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 artistBlenno
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:
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. ]
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. [
^ ]
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.
[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 ...
[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 ...
[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 ...
[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 ...
[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 ...
[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.
[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.
Y (why?) is Yariv's logo. 
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 
...
