learned from 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 wonderful 6 minutes of 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 ...

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twitter.com/meesterwerk

Sun, 03 May 2009 22:47:57 +0100
[may 03, 2009 | #306 _ sbpc/031] Hear Audio [ mp3 3MB ]
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 is, as you will know, the social micro-blogging site that somewhat suddenly became so 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, come and see! Follow me @meesterwerk, follow me @meesterstuk ...

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ookoi's Winterland @ Rhizome.org

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:00:57 +0100
[april 26, 2009] Attention Rhizome.org members ! ... This summer the ookoi will work on a release of their forthcoming "WINTERLAND" album in the form of an interactive iPhone application. We entered this year's commission competition at Rhizome's as a means to ensure part of the funding needed for this project. Thank you for viewing and voting for ookoi's proposal !

[ Follow ookoi @ twitter.com ]

le petit paris : das kleine, ici

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:23:57 +0100
[april 26, 2009 | #305] 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 became a memorable afternoon, that saw a series of six fine examples of (applied) (radio)phonography, produced by Rebus+Kim Joeun, Gael 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, it was a happy view ...

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Martin Bril (1959-2009)

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:47:57 +0100
[april 23, 2009 | #304_sbpc/030] Hear Audio [ mp3 9.1MB ]
Yesterday, searching for some papers in a cupboard I found a file that I had long forgotten about. On it I had 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 knieen en Rok 'n' Roll - is an extract from that audio-cassette.
We will not forget Martin.

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Junk me up, Scotty!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:43:57 +0100
[april 21, 2009 | #303] This sunday april 19th I was part of a 4 (wo)men crew led by captain Rebus 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-hunting 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 Rebus picked up near a tube station in the very middel of Paris ... "Tout mari meme non medecin est capable de percer une boite de conserves de champignons ..."

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Friday the 13th

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:47:57 +0100
[april 16, 2009 | #302_sbpc/029] Hear Audio [ mp3 12.9MB ]
On friday march 13th of this year La Comete became the arena for displaying a vision of Jean Borde'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 ... Enjoy!

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"Blood and Bottom" (RaudiOGaGa)

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:27:57 +0100
[april 07, 2009 | #301_rpc/041] Hear Audio [ mp3 9.9MB ]
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 ...

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A Block with a Name

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:10:57 +0100
[april 01, 2009 | #300] 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 Nois and Willy Fistwell'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 ...

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The Meaning of Life [ii]

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:59:57 +0100
[march 22, 2009] 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." ...

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A weekend at the Ateliers Claus

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:47:57 +0100
[march 10, 2009 | sbpc/028] Hear Audio [ mp3 7.8MB ]
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! ..."

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The Meaning of Life [i]

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:47:57 +0100
[march 04, 2009] "We all know that Kurt smelt like teen spirit. For similar reasons (though it admittedly makes for a far less brilliant song title) I smelt like opium" ... On sunday february 22nd, without really having wanted to, in the Parisian Grand Palais 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 to do already in the days before that ....

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Insular Arithmetic (ookoi toont)

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:47:57 +0100
[february 21, 2009 | sbpc/027] Hear Audio [ mp3 1.8MB ]
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 ...

Time and the weather

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:47:57 +0100
[february 19, 2009] 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) ...

Sweet dreams a la Comete 347

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:25:57 +0100
[february 10, 2009] On thursday february 5th I went to the opening of Michael Ghent's new expo and installation in La Comete 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 Comete, 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 ...

Mok mok jaha fuer das kleine in Berlin (Tuned City, Berlin _vi)

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:55:57 +0100
[february 07, 2009] 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 ...

A Glimpse of Heesbeen

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:59:57 +0100
[january 31, 2009] A first glimpse of Heesbeen, the street organ that will play ookoi tunes, this saturday january 31st during the "RAUDIO.NL presents ookoi@E@rport" event, from 12 till 17h (GMT +1) in the Theaterzaal of the Amsterdam Conservatory, Oosterdokskade 151 ...

A Tingel Tangle Tape Machine

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:25:57 +0100
[january 30, 2009] In this first report on a well-spent week in Brussels there's a description of my 'tingel tangle tape machine', 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 diligent getting ahead with the preparation of new acquisition 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' ...

Kassettenkopf ; then Brussels, Montreuil, Amsterdam

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:07:57 +0100
[january 15, 2009] In this relatively short post there's only looking ahead ... 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 while ookoi's 1024 and l'Ecoute are projected throughout in the Instants Chavires in Montreuil, you will not find me there ... From Brussels I will 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 head 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 ...

The Voise of Noise

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:22:57 +0100
[january 06, 2009] 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 three simply wonderful (and wonderfully simple) ideas. First, there is one among 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 very enjoyable music of british electronician Matthew Herbert, who in his polit-pop does not allow himself the use of sounds that 'exist already'. Matthew creates each and every 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 ...

Thinking can be Fun!

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:15:57 +0100
[december 31, 2008 | sbpc/026] Hear Audio [ mp3 3.3MB ]
This year'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 classis 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 last) Christmas song - in a St. John's Wood basement right next door to Paul McCartney's mansion ...
Enjoy!
Happy New Year to you all ...!

das kleine, intiem (Tuned City, Berlin _v)

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:39:57 +0100
[december 23, 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 ... Read about the Found Tapes Archiv at Cake and Coffee's, about the Subharchord (the socialist answer to our capitalist Trautonium); about Ben Roberts who flew in from Madrid with his Sounds of the Flohmarkte, about Soinu Mapa (an online sound map of the Basque Country), and about the condition of the toilets in art museums across the world ...

Foundtaping in Neukoelln (Tuned City, Berlin _iv)

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:28:57 +0100
[december 08, 2008] 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 ...

Elderly artists, some of them sleeping

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:45:57 +0100
[december 04, 2008 | sbpc/025] Hear Audio [ mp3 2MB ]
From the Zoo 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 ...

Monkey Business, etc.

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:39:57 +0100
[december 01, 2008] On the afternoon of friday 24th we performed in the parisian zoological garden, the Zoo de Vincennes, dressed at our sunday's best. (I overheard at least one of the girls among our human listeners snigger that we ourselves were the monkees ... ) Our first set was for the zoo's community of baboons. We then turned around for a second set, performed explicitly for Chimene 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 Rebus 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 ...

Kings, Queens and Koons

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:59:57 +0100
[november 26, 2008] "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" ...

Steal this for the love of god ...

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:59:57 +0100
[november 20, 2008] 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 ... "
Post includes 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 ...

Neurotic Precision (Tuned City, Berlin _iii)

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:14:57 +0100
[november 12, 2008] 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 ...

Cake and Coffee (Tuned City, Berlin _ii)

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:54:57 +0100
[november 07, 2008] How 'obst und gemuesse' became 'coffee and cake', on aurality and living on foot, on speaking spaces and spanish buildings, about bubble wine, infrasound, migrating bees without a house and a startrek to Neukoelln, which on the first night of Tuned City, this summer in Berlin, led Rinus 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.

Light budget, heavy thinking (Tuned City, Berlin _i)

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:34:57 +0100
[october 29, 2008] 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" ...

Hanna's Sirens (Tuned City, Berlin _o)

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:34:57 +0100
[october 12, 2008] Hanna Buhl came from Berlin to Paris, on a summer-sound-sabbatical, and re-discovered there a sound for 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 ... Meanwhile, in the city of Marseille, on the square in front of the opera, there was the monthly 12 minute public city play with and in between the testing of the sirens: Sirenes et Midi Net ... An upbeat to more Tuned City reports, forthcoming ...

The Right to be Slow

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:34:57 +0100
[october 02, 2008] 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 ...

The Speed of Things

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:48:57 +0100
[september 18, 2008] 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 ...

Psycho/Geo/Conflux in Brooklyn, NY __i

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:08:57 +0100
[september 16, 2008] 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 retrace my 2007 steps in sunny Williamsburg and elsewhere ... In this report: read about Sander Veenhof's "SL Walkie Talkie Walks", and the Shua Group's "Intersection Play" ... There's also a bit of ookoi-news ... So, do hop over now ...!

Found in Brooklyn, NY

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:45:25 +0100
[september 15, 2008] "Found in Brooklyn, NY" is the Found Tapes Exhibition's newest acquisition, the 87th. It documents the 25 cast-aways picked up in New York, between september 12th and 16th last year, as part of the 2007 edition of the Conflux festival. It turned out to be a fascinating lot: with mexican music and, of course, some pop, rock ... Somewhere along Wythe Avenue I came upon a very badly degraded bit of tape with parts from Jethro Tull's 'Aqualung' that somehow sound ... modified ... Also there's a tape from a telephone answering machine, a recorded lecture on something, readings in yiddish and much more. "Found in Brooklyn, NY" is the fifth in our series of limited fotex-editions on cassette. Get it from our online shop ...

" Le chasseur " (foundtaping in brussels_ii)

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 14:55:57 +0100
[august 31, 2008] 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 on line store, to get your copy of "Found in Brussels" ...

Rags 'n' riches

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:25:57 +0100
[august 29, 2008] I 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" ...

Spiegeltje, spiegeltje

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:45:57 +0100
[august 27, 2008 | sbpc/024] Hear Audio [ mp3 6MB ]
The star of the evening, on july 17th, 2008 at the parisian La Miroiterie was a mysterious black box, called RT.220 ME. Jean-Philippe found it in a dustbin on the parking-lot of a shopping mall in Marne-la-Vallee, where it had been crying out to him, like an abandoned child. Listen to this entry's podcast, and hear it chit-chatting along with us in the Miroiterie's yard ... 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, that memorable evening. Large parts felt like a freeze within the sound of a huge mirror at the precise moment of its 'smashing' ...

Michel Waisvisz' Song of Praise

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:45:57 +0100
[july 28, 2008 | sbpc/023] Hear Audio [ mp3 14.7MB ]
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 Kraakdoos Sinfonietta in this entry's podcast ... In the article you find a link to the downloadable mp3-file of the complete special edition of 'Songs of Praise', dedicated to Waisvisz, with lots of unique audio documents, and including one other live tribute: members of the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, improvised in the program's finale from within Second Life, on the Patafone, a virtual instrument designed and built by Michel's avatar, Pata Mayo ...

Mind: the gap (Hommage a Nam Jun Paik)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:45:57 +0100
[july 23, 2008 | sbpc/022] Hear Audio [ mp3 5.1MB ]
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 high 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' ...

"Sing laping, sing !" (foundtaping in brussels_i)

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:35:57 +0100
[june 18, 2008 | sbpc/020] Hear Audio [ mp3 15.4MB ]
Somewhat over a year ago, during my foundtaping event at _Recyclart_ in Brussels, Belgium, I watched a man picking up a cardboard box on the place du Jeu de Balle. The box was left behind there at the end of the daily flea market. When the man turned the box upside down, out came tumbling 16 cassette tapes. He took the box. I picked up the tapes. I found that they once 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. For this he put the microphone of his cassettetape machine next to their gramophone player's speaker. Not far away from both, there stood a birdcage. Inside of that case 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 ... Listen to all of it together in this entry's podcast ...

Raudio Graffiti: almost live!

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:55:57 +0100
[june 06, 2008 | rpc/040] Here's all about ookoi's 'doing nothing' at the 2008 Maastricht Kunsttour ... See us sit on Pierre Paulin design furniture in a freshly re-decorated _Timmerfabriek_. Watch us drag the Radio Raudio Mobile along the city's cobblestones, live on the web. Hear us hit a white Baby Grand in _Landbouwbelang_, the Euregional center for autonomous and anti-commercial artistic activity. Amaze at fPcM's cranking a street organ in the gigantic _Eiffel building_ hall. Come along with us to check out what it is that is going on in Kaspar Koenig's _ArtSpace Rondeel_, Maastricht's next b i g art-thing ... and listen to an eclectic stream of more than seven and a half hours of Kunsttour sounds: from popular dutch to Sofia Gubaidulina, from street noise to backyard-rock, from beer to scotch, from sunshine to rain, from minutely composed to freely improvised, from circuit bent to organ ground ... This is Raudio Graffiti. This is almost radio. This is almost live ...

free lodgings, free food

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:15:57 +0100
[may 14, 2008] In Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's From here to ear some thirty small, but loud and boisterous, sing birds are kept in a wide and light room of a parisian gallery, thus turned aviary. Flitting around and perching on a number of horizontally supported electric guitars, each connected, via a 'big muff' distortion unit, to a stage amplifier, the guitar-birds make 'sweet, sweet music'. They get their free lodgings, drink and food in return. It's the way of the world. Elegant and simple ...

Saskatoon: a demain (tot morgen !)

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:55:57 +0100
[april 22, 2008] 'Tot Morgen (a demain)', a sound piece that I made for seven consecutive nights in Saskatoon, Canada, this week is webcast as the final of four contributions to Simulcast 1.0b: Saskatoon, a month-long audio transmission event curated by Emmanuel Madan ... In 'Tot morgen (a demain)' one chord sounds. It consists in two tritones that overlap each other by a semitone. It sounds 140 times forwards and 140 times backwards. The unlawful sequence of its soundings forms a sonic palindrome: it is identical to its time-reversal ... Were it not for the _flies_, the piece would have been 'time-less' ... 'Tot morgen (a demain)' bridges the gap that separates the beginning of a next day in Saskatoon from the end of a previous one ... it separates the end of a previous day from the beginning of a next . .. ... .. . "until, again, the roar of dawn" ... (In the first measure of Stockhausen's "Klavierstueck IX" the same chord is played 140 times in an evenly spaced decrescendo during 48 seconds.)

Au clair de la lune

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:15:57 +0100
[march 30, 2008] "... if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done," Charles Babbage wrote in 1837 in his 'Ninth Bridgewater Treatise' ... So listen to the sound that was inscribed on a phonautogram made in France, in april 1860, and recently dug up from a parisian archive. Then read about ancient pottery recordings, and sound inscribed in paint stroked along an artist's canvas...

The Great Washing

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:35:57 +0100
[february 24, 2008] In search of a music that does not make sound ... about ookoi's l'Ecoute, 'Live Beyond the Paradiso' and the end of art ... about Olivier Vadrot's 'kiosque electronique' (a mobile placard), and the Brocante Sonore and Har$ performing chez Fukiko, a japanese hairdresser in Vincennes, France ...

Karlheinz's Song of Praise

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:35:57 +0100
[february 12, 2008 | sbpc/018] Hear Audio [ mp3 28.4MB ]
For a special tribute edition of Aligre FM's "Songs of Praise" I dug up the original audio cassette recording of an interview we did with Karlheinz Stockhausen more than twenty five years ago, in november 1982, at the time he was composing Samstag aus Licht and with family and friends/collaborators for a period of thirty five days 'occupied' the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (the Netherlands). This SoundBlog edition's podcast consists in a special 30 minutes 'Stockhausen on dictaphone' reportage around three large audio extracts taken from this historic recording, in which Stockhausen, among other things elaborates on the process of composing his thirteenth piano piece (Lucifer's Dream), on the nature of time, on pop music, on what's wrong with collage, and on the 'terrible decadence' of western culture, and western music in particular ... (Please respect this podcast audio file's attribution/non-commercial creative commons licence.) ...

Dead composers and a hairdresser (japanese)

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:55:57 +0100
[february 08, 2008] About our upcoming performance at a japanese salon de coiffure in the heart of Vincennes, about Avraamov's 'Symphony of Sirens' and about how I found a trace of the mysterious long lost pre-futurist 'Symphonie des Forces Mecaniques', written by the french composer Carol-Berard in 1908 (or 1910) ...

Kh Stockhausen (1928-2007)

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:55:57 +0100
[december 08, 2007] On dec. 5th, 2007, Karlheinz Stockhausen, after a short illness, passed away in his house in Kuerten, Germany. It was an unexpected message, and it caught me by surprise, on the evening of friday dec. 7th ... I felt sad for the music, but most of all for the passion that has gone with him. And no more summer courses in Kuerten! At least not with 'the master' ... I thought of Haus Hubertus, of professor doktor doktor, then of Vicky's Mosquitos, and the road curling down from the hill to the village's high school ... I turned over the leaves of the notebook that I kept the summers that I went there. Looked at the quick drawings that I made, the words, the question- and exclamation marks. Oh, it was easy ot make fun of Stockhausen! Here is the final entry in my notebook, made while assisting at his 2004 'Kompositions-Kurs' : ... and this here ... now this is very interesting ... have a look at page 14, please! ... this is where we flush the soprano down the toilet. This is completely new! I have never done this before. For the first time in the history of music, we flush a soprano down the toilet ...!"

... So here's to you, mr. Stockhausen ...!

New York @ 9/11

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:15:57 +0100
[september 25, 2007] Two weeks ago I took an early plane from Paris to New York. It may have been mere coincidence, but there were not very many with me on this particular 9/11 flight, apart from a large group of orthodox american jews that, as so many Jack-in-the-boxes, all the way kept on jumping up from their seats to lay tefillin ...

it hurts like a warehouse ...

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:55:57 +0100
[august 31, 2007] Blockhaus 1-3 ... Watch me sing and dance among, with and inside degraded german bunkers ... Three mobile field noise movies, here to mark five years of SoundBlog.

Mo' Better Mo-Tapemosphere

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:59:57 +0100
[june 16, 2007] On the first of april of this year I went from Berlin to Cologne, to spend some tape-finding time with three B-boyz's - Bela, Block and Balz - who had invited me to come over and participate in the ninth 'Tapemosphere' ... They chased away all my fear ...

Tin(g)tin(g) in Switzerland

Sun, 06 May 2007 15:59:51 +0100
[may 06, 2007 | sbpc/014] Hear Audio [ mp3 21.1MB ]
A curious country - A curious Jura hotel - A curious mark3t in Bern - A curious concert in Lausanne - A not so curious scheme for EAI ... But still: no tapes found in Switzerland, only a soother caught in Biel underwood ... (entry includes 20 minute podcast with extracts from our Lausanne performance (re-mastered)) ...

Fluxissage

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:59:57 +0100
[april 25, 2007] A finissage in Friedrichshain ... with - maybe too? - many words on the sonanismo; long nights in Berlin, ever changing and dissolving as if in bergsonian flux; a Fifty-Fifty for fifty minutes of dictaphone field recording; and a look at Gunter Krueger's wonderful video film 'Magnetic {eye}': found tapes in Jerusalem, 2000 ....

Back to Berlin, 3_i

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:59:57 +0100
[april 08, 2007] On feelt reek or dinges. First part ...

Back to Berlin, 2.

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:59:51 +0100
[march 07, 2007] 'The risk of some random sleazebag serendipitously profiting from found tapes on the side of the highway is extremely remote ...' (John Oltsik, senior analyst)

Cellarlar Heroes

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:59:51 +0100
[november 05, 2006 | rpc/030,031] perpetual music tracks __ celluloid __ cellular __ cellarlar ___ cellar hall __ paradiso, amsterdam __ tuesday october 10th, 2006 __ "we need rock 'n' roll!", part one; and part two __

jenny likes poets

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:36:51 +0100
[september 28, 2006] An RER train approached from the parisian direction of the track ... I looked at Jenny looking my way with a sudden sweet and sunny smile, that read "Jenny likes poets !" ...

shake your buddha-loop

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 23:36:51 +0100
[september 16, 2006 | sbpc/011] Hear Audio [ mp3 2.6MB ]
"Everyone can take part in Chanting for Peace in their home - just turn on the chanting player and chant along with it ..." Words, sounds and pictures ... all on FM3's transcultural Buddha Machine ...

the sound of almost-no-more words

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 23:36:51 +0100
[september 05, 2006] "Every minute, every day I think you, because I love you, love you, love you ..." This is what within and amidst the noise I heard she said. But few words, that were almost there no more. The sound of almost-no-more words ...

de_tails of lite house keeping

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:36:51 +0100
[july 07, 2006] About Raudio's Havenland Lighthouse Placard, on sunday may 28th 2006 ...

"In your ball, sir, I see fertility ...!"

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:36:51 +0100
[october 22, 2005 | sbpc/004] Hear Audio [ mp3 9.1MB ]
In the midst of crop circles, flying saucers in grainy black and white, green vintage alien dolls, women receiving messages and men with a mission, Cosmodrone surfed the planing waves of a vintage universe ... live at the 1st European Ufo Congress in Chalons-en-Champagne ... "Space is the Place!"

Spiderman

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:36:51 +0100
[september 12, 2005] I went walking for a week, high up in the French Alpes. Amidst the fantastic sounds made by millions of bugs, Spiderman promised, he'd throw me a rope ...