Harsmedia (SoundBlog - Feed and Podcast)

Y.3 = YltrA! (One big sweep, iii)

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:22:23 +0100

[may 06, 2012 | #421]

Y is a series of yearly events/workshop for students of the Amsterdam Rietveld Academy for Fine Arts and Design. Y carries the name of the artist Yariv Alter Fin (1968-2007), a former student of the Rietveld and (until his untimely death) also a teacher there.

Y (why?) is Yariv's logo.
It looks like a tuning fork.
It sounds like an A.
It is both a question and an answer.

Last year's Y-event - Y.2 - was an 48 hours workshop for Rietveld students on augmented reality/audio that took place in Mediamatic in Amsterdam, April 2011. AR-Artist Sander Veenhof helped the students to 'augment reality' using the Layar iPhone application. Peter Mertens and myself introduced the students to the use of the RjDj-platform for the creation of reactive (augmented) audio-applications.

This year's event was all about working with sound, doing music & performing in the impartial, investigative and do-it-all-bloody-yourself ULTRA-way. For good reasons. Rietveld students were among the driving forces of the ULTRA wave in the late 1970's/early 1980's, while ULTRA's heart of continuous innovation and experimentation for many years after continued to beat forcefully in the Rietveld Medialab. That's one link. The other one being that also for Yariv it all started with an ULTRA-like music group. In the Tel Aviv of the 1980's, before coming to the Netherlands, he was in a band called DXM (Deus Ex Machina). "With DXM I learnt about home production. And about DIY," Yariv used to say. "Do it yourself, use your own head and then hands."

Thus Y.3 became YltrA, which took off with a series of morning presentations on Friday April 20th, down in Room K29 of the Rietveld Academy's Sandberg building.

There, underground, STEIM's Jonathan Reus gave a swirling presentation on subversive electronics circuit bending. We also had Erfan Abdi Dezfouli, who Peter and I had seen December last year at the (h)ear 'Experimental Sounds Connected' festival in Heerlen. Like in Heerlen, Erfan presented his Notesaaz, an awesome electronic instrument that he programmed and built, with a nice interface for a performer to manually control it in an elegant and visually attractive way. You find it explained in the following uTube:

Last, but not least, that Friday morning Truus de Groot talked about her inspirations and approach to making of music. Along the way she gave a fascinating overview, with many fun pictures, of her life long doing music with an ULTRA-touch. At the end she even danced to it...

The work (and fun) began in the afternoon, in Club Karlsson, Mart van Bree's, say, CCC: a 'club for counter-cultural activities' situated on the top floor of Keizersgracht 264 in Amsterdam, the voluptuous housing of the Dutch Media Art Institute NIMk - until the end of this year that is, as the NIMk fell victim to the recent wave of cuts in budgets for the arts in the Netherlands. Situated at a mere couple of hundred of meters of where the Oktopus center used to be (Keizersgracht 138), where in 1980-1981 the original series of ULTRA-concerts took place, Club Karlsson provided for a period of some 30 hours the studio's, rehearsal spaces, stage and lodgings for YltrA. It was there that we came to re-install the energy and drive of the former Rietveld Medialab and the laboratory atmosphere proper that is at the heart of the ULTRA-way of music making.

And this was the students' assignment: within the given period let chemistry work non-stop, and come up, in one big sweep from scratch to end, with the ideas, the sounds, the music and the settings for a public concert/performance in Club Karlsson, on the evening of Saturday April 21st.

It worked like a charm.

Chun-Han Huang, Sinan Güven, Marcel Herkelman, Emidio Josine, Lelou Kjaerulf, Kristoffer Leemburg, Elon Liberman, Derck Littel, Silvia Martes, Anna Orlikowska, Roberto Pérez Gayo, Kevin Schuit and Charles Spears were the 13 enthusiastic Rietveld students that participated in the workshop. They brought with them all sorts of different instruments, providing a broad spectrum of possible sounds to use: a drum kit, keyboard, electric guitars, bass, acoustic guitars, a cello, didgeridoo, mouth harp, percussion, home-built electronics, laptops running Max-MSP ...

Maybe even more important and interesting: the participants came from very different backgrounds, also from a musical/technical point of view, ranging from the highly experienced and accomplished (professional) classical cello player Derck Littel to complete novices, bringing little more than their voice and the will to learn & contribute. Common was their eagerness to jump out of their boxes, whatever these might be, to try things they never tried before, to experiment and to cooperate.

Our special YltrA-guest for the 30-hours session was Parisian povera sound system artist Blenno und die Wurstbrücke, who admirably fulfilled his role of alien element and (slight) provocateur (YltrA 1, 17, 19, 23 ... ( * ). Blenno had come rushing over from France on Thursday night, and rushed back over there on Saturday night, as on Sunday 22th there was the first round of the French presidential election.

There was more politics in the air that weekend at Club Karlsson, where, shortly before Saturday's concert, we applauded the rather unexpected fall of the Dutch right-wing coalition. Secretly I was and remain convinced that the forceful subconscious waves emitted by the far better sounding coalitions that - in a smooth and natural way - were formed at our YltrA workshop actually did provide a final, decisive push. For the better. ;-)

A first ad-hoc coalition was formed early on in the afternoon, by Blenno Wurstbrücke, Elon Liberman, Emidio Josine and Kevin Schuit, who volunteered to provide the ULTRA-sonic acoustic illustrations for my talk with Theodor Holmann about ULTRA for OBA live, broadcast live that early Friday evening on national radio, from the fourth floor of the Amsterdam Public Library (Yltra 7, 20). You can see them in action in the 2 uTube-clips extracted from the live video stream of the program, here and here.)

Meanwhile in Club Karlsson work spread over the premises. There was a loud room, where Blenno had built his cabin and where the drum kit stood. And there was a quiet room, where participants were experimenting with laptop electronics and Max-MSP patches, live transforming the sound of Derck Littel's cello, voices and other stuff. Others again had found that also the corridor behind Club Karlsson's kitchen, or even the staircase, were handy places to work and play, while not being too much disturbed by the sounds made by others...

It was in the loud room that Emidio on Friday evening came up with the idea to use cow bells as interrupters for 220V light bulbs. Mart van Bree loved it, and together with Emidio he immediately began splicing the cables, in order for this to work. High voltage cow bell percussion. On the dangerous side, when not paying attention or touching the wrong parts, but of course it worked. And it did look rather spectacular. Here's a short clip from the Friday late night sessions in the loud room, with Kevin Schuit on drums, Mart van Bree on high voltage cow bells and Kristoffer Leemburg using his self-built electronics.

Later that night the quiet room became the stage for a fascinating improvised sound play for ping pong balls, squeaking floor boards and doors, after which some (though not all) of the participants crashed on the field beds provided for those that dearly were in need of a couple of hours of sleep.

It eventually all came together at the end of our 30 hours, in Saturday evening's showcase: the YltrA concert for Yariv. Visitors were led up the stairs to Club Karlsson while witnessing the four stages of a 30 minute stair case piece, with electric bass, percussion, acoustic guitar and voice (YltrA 9). The concert continued in the quiet room, with a condensed version of the ping pong balls-floorboards-door sound play, led by Roberto (YltrA 3), which gave way to an atmospheric piece for electronics, voice and cello by Sinan, Anna and Derck (YltrA 22, 6, 14). Enhanced, by the way, via an Max-MSP patch made by Roberto that ran in the background, and that those who wished to do so could listen to via the headphones that were provided for that very purpose.

In passing from the quiet to the loud room, we paused to hear Derck and Lelou performing inside a - no longer in use - toilet on the landing. The closet was used by Mart for the storage of all sorts of things, that Lelou diligently removed and put elsewhere for the evening, in order to be able to there sing her song (YltrA 11). The picture, actually, was taken at rehearsals. For the evening concert Lelou draped the whole thing in black cloth... The closet's door opened for the song to start. After the duo had finished their song, the door closed again.

The fourth and final stage of the evening's concert took place in the loud room, where three electric pieces were staged. A first one centered around Elon's customized didgeridoo, the sound of which was partly modified by laptop electronics (YltrA 16, 19), while a second piece, with electronics, drums and electric guitar drifted into realms with a definite 1970's rock-jam & Kraut-y feel (Yltra 21). It all ended with what not only was the climax in the concert's built-up, but that for me personally was this YltrA's high-point: a six minute (almost) tutti monodrone, conceived and relentlessly driven forward from behind his drum kit by Kevin Schuit (YltrA 28).

...

I compiled an hour's worth of live recordings from the workshop in a 28 track documentary Y.3 = YltrA! net-album, available as a free download from Bandcamp's:

Y.3 = YltrA! by Y.3 Workshop

Also well worth lending your ear is the one hour Y.3 = YltrA-remix that we did live at Red Light Radio, on wednesday April 25th, with Kevin Schuit adding a number of fine live electric guitar interventions in the studio.

The two days at Club Karlsson were greatly inspired, intense, energizing and inspiring. An extraordinary experience.

YltrA was a blast!

[ Y.3 = YltrA! was conducted by Peter Mertens and Harold Schellinx, in the spirit of former Rietveld student and teacher Yariv Alter Fin (1968-2007). Many thanks to the Rietveld Academy staff for support, to Mart van Bree for unlocking Club Karlsson and technical support. We survived thanks to the healthy and tasty Yltra catering, provided by the female branch of the Mertens family. Y.3 = YltrA! was made possible by the Alters. ]

[ previous: One big sweep, ii ]

notes __ ::
(*) The indications YltrA 1 et cetera in the text refer to the track titles of the documentary Y.3 = YltrA! net album, available as a free download at Bandcamp. [ ^ ]

tags: yltra, ultra

One big sweep, from ULTRA-modern to post-experimental (ii)

Thu, 03 May 2012 22:22:23 +0100

[may 03, 2012 | #420]

In the proven do-it-yourself fashion, past months' Dutch ULTRA-neo-retro-wave was brought to its zenith by an impressive bunch of volunteers, enthusiasts and run-a-longs, with Wally van Middendorp (also in the proven way) riding the wave's crest and acting as a zen-ish focal point for lots of the ULTRA 2012 action (in which I was, by the way, involved merely sideways).

Much in the avalanche of ding-dong that accompanied it, however (though - obviously - very useful and valuable from a marketing point of view, for which I bow my head in graceful thanks), quite regularly missed the point by miles.

It is why I so much love this modest screen shot of a consecutive series of re-tweets of (non-consecutive) tweets by my favorite swarm of houseflies, cooked up by Hans Hopper, a young twitter friend of the @soundblog's.

- Hopper, Hopper, boy oh boy, I knew they (c)(w)ould do it! -

...

Preceded in the afternoon in Concerto in the Utrechtsestraat (Amsterdam's only surviving proper record store) by a short and energetic set by post-ULTRA rockers Space Siren and followed by one of our highly acclaimed New Moons' ULTRA-reading-performances, a meticulously orchestrated 'final' ULTRA chord was hit on Easter Saturday April 7th, in the Melkweg in Amsterdam, with a multi-layered ULTRA 2012 Einde event, offering an awful lot to hear and an awful lot to see.

Me wearing a The Sound and the Fury T-shirt, just to name an example. You could briefly read about that shirt in an earlier entry of the SoundBlog. It inspired one of my favorites among the many heartbreaking stories in the ULTRA-book (p. 149-154). Zsa Zsa Linnemann, who, decades ago, designed and hand-painted the original shirt that Ian Curtis wore on stage while fronting Joy Division's first and only concert at the Amsterdam Paradiso, had the good sense to do a limited edition remake on the occasion of my book's publication and the series of related ULTRA-events.

Among the many other things worth mentioning, in hindsight it's first of all the delicious ULTRA cakes that spring to my mind. They were offered to us ULTRA-lot by the esteemed Richard James Foster. Baked by Zoe Elizabeth Gottehrer, Richard and Zoe's thought- and colorful present allowed me that very evening to have my ULTRA-cake and eat it...

Wally did the same. He also had his cake and ate it.

The wickedly marvelous Minny Pops, that, after thirty years of standstill, had been set back into motion, and who - performing or not - had been at the heart of the 2012 ULTRA 'revival', were to have their deserved heure de gloire in de Melkweg. Back in 1979/1980 it were Wally's Minny Pops that set this whole 'ULTRA-thing' in motion. And now, at the very end of the end of the series of ULTRA 2012 events, the band - thus Wally decided - would make its last ever appearance in the Netherlands. Even though the Pops are certainly not coming to another standstill yet. They will be recording new material and performing again - in the UK - later this year. Time will tell whether the Melkweg concert indeed has been the Pops' final Dutch 'standup', but whatever way, it gave rise to a whole lot of (re)mark(et)able buzz.

And high expectations.

Wally van Middendorp is the Minny Pops. The Minny Pops are Wally Pops. And with (more than) a little help from a long list of old and young Minny allies, the Pops' conceptualizing frontman came up with a number of ULTRA 2012 live events that were close to being magic.
Touching is the word that probably best describes the band's short first-after-30-years performance. They played a number of tracks from the (late) Poste Restante album (1983, Plurex 3000) in Roodkapje in Rotterdam, on December 3th 2011 (with Pieter Mulder on bass, Wim Dekker on synths and a guest appearance by Mecano's Dirk Polak, on accordion). It all added up to Wally emptying a bottle of water over his head on stage.
Surprising and fun was Wally's live makeover of the first Minny Pops record, the Kojak ep (1979, Plurex 0005), in TAC in Eindhoven with an all-female backing band, on March 9th.
Outstanding were the two renditions of the Minny Pops' seminal first album, Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement (1979, Plurex 0900), in which Wally and veteran Pops Dennis Duchhart, Wim Dekker and Pieter Mulder joined forces with young composers Wilbert Bulsink, Bart de Vrees, Thomas Myrmel and Jeroen Kimman: a first time in the Brussels Ateliers Claus on March 7th, and again a few days later in Dansmakers in Amsterdam, on March 11th, where the bottle of water gave way to a liter bottle of olive oil.

The Minny Pops' final ULTRA 2012 gig, however, seemed to be far less concerned with the sonic (al)chemistry, that for me from the early days of ULTRA onwards always has remained at the core of what making music should be all about. In the Melkweg, after a short promising theatrical introduction somewhat reminiscent of the Residents, the Pops much of time picked from a hat full of rock performance cliches, in a show that was built around material from the band's Factory period, which (as readers of the ULTRA-book will realize) is somewhat less my piece of ULTRA-cake. Thomas Myrmel and Wim Dekker's fine electronickery were set back too much for my taste (or for my place), on stage as well as in sound. Upfront were Mark 'Spasmodique' Ritsema's rock-rhythmic solid electric guitar playing and Pieter Mulder's versatile electric bass-ing. And then, of course, in the very middle of it all and in the limelight wandered, jumped and waggled Wally Pops, the ever (non-)singing de facto (non-)star-entity, very much in place because of being so far out of it.

But one of Wally's great talents when verging into cliche and super-kitsch, is his ability to give things just that little extra push that nolens volens at some point always manages to win me over.

On April 7th that moment arrived when near the end of the show on stage he was joined by Caroline Westendorp, singer of - no kidding - The Charm and the Fury, a metalcore band from Amsterdam. After a but moderately successful attempt to remove the hair of Wally's head with electric clippers, Caroline and Wally did a duet-version of Een Kus, arguably among the Minny Pops' most shameful tearjerkers, that, with Caroline growling like a whistling buoy, was pushed way over the top into the echoing meta-wacky and remained echo-laden until the very end, when Caroline solemnly anointed the Pops' Great Helmsman with a flow of white lotion.

Wally Pops likes to have liquids of all sorts poured over his head on stage. This time it looked a frigthening lot like the scene I had dreamt a couple of weeks before, as part of my 1 minute ULTRA opera ... ...

In between the pictures of the shaving and anointing (made by Marcel Harlaar) there's a fine noisy sounding lo-fi YouTube clip (by Roel Dormits) of the last 13 minutes of the Minny Pops' final Dutch appearance.

Because of some of the parallel program items in which I was myself involved - participating upstairs in a panel discussion on ULTRA then & ULTRA now, with Stan Rijven, Peter Bruyn, Atze de Vrieze and Marcel van Schooten, and a bit later performing in the Theaterzaal - and thanks to the highly enjoyable presence of so many old friends and old & new acquaintances to talk with in the Melkweg's many corridors, I missed all of Truus de Groot's performances, and most of the Tapes retro-reunion-performance. For similar reasons I missed the neo-plus-post-ULTRA opening performances in the Theaterzaal, by the Tobacconists and Bertin. I also missed the Wooden Constructions, but that was because this exciting young Amsterdam neo-post-punk outfit attracted such a crowd that I found it simply impossible to get inside the relatively small Melkweg Theaterzaal.

After the Wooden Constructions had ended their explosive concert and the crowd dispersed, the Theaterzaal was left empty again. It was there and then that Peter Mertens and myself set up for a New Moons performance. Also this would be a final one, eager as we were to now quickly become our familiar ookoi-selves again, getting back to being the plus-post-meta-ULTRA's we had always been, in one straight wiggling warping line leading from way back then into the now, and on to the tomorrow. But as we never did and never will do last performances (that, of course, is a principle; but maybe also it is not, because nothing really is), this last ever New Moons performance got canceled.

When later that night I left the Melkweg, not even drunk just a little, but pretty exhausted, I decided to skip the ULTRA-afterparty with a bunch of exciting young bands, hosted by the Subroutine Records label, in the Vondelbunker in the Vondelpark; a place that in the late 1960s was home to one of the first Amsterdam youth centers, Lijn 3, which later elsewhere in town became the Oktopus center where in 1980's fall Wally Pops, Rob Scholte and myself began organizing the series of ULTRA-concerts, that in turn brought me to where I was now, on that early 2012 Easter Sunday morning in Amsterdam.

All of this I carried back home with me, along with the large paper roll-up of our canceled final New Moons performance.

It felt quite a burden.

tags: post-punk, ultra

One big sweep, from ULTRA-modern to post-experimental (i)

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:36:22 +0100

[april 02, 2012 | #419]
A (1st) ULTRA-craze wrap up, about the author of the ULTRA book becoming a Thai music playing, mice torturing deadhead, and in-cluding an ex-clusive, post-experimental, New Moons track: Back to Nature (based on Hanns Eisler's Rueckkehr zur Natur). Read more ...

Flies, not in the ointment...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:22:23 +0100

[february 27, 2012 | #418]
On how and why I recently became a dedicated follower of a swarm of tweeting houseflies ... Read more ...

Magnetic Remanence: Another Paris Tape Run

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:36:22 +0100

[february 19, 2012 | #417]
An exciting presentation at the Instants chavirés, richly topped with bourbon, beer & snacks, and a far, far more sober & austere Diktat performance at the wonderful-but-cold-in-wintertime La générale nord-est ... Read more ...

The small world daisychain mail tongue tape

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:22:23 +0100

[december 31, 2011 | #416]
A fine analogue art tale, that brings several of this past year's SoundBlog threads together, pulls us over into 2012, as always quoting a wise man: you ain't seen nothing yet ... Read more ...

Touching base

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:36:22 +0100

[december 24, 2011 | #415]
Hi there! Season's greetings! After near to four months of writing, in Dutch, 'Ultra. Opkomst en ondergang van de ultramodernen (1978-1983)', published by Lebowski Publishers, and available as of march 1st, 2012, the SoundBlog is back ... Read more ...

R.I.P.-1 The Francis Cook Landfill and other dumps

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:22:23 +0100

[august 20, 2011 | #414]
We started our R.I.P. summit and workshop at the Banff centre on July 9th with a field trip that took us to the Francis Cook landfill and Banff's recycling depot. A rocky mountains junk hunt, and lots, lots of great garbage pics... Read more ...

(I can't get no) Immediate Satisfaction - Diktat in Berlin [iii]

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:36:22 +0100

[august 05, 2011 | #413]
'... and the evening and the morning were the third day...' Diktat in Berlin. On sunday june 19th, diktat sucked orange... third in a series of fine illustrated & sounding underground fringe reports: out on the Tempelhof, and living rooms as a natural habitat.

Read more ...

'Komm raussi!' - Diktat in Berlin [ii]

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:22:23 +0100

[july 31, 2011 | #412]
'... and the evening and the morning were the second day...' Diktat in Berlin. Second in a sunny series of fine illustrated & sounding underground fringe reports. On the IN-side, and on the OUT-side. Deep thoughts.

Read more ...

Seventy Seconds [ 30/52 ]

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:09:11 +0100

[july 31, 2011]

10-seconds-per-day sound diary for the prime year 2011 in weekly editions, every Sunday on the Dutch hard//hoofd web daily. Each edition comes with a short text taken from my personal diaries (in Dutch) and a picture made by photographer Pieter van Wynsberge at a corresponding hour on one of the seven days...

[ The full series of weekly sound files is available at soundcloud. ]

...

'Where ist Ausland?' - Diktat in Berlin [i]

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:36:22 +0100

[july 29, 2011 | #411]
And the evening and the morning were the first day... Over the weekend of June 17-19, Diktat went to Berlin. This is the first in a fine summer series of lively and illustrated reports, including extracts from Diktat's Berlin performances.

Read more ...

Discuts

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:22:23 +0100

[july 25, 2011 | #410]
Suddenly, there's pics of last year's Parisian estafette rue cassette on the blog. How come!? They're a prelude to my praise for the new edition of Discuts Magazine, that comes with a fine found tapes interview, and a special limited edition discuts found tapes cassette. Get it now!

Read more ...

Halfway

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 23:49:51 +0100

[july 23, 2011 | #409]
Some reflections on a first half year of Seventy Seconds, my 10-seconds-per-day audio diary for the year 2011, which you can listen to - full & unabrigded - as the 10th episode of Chicago based experimental radio broadcast Radius

Read more ...

Life is A Color Wire 3 (table version/KT2011)

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:11:32 +0100

[july 03, 2011 | #408]
A short tour of this year's Kunsttour in Maastricht, for which, in the Hoofdwacht on the Vrijthof, I set up a table version, a miniature, of my last year's Life is A Color Wire installation. Also: a procession, Stichting Intro's Klankpaal and Stefan Rummel's Articulated Chambers, a 24/7 see-hear installation out at the Bassin.

Read more ...

End of an era

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:29:41 +0100

[june 28, 2011 | #407]
A couple of pictures from Jorge Macchi's Music Stands Still, now showing at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. From there with Paul Devens I drove on to Maastricht, just in time to one more time see Vasiliki Tsagari dance her heart out, at the Last but Least Party, that was bidding farewell to the Art Space Rondeel in Maastricht.

Read more ...

Listen! (Sound-Art-Music)

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:11:32 +0100

[june 25, 2011 | #406]
During the closing day of last month's Listen symposium, David Toop tried to not give a lecture. He reminded me of how many, many years ago I discovered William Faulkner's fabulous writing because of Ian Curtis's t-shirt... About a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape, lousy music, great art and the nightly tasting of Belgium beer in the private back room of De Dingen.

Read more ...

Hear It! (Sound-Art-Music)

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 23:29:41 +0100

[april 30, 2011 | #405]
The full and illustrated text, complete and unabridged, of my introductory talk at Hear It!, an extra-ordinary evening full of sound, art and music, that - if only for some hours - turned the, usually so solemn & silent, Stedelijk Museum for modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam into a 'happily noisely' one.

Read more ...

[Resonance] The Human Measure

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:19:07 +0100

[april 29, 2011]

I talked with Dutch sound artist Paul Devens about essentials, control, dead kittens and his recent works: 'Probe', for the Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn NY; and the new Resonance installation 'City Chase', which will premiere next week at the Festival van Vlaanderen in Kortrijk, Belgium.

(Topographic [Table) Topographique]

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:11:32 +0100

[april 19, 2011 | #404]
A pittoresque report of A Table!'s eventful recording sessions in the Pianofabriek in Brussels, laying down the sound material for the A Topographic Table album. Two weeks full of musical ambition and sonic extravagance.

Read more ...

SB Tweet Digest #12 (february 2011)

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:29:41 +0100

[march 14, 2011 | #403]
The ookoi's exploring of a Small World * All about Einstein's Errors * Why are Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony and Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans so very similar? * Silence is a sound, stretched to last forever...

Read more ...

Found Tapes Exibition: update

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:04:37 +0100

[february 11, 2011]

The Found Tapes Exhibition's latest acquisition, number 119, documents the (indeed, no more than) 6 trashed tapes that I picked up in the months july-december 2010. It brings the total number of documented finds to 706, the total duration of the found tapes audio collage stream to 13,5 hours. The new acquisition includes Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (found near Hamburg in Germany), Sinita's crossing her broken heart (Amsterdam), The Beatles' Abbey Road (Amsterdam), de Mosselman (in Eindhoven, the Netherlands), the tapes from the telephone answering machine that Roy and Bianca threw away in Maastricht, and a recording of a French amateur rock band's rehearsal, picked up in Paris, France.

"Harold Schellinx' Found Tapes project was emblematic for the best pieces of art in the SHIFT galleries, mining beneath the surface of simple visual appeal to conjure richly suggestive narratives." " - The Wire (february 2011)"

...

SB Tweet Digest #11 - jan 2011)

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:01:21 +0100

[february 10, 2011 | #402]
Esther et Pierre * did Captain Beefheart sell Filter Queens? * Why the bells in Maastricht did not ring this winter * Esther will sell me anything I want * A QR code * The unbearable fleeting of time * The best things in life are utterly useless

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Seventy Seconds ('promise/things/big diamond rings')

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:29:41 +0100

[january 10, 2011 | #401]
Almost seven years ago, in the conclusion of my SB review of the My2k project, I promised that for each of the remaining prime years of my life, I would keep a 10-seconds-per-day sound diary. 2011 is a prime year. I am keeping my promise.

Read more ...

Happy New Prime Year! (SB Tweet Digest #10 - nov/dec 2010)

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:01:21 +0100

[january 01, 2011 | #400]
Hear Audio [ mp3 7.4MB ]

We break the ice with a deviciously poppy happy happy track, all and only for your new prime year's pleasure, meanwhile debunking the Google Translate beatbox... Then read on to find how I managed to beat Marcel Duchamp at his own game. There ain't no escaping it: 2011's gonna be magic!

Read more ...

Obsolescence

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 13:29:41 +0100

[december 29, 2010 | #399] A panoply of media formats and media players, from the very old to the shiny new, all fighting for the best of our attention during three days of Obsolescence at the Parisian La Générale Nord-Est, where I retro-projected De Ingenieur and stood in awe before a future without face.

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Compositie met champignons (Composing with mushrooms)

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:01:21 +0100

[december 19, 2010 | #398 - sbpc/043]
All about my Mushroom Music, which was given a premiere of Portsmouthian beauty and charm at Schunck's Restaurant 5.0 on November 28th, as part of the grand final of the John Cage 'Anarchy of Silence' exhibition, by 5 brave musician's from village community bands from the south of the Netherlands.

Read more ...

STRP S K7 HISSSS

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:29:41 +0100

[december 03, 2010 | #397] Hear Audio [ mp3 7.7MB ]

In the former heart of Philips Electronics Inc., we met up with veterans from the Dutch DIY cassette scene of the 1980s, marveled at the wondrous tape sounds of Prezlav, Tapetronic, Wouter van Veldhoven en Aki Onda and almost shook hands with Ir. Lou Ottens, inventor of both the compact cassette and the compact disc.

Read more ...

Foundtaping, Maps and Shadows (@ Shift Basel, i)

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:01:31 +0100

[november 28, 2010 | #396] I lost my soles in Basel. But also premiered the brand new Found Tapes Map interface and presented an overview of my 8 full years of foundtaping brought together in the Found Tapes Exhibition, that dazzling "siren song of decaying media", at the 2010 Shift Electronic Arts Festival.

Read more ...

SB Tweet Digest #9 (October 2010)

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 07:29:41 +0100

[november 19, 2010 | #395] Reading out loud in ancient Babylonian * A brilliant future for process music * A Funneling Stone for a tweet * Virtually squatting the Moma * Eartwits * Birth of the terrible Kasettouokuman.

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Noise and Capitalism

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:01:31 +0100

[november 04, 2010 | #394] I read 'Noise & Capitalism', a bundle of essays published about a year ago by the audiolab division of Arteleku. I also listened to the 26 minutes piece that noish~ made from the sound he obtained by reading the book.pdf as an audio file.

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Introducing: Resonance - a European sound art network

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:59:41 +0100

[october 13, 2010 | #393] Resonance is a European sound art project and network that - for starters - will run until May 2012. I will be monitoring the project, a task which includes editing the Resonance blog ...

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Running Roaming Recorders (flying, bumping, hopping, hking)

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 22:01:31 +0100

[october 07, 2010 | #392 - sbpc/042] Hear Audio [ mp3 9.7MB ]

Lauri Warsta sent a parcel with a recording dictaphone through the European snail mail system. It made me so curious that as an experiment I played mr. postman myself to a parcel with a recording dictaphone. I took it all the way from Amsterdam to Maastricht... Could it be that barking dogs are a roaming running recorder's destiny?

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SB Tweet Digest #8 (september 2010)

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:59:41 +0100

[october 01, 2010 | #391] * The SoundBlog Tweets Daily, * a musical instrument of microscopic scale * Matthew Herbert's hypertextual translation of Mahler's Adagio , * 2011 is a prime year, * Vuvuzela blues.

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Bonjour Schiphorst! Farewell Blue Vase! (and then I joined the Avantgarde, iii)

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:01:11 +0100

[september 26, 2010 | #390 - sbpc/041] Hear Audio [ mp3 11MB ]

A colorful and re:sounding description of A Table's sunday morning performance at this summer's Schiphorst Avantgarde Festival, and how, by throwing in a tenner taken from their hard-earned fee, the illustrious duo together with Jean-Hervé Péron and his family became the proud co-owners of a freshly sprayed Danner.

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Life is a Color Wire 2

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:09:11 +0100

[september 20, 2010 | #389] How with the help of Stichting Intro's technical staff I became a telecom provider: we gave Minckeleers and 't Mooswief a 90 meters long tin can telephone connection, stretching all the way across the town hall from one side to the other of the Markt in Maastricht (the Netherlands).

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Life is a Color Wire [i]

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:07:21 +0100

[september 15, 2010 | #388] We get to know Minckeleers and 't Mooswief, two statues on the marketplace in Maastricht (the Netherlands). The one is situated to the north of the old town hall, the other to its south. One holds an eternal burning flame, the other spits water into a pentagonal basin through five metal fish-heads.

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The strange case of the quite honorable Justin Bieber's temporal stretching

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:09:11 +0100

[september 04, 2010 | #387] How a recent Internet-meme suddenly doubled the SoundBlog's traffic, about audio time-stretching becoming part of the musical mainstream, a playful yet serious Cupertino pitch and a number of clear-cut promises for the Future of Music Consumption.

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Yi Sang in Seoul: Rebirth

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:01:11 +0100

[august 22, 2010 | #386] A distant view on the second part of the Yi Sang project, in the Space Hamilton in Seoul (South Korea): bicycle rides, Read me a Poem, and a streaming pulp performance with a pale red-haired woman, bathing, a strong taste for chocolate hard as stone and a gramophone for a suitcase.

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'And what about Yi Sang?' (... a Paris, iv)

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:11:11 +0100

[august 14, 2010 | #385] At the soirée littéraire in La Générale, Paris XI, I introduced three fine ladies who honored the elusive Korean poet. One wore a white mask. They made him blush and sometimes chuckle. A strange/ideal symmetrical translation, a Lego architect, Yi Sang in the box, and the unbearable reversal of time.

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Shake your booty (on the workfloor) [and then I joined the Avantgarde (ii)]

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:01:11 +0100

[august 10, 2010 | #384] When up on the Avantgarde Festival's workfloor Lainhart & Zunk performed Messiaen's Oraison, outside even the Schiphorst birds for a moment held their breath. But there also was welding and cutting and sawing and hammering. And our Re:Carcassonne Table that, eventually, had to give in to the Avantgarde's strain, and crashed.

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SB Tweet Digest #6 (July 2010)

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:11:11 +0100

[august 02, 2010 | #383] * A German Twietenstelle, * Rietveld graduation show pics, * Chinoiseries d'été, AND * six (6) classic SB-related albums now available as high quality digital downloads @Bandcamp, including the first ever official digital re-issue of two very rare and highly collectible early 1980 releases by the legendary Young Lions.

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And Then I Joined The Avantgarde (i)

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:01:11 +0100

[july 22, 2010 | #382] The morning after I slipped out of the bed and had a solitary early breakfast in the cottage's front garden, where I watched a lama and a camel grazing in the meadow just across the street.

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'Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl'

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:01:11 +0100

[july 19, 2010 | #381] Still on our way to the Avantgarde festival in Schiphorst (Germany): a revelation, misfortune, high way sausages and how a car's loose bottom caused Holland to win miraculously against Brazil... Nothing that a bit of tape won't fix!

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From (h)ear to avantgarde

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:01:11 +0100

[july 18, 2010 | #380] On our way to the Avantgarde festival in Schiphorst (Germany), with Maurice JJ we made a stop at (h)ear in Heerlen (the Netherlands), where we went 'A Table!' with Kaspar König and witnessed Vulvax & S.N.O.T., like diver and duckling, set out on a mission of bourgeois revenge ...

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The Final Soundtrack

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:01:11 +0100

[july 14, 2010 | #379 - sbpc/040] Hear Audio [ mp3 112MB ]

The SoundBlog proudly presents _Finale_: the full soundtrack of the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup final between the Netherlands and Spain, slightly (but ever so subtly) edited [re-composed], for an optimal listening experience.

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SB Tweet Digest #5 (June 2010)

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:01:11 +0100

[july 13, 2010 | #378]
* TINT Arts Lab online residencies, * Momus' Hypnoprism uTube album, * Vive la Vuvuzela!

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The Great Johnny Hallyday Meltdown

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:58:21 +0100

[july 06, 2010 | #377] On the sunny Sunday afternoon of June 27th with the Wurst-Brücke and Tapetronic I swang, swinged and swung in Blenno's Povera Park down in Viroflay. That very same evening Aux Combustibles yet another Parisian club manager threw a tantrum in view of our public appeal. Still, Ultimate Capitalists was one of our best performances sofar this year.

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Ceremonies [Yi Sang in Paris, iii]

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:18:11 +0100

[june 29, 2010 | #376] Est-ce que la ligne a assassiné le cercle ? opened on wednesday June 23rd with a performance composed by daily, incorporating an ancient Korean rite. On saturday June 26th we saw Ryu Biho launching baseball messages among Korean soccer fans watching their team's world cup match outside in Seoul's pouring evening rain.

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Read me a poem, Yi Sang! [Yi Sang in Paris, ii]

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:23:21 +0100

[june 25, 2010 | #375] In a small transparent suitcase there is an audio cassette, which contains a copy of 'Read me a poem, Yi Sang!', a one hour sound composition based on my recent reading of French and English translations of Yi Sang's poems.

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'Raise the trumpet, sound the drum'

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:18:11 +0100

[june 23, 2010 | #374] After a stunning demonstration of their out-of-the-ordinary use of the vuvuzela on wednesday June 16th 2010 in Amsterdam, the ookoi are currently available for short notice field missions to South Africa ...

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Sunny soundy days [KT2010, iii]

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:13:11 +0100

[june 17, 2010 | #373 - sbpc/039] Hear Audio [ mp3 1.9MB ]

In Maastricht, along with a tree, I dreamt of Uirapuru, I strummed an electric egg cutter guitar, watched lava dance and then solemnly reflected upon the sense of it all in a room set up to that very purpose by Bonne Knibbe. Afterwards, we had a beer.
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Yi Sang in Paris [i]

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:18:11 +0100

[june 13, 2010 | #372] "If one cannot even know oneself, how could one know Yi Sang?" A gentle prelude and introduction to the upcoming Yi Sang à Paris events, that will take place in and around the Parisian la générale from june 23rd to july 4th: Est-ce que la ligne a assassiné le cercle ?

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Jean Borde's Electric Dream

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:18:11 +0100

[june 12, 2010 | #371] Friday June 11th 2010, when Jean Bordé presented his electric oc(VIII)tet at La Comète in the rue du Faubourg du Temple, outside in the courtyard we watched the most incredible and mesmerizing of electric colored skies linger over Parisian rooftops.

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A kitchen table and a game of cards [KT2010, ii]

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:31:11 +0100

[june 10, 2010 | #370] (Spoerri, Filliou, Coca Cola) - About three 'empty rooms' that were on show at three different locations of this year's euregonial, untitled, Kunsttour in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and how all three of them were connected.

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Kunstvlaai 2010 - some im/pressions

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:31:11 +0100

[june 09, 2010 | #369] A frozen audio cassette tape, photographs of jolly 'Germans', the advent of the singularity, Heavy Metal and a couple more im/pressions of a walk around the 2010 edition of the Amsterdam Kunstvlaai, on May 19th 2010.

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Table archaeology: unearthing the picture trap

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:31:11 +0100

[june 04, 2010 | #368] I had the good luck meet Daniel Spoerri in the park of the Domaine du Montcel in Jouy-en-Josas, where the first week of June 2010 the Société du Déterrement du Tableau_Piège set out, with the professional help of a team of archaelogists of the INRAP, to meticulously excavate the remnants of the Déjeuner à l'occasion de l'enterrement du tableau-piège , which took place there 27 years ago ...

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Classified

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:01:11 +0100

[june 03, 2010 | #367]

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SB Tweet Digest #4 (May 2010)

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:01:11 +0100

[june 02, 2010 | #366 - sbpc/038] Hear Audio [ mp3 1.5MB ]

How the Dutch Socialist Party managed to win my vote * a free vuvuzela * about private Wilhelm's on-screen screaming, since 1951 * legendary 1980s mag "Vinyl" now online * the free improviser as a model of the ultimate capitalist.

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Autonoom en untitled [KT2010, i]

Sun, 30 May 2010 16:01:11 +0100

[may 30, 2010 | #365] The 11th Maastricht Kunsttour opened on May 22nd with a sunny breakfast discussion on art, autonomy and cultural politics in the Timmerfabriek's backyard. Read about Karl Marx's sister Sophie and how I and myself (geen woorden, maar daden!) became future tenants of 1 square meters of Maastricht's most exciting Artspace.

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Instant coffee and (b)[re](a)d wine: the Spoerri re:table in Extrapool, Nijmegen

Tue, 18 May 2010 13:01:11 +0100

[may 18, 2010 | #364] Roy Santiago thoughtfully and deliberately messed up the re:Carcassonne table during its Dutch premiere at the Nijmegen Extrapool, on Friday May 14th 2010. In a grand final gesture, Eva van Deuren, his belgian complice, then covered it all up...

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Paris Visite

Sat, 15 May 2010 23:01:11 +0100

[may 15, 2010 | #363] Thanks to Blenno und die Wurst-Brücke, who sent us a picture of another mighty fine audiophile endroit in the French capital. Let the SoundBlog be your guide, on the other sides of town ...

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attention ! oeuvre d atable

Thu, 13 May 2010 08:21:31 +0100

[may 13, 2010 | #362] With A Table! we re-made Daniel Spoerri's kitchen table, the way it was on October 17th, 1961, at precisely 15h47, in his Parisian hotel room. It is our principal instrument in an upcoming series of A Spoerri Table! events. The premiere took place on May 7th, during the Parcours d'Artistes Saint-Gilles, in Brussels.

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Tweet Digest #3 (april 2010) [2/2]

Tue, 04 May 2010 19:01:11 +0100

[may 04, 2010 | #361 - sbpc/037] Hear Audio [ mp3 2.9MB ]

... * Start Learning Squirrels To Read A Poem, with the online free-form scores of Jason Freeman's Piano Etudes ... ** Then find serendipity lurking in every corner of the Amsterdam Mediamatic Bank, during last week's 24 hour Music Hack Day ...

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Tweet Digest #3 (april 2010) . [1/2]

Sun, 02 May 2010 18:21:51 +0100

[may 02, 2010 | #360] ... * Diablito - the mechanical imp, or how to define a fieldrecorder ** a Digital Folklore Reader (review) *** "Drs. P is nog lang niet dood // hij was heel op dreef bij Radio Rood" **** Thirty (30) times Jandek

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'noem me black en decker, want ik ga je boren'

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:01:11 +0100

[april 22, 2010 | #359] I found 7 crumbled pages with Dutch raps on a corner of the Amsterdam 'jewel hood', the Diamantbuurt. Thrown away after a performance or rehearsal, I guess, by a bunch of young Dutch rappers. Some of it is obviously inspired by the late American rap megastar 2Pac, but not only the lyrics' language, also their content is nevertheless very *Dutch* ... or is it? Well, it is, and at the same time it is not. Which accounts for the fact that for weeks I kept carrying them around in my pockets. I read them over and over again, but many of the seemingly pretty local references remain utterly misty to me... What is meant by a 'carnaal' (or 'karnaal')? And is 'kelma' indeed the Moroccan word for 'word'? What are the 'tijden van Hayran'? And who is 'Justin Liehoedlake'? ...
Anyone out there with a rapping Amsterdam cousin?
Bring me that 'boy die blijft draaien, als een reuzenrat vanuit Amstel-fain' ...!

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Fecit Venetiis 1754 (Muzzix #10, Lille)

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:21:51 +0100

[april 18, 2010 | #358] We spent a great weekend of sonic demo(n)creation with both the Ana-R and A Table! at the 10th edition of the Muzzix Festival in Lille (France).
Read, see and hear in this colorful report all about new blood, the fine but long forgotten art of Stradivarius bashing, and Rebus' Red Hatter: a solipsis's musician's wet dream ...

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Tweet Digest #2 (march 2010)

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:01:11 +0100

[april 02, 2010 | #357 - sbpc/036] Hear Audio [ mp3 2.6MB ]

The monthly SoundBlog Tweet Digest, though meant specifically for those going the Queen's way (that is: those that do not have time, energy or gusto to follow twitter.com/soundblog), will be of interest also if you soar along the Femke Halsema way: there's great pictures, deep thoughts, a couple of confessions and additional comments added to the best of SoundBlog's february 2010 "'Heard/Read/Seen" tweets. In this edition: * "In B-flat" , * RjD news, * AI and algorithmic composition, * The Arduino micro controller, * An analogue tape glove, * Second Life, and lots more ...

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on-g'luk = un-luck, that is: malheur, twice ...

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:01:11 +0100

[march 30, 2010 | #356] Late february Diktat did a very fine performance at La Machinante. But when we packed our gear, JB found the neck of his 150 year old double bass had been broken (repair: 5000 euros)... Even more memorable and unique was our rendering of Stockhausen's Right Durations, some weeks later at the Eglise Saint-Merry. But the morning after we found some rascal stole the wheels of JJ's car (repair: 700 euros)... If someone wants to stop us that badly, we surely must be on to something BIG...

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Paris Tape Run (2009): tous les sens uniques

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:01:11 +0100

[march 20, 2010 | #355] Also pop hop pretty girls are onomato-peeing "Pfffjizzzz, schroenkkk, zschroenkkkk !" these days. And Staaltape's release party for the 2009 Parisian Tape Run (a relay recording compilation cassette in '70/80's mail art style) was a big hit. Another collectors' slum? Or cassette culture's second coming?

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Le son de l'art a sa naissance (Art's Birthday 2010)

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:01:11 +0100

[march 18, 2010 | #354] Commissioned by the Swiss RSR Espace 2, my present to art on the occasion of its this year's birthday became an elaborate audio-bio-faction and a sonico-musical reflection on the concept of being born. Its key-ingredient is a recording made one summer night in 2003, when I found myself tumbling into a hole in the floor of a dark garage somewhere in Paris, with my dictaphone on and recording...

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SB Tweet Digest #1 (february 2010)

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:01:11 +0100

[march 01, 2010 | #353] The monthly SoundBlog Tweet Digest, though meant specifically for those going the Queen's way (that is: those that do not have time, energy or gusto to follow twitter.com/soundblog), will be of interest also if you soar along the Femke Halsema way: there's great pictures, deep thoughts, a couple of confessions and additional comments added to the best of SoundBlog's february 2010 "'Heard/Read/Seen" tweets. In this edition: * Sun Ra's "Space is the Place" , * The High Ponytail, * why the Dutch composer Matthijs Vermeulen inspired DIKTAT, * Sound is Art, * Noise Control, and lots more more ...

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"Zonder Vreesch, want immer Dapper, gaan wij des Zondags naar den Kapper"

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:01:11 +0100

[february 24, 2010 | #352] I had my hair cut by charming and talented Vasiliki Tsagari, in Kaspar and Maja's Kapsalon, on february 7th, where 3 boys and 3 girls sang my sudoku, Matthijs Vincent Kouw's compossibilities of sonic trajectories revealed topological features, and Rod Summers re-enacted one of the greatest death scenes in cinematic history.

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White Fungus

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:11:11 +0100

[february 20, 2010 | #351 ] White Fungus is the name of a bi-annual politically outspoken and independent experimental art magazine, now spreading from Taichung City in Taiwan, but still with firm roots in New Zealand...
"Magazine? You can't mean... printed...? As on... paper!?"
Ah! Yes, I can! Printed. As on... paper!

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public places, hidden islands

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:11:11 +0100
[february 17, 2010 | #350] Every once in a while I have this sudden urge to hear Beethoven symphonies all day long. Why? I went through this, ad nauseam, with my analyst. She thinks I keep the reason stowed away on a little ile, that I've been hiding ever since my early youth. Bref. I guess she's right. But once more I gave in to the urge... and found Ludwig Van leading me to the perfect scene for a Diktat...

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twitter.com/soundblog

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:11:11 +0100
[february 16, 2010 | #349 ] You now may follow @soundblog on Twitter, where each update is a link to something we just read, heard and/or saw, and that we think you should read, hear or/and see as well ...

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If only the goal of our journey were nearer, we all would be jolly long less

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:11:11 +0100
[february 13, 2010 | #348 - sbpc/035] Hear Audio [ mp3 11MB ]
Here's twelve fine minutes, brough to you as a podcast recorded live during last month's edition of the Rhinoceros' laboratory, on sunday january 24th at Les Combustibles in Paris, France. Hear my Korg's twiddlelydeetin', listen to my dictaphone's zapping, feel how workmen hit a conservatory's baby grand and vibe along to dark waves of an intrepidly zonking electric guitar... "If only the goal of our journey were nearer" ... Featuring Ana-R, and Anthony Carcone. Read more ...

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

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:11:11 +0100
[february 05, 2010 | #347 ] About Alessandro Bosetti's The Pool and the Soup, a 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 beamed me back to the very early 1960s, peeking around the door of a small room in the flat of friends of my parents. Read more ...

Medium Hang Esztetika

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:11:11 +0100
[february 04, 2010 | #346] The first part of the ongoing study on EAI as a metalanguage, that, together with Rebus, I embarked upon a couple of years ago, just recently was published as part of an Hungarian book called "Medium Hang Esztetika - Zeneiseg a medialis technologiak koraban. (That Google-translates: "Medium Sound Aesthetics - Performance in the medial age of technology".)

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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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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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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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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 ...

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' ...

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 ...!

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...!

" 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" ...

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 ...

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.)

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.) ...

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 ...

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 ...

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)

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 ...