october 29th, 2008 :: Light budget, heavy thinking (Tuned City, Berlin _i :: For the time of Tuned City, an exhibition and conference project in Berlin, Germany, which took place between july 1st and 5th of this year, I joined Rinus van Alebeek and his das kleine, which in 2008 went into asymptotic Zen mode ... In this first of several reports, read about the sirens in Berlin, about Ryijo Ikeda's Spectra/Matrix installation next to the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, and about the two old ladies that were with me on the bus from Hauptbahnhof to Neukoelln ... "Wherever you go, there you are" ... [ read more __ ]

october 12th, 2008 :: Hanna's Sirens (Tuned City, Berlin _o :: Hanna Buhl came from Berlin to Paris, on a summer-sound-sabbatical, and re-discovered there a sound by her unheard since early youth: the testing of the sirens ... To capture that sound and its feeling, on the first wednesday of october, she sent out a team of 'siren hunters' to set up their microphones along the Seine ... [ read more __ ]

september 22nd, 2008 :: souvenirs de vacances ("hear what you think!") :: This summer I had tea at Rod Summer's, an audio artist of british origin who has been living and working for most of his life in my native town, Maastricht. I talked with Rod about his career and work, but most about the VEC Audio Exchange Program, an audio mail art project run by him between 1978 and 1983. It comprises a series of 16 audio-cassettes that provide a multi-faceted sound portrait of those years. The 16 1/2 hour collection of (mostly) 'home'-recordings nicely feature and illustrate several of the hang-ups and peculiarities of those years, as well as bringing to the fore the great overlap and intricate entanglement of the world of 'young and avantgarde art' with that of post-punk experimental pop in its bloom time, the late 1970s / early 1980s ... Back in Paris there was even more mail art: though it did not make any sound, it stuck thousandfold to the walls of gallery Art de Rien in the rue d'Orsel ... [ read more __ ]

september 18th, 2008 :: The Speed of Things :: "It was only after a while that it dawned upon me that she really thought that I was putting the tapes out there ... But isn't that wonderful ? Imagine me roaming city streets, carefully watching ... looking for suitable spots to drape strands of magnetic tape that I carry along in my bag ... around flowers, in fences, in gutters ... Oh, it would be so much better ... " [ read more __ ]

august 31st, 2008 :: " Le chasseur " (foundtaping in brussel_ii) :: 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 online store, to get your copy of "Found in Brussels" ... [ read more __ ]

august 27th, 2008 :: Spiegeltje, spiegeltje :: The star of the evening, on thursday july 17th, 2008 at the parisian La Miroiterie was a mysterious black box, called RT.220 ME. Jean-Philippe, aka Hawaiian Spasms, had found it in a dustbin on the parking-lot of a shopping mall in Marne-la-Vallee. It lay there, crying out to him like an abandoned child. Listen to this entry's podcast, and hear RT chit-chatting along with the lot of us in the Miroiterie's yard ... Then read about the Stig Noise Sound System (from Liverpool, UK) : "... some bands start to play, but Stig Noise exploded ..." Together with Rinus van Alebeek we were the final act on that memorable evening. "Large parts felt like a freeze within the sound of a huge mirror at the precise moment of its 'smashing' ..." [ read more __ ]

august 20th, 2008 :: Quirass Moet Je Horen :: Four years ago I wrote extensively about 'Quirass', the ... whatchamacallit? ...'teen-avantrock-band' me and a couple of friends did when we were at highschool in Maastricht (the Netherlands) in the early 1970s. That write-up was part of Splogman's '52 Weeks Project'. It came with a CD-length selection of the original live-and-other recordings, that survived the tear and wear of decades. The 14 tracks now have been re-published by 'Maastricht Moet Je Horen', a website that reports on all aspects of 'life in the town of Maastricht', through sound: interviews, lectures, audio reports, music, etc ... Now including a downloable CD cover ... !
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june 18th, 2008 :: "Sing laping, sing !" (foundtaping in brussels_i) :: Somewhat over a year ago, during my 'foundtaping event' at Recyclart in Brussels, Belgium, I stood on the Place du Jeu de Balle and watched a man pick up a cardboard box. The box was among the rubbish left behind there at the end of the daily flea market. When the man turned the box upside down, out there came tumbling a lot of 16 cassette tapes. He took the box. I picked up the tapes. I found that once the tapes belonged to Willy's husband. Willy and her hubby liked singmusic. And they liked birds. Hubby used the cassettes to record Willy's gramophone records. To do so, he put the microphone of his cassettetape machine next to the gramophone player's speaker. Which was not far from the birdcage. Inside of that cage there was a shrieking singbird... Whence, 16 full cassette tapes long, we hear Willy and her hubby's domestic bird squeaking along to the music ... Now listen to all of it together in "Sing laping, sing!", which is this entry's podcast ... ... [ read more __ ]

june 09th, 2008 :: d_Revolution #2 :: "Mechanical machines are bodies," dutch writer Dirk van Weelden states in a recent blogpost. "They share with us, humans, the tragic aspects of being a body." Dirk is, specifically, referring to typewriters ... For even though he keeps a blog, at heart Dirk is very much an analog writer. It is therefore that I rejoiced when discovering that recently he began to typecast his weblog ... "Fold 'm and fly 'm!" ... Or how to get trans-digital ... [ read more __ ]

may 11th, 2008 :: a new kind of water :: there's a giant blue Boeing tjif tjaf flying overhead, the silent un-sound of water and a police car rushing backwards along a forest path in 'Air, Earth, Water, Fire', six-and-a-half minutes of uTube with sounds and visions from our soundwalk in the Amsterdam Forest ... In Seconds all falls into place, in one more pretty uTube signed by Rebus: 'The Music Box' ...it is about vibrations, which is the stuff that sounds are made of, and how with Jodi Rose we made a brand new passerelle across the Seine sing, on a funny sunny friday afternoon in april ... 'See me, feel me, touch me, steel me' ... [ read more __ ]

april 22nd, 2008 :: Saskatoon: à demain (tot morgen !) :: 'Tot Morgen' is part of Simulcast 1.0b: Saskatoon. It's a sound piece for seven consecutive nights in Saskatoon, Canada. It plays from sunset to sunrise, 'until, again the roar of dawn.' It was made from one single chord, and a whole lot of flies ... Maybe you should drink. Maybe you shouldn't. But if you do, then take care to stick to whiskey or vodka or beer. 'Tot morgen (à demain)' is no wine-piece ... [ read more __ ]

april 14th, 2008 :: Dung, dung, dung, beetle, bone, bone, dung, dung :: In the Louvre's 39 galleries dedicated to paintings from the northern schools, the flemish artist Jan Fabre traced a meandering monodic path marked by many large but often transient and fragile looking objects built from thousands of iridescent dung beetle elytra, slices of bone and angel hair. A flamboyant, repetitive and obsessive mix of body fluids, angels, warriors and carnivorous insects, that is cartoonish, jubilant ... and profoundly optimistic ... [ read more __ ]

march 16th, 2008 :: "I did not need that string anyway ..." :: Reverberations Paris-New York : everybody having an awful lot of art/rock/FUN with Rhys Chatman's Guitar Trio at Studio Campus in Paris, and - not lightly to forget - David Watson's bagpipes ... [ read more __ ]

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

february 24th, 2008 :: The Great Washing :: In search of a music that does not make sound ... about ookoi's l'Ecoute, 'Live Beyond the Paradiso' and the end of art ... about Olivier Vadrot's 'kiosque electronique' (a mobile placard), and the Brocante Sonore and Har$ performing chez Fukiko, a japanese hairdresser in Vincennes, France ...

february 08th, 2008 :: Dead composers and a hairdresser (japanese) :: About an upcoming performance with the brocante sonore at a japanese salon de coiffure in the heart of Vincennes, about Avraamov's 'Symphony of Sirens' and how I found a trace of the mysterious long lost pre-futurist 'Symphonie des Forces Mecaniques', written by the french composer Carol-Berard in 1908 (or was it 1910 ?) ...

december 04th, 2007 :: I'm an island :: "It's not easy to be an island. There's water all around you"... Read all about ookoi's residency at the Archipel Medialab on the dutch isle of Ameland, november 13-20, 2007 ...

november 08th, 2007 :: All Hallow's Trivia (i) :: About free improvisation and the art of wearing ties, Brooklyn, celebrating Wiel's birthday in Montevideo, a video impression of the Brocante Sonore from Brussels, and playing live sudoku's at the Agence XP placard in Paris XIV ...

november 12th, 2008 :: Neurosen der Präzision (Tuned City, Berlin _iii :: On the second Tuned City day we again walked for far more than two hours, up to the Staalplaat store in the Torstraße. There we met a charming young japanese musician who 'knew about the festival since coming', and Rinus van Alebeek wrote a radio memory on Brandon Labelle's white tablecloth. We then embarked upon the long march back down to the Weserstraße ... The first stage of that journey led us to food and the second one to music. With its third stage we came to knowledge, as we arrived at Udo Noll's place, who that evening was just about to test his upcoming presentation of the radio aporee soundmaps, played by means of a GPS enabled cell phone ... We thus listened to the many sonic ghosts lurking in the neighborhood, while Udo shared with us his passion for maps and the history of surveying ... [ read more __ ]

november 07th, 2008 :: Cake & Coffee (Tuned City, Berlin _ii :: the first night of Tuned City, this summer in Berlin, led Rinus van Alebeek and me to a night shop at the border of Kreuzberg. We bought some drinks and sat down next to two big but friendly Germans. "Mok mok jaha!" one of them cheered in Klingonisch ... "Ruhm und Ehre: Mok mok jaha!," he said. "You can learn it" ... The next day my feet hurt a lot ... Mok mok jaha! for das kleine in Berlin was still lying ahead. [ read more __ ]

october 02nd, 2008 :: the right to be slow :: 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 ... [ read more __ ]

september 14th, 2008 :: Psycho/Geo/Conflux in Brooklyn, NY _i :: 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 try to retrace my 2007 steps in sunny Williamsburg and elsewhere by means of the map of my Williamsburg tape finds ... In this report: read about Sander Veenhof's "SL Walkie Talkie Walks", and the Shua Group's "Intersection Play" [ read more __ ]

august 29th, 2008 :: Rags 'n' riches :: got up-cycled and RFID-triggered at the brand new Mediamatic Bank in the Amsterdam Vijzelstraat, a street that for some reason I continue to associate with depression, wind and rain ... Watch me in a fine pair of sekppku pants, hand-tailored from formerly owned trousers drawn from a huge pile of rags provided by the Salvation Army. On the pile there was a sign: "Do not climb the mountain" ... [ read more __ ]

august 23rd, 2008 :: Trashing, un(un(un(educated :: Noise ... sometimes it is white, sometimes it is pink; it may be brown, speckled, crackled or thermal ... even chaos is noise! Or should that be the other way round? ... Some lines on Portable Noise Kremator's Uneducated Trashing, a very limited edition 8-track CDr, produced by the author of the Noiseblog, with the help of a cracklebox that he just bought and a couple of effects ... [ read more __ ]

july 28th, 2008 :: Michel Waisvisz' Song of Praise :: 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 Sinfonietta in this entry's podcast ...
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july 23rd, 2008 :: Mind: the gap (Hommage à Nam Jun Paik) :: Musicians from the impromptu Ana-R chamber orchestra, in divers combinations, performed over the course of two separate evenings in june six times a parisian Sound CityScape, signed by the Korean artist Daily ... We used a flute, a toy piano, a Casio keyboard, an acoustic guitar and an ukulele on sunday june 15th at La Veilleuse; at the franco-korean Espace Han-Seine, on friday june 22nd, there were a double bass, a piano, and - again - Rebus's toy piano. I think I never ever before heard nor played anything as ephemeral. " "... As ephemeral as the nightly view of a city from within an airplane flying overhead. As ephemeral as the view of Paris from within a car that is speeding along its ring way ..." Such was Daily's 'Hommage to Nam Jun Paik' ... [ read more __ ]

june 29th, 2008 :: Diktat went double Swiss :: DIKTAT performed but twice over the last seven months or so. Twice that was in Paris, and twice we met a Swiss duo in concert. Late last autumn we played with BUG (Christian Bucher and Andreas Glauber) in La Comete (watch it on YouTube). And last month (hear a 20-minute extract in this entry's podcast) we met JEUDI (Benoit Moreau and John Menoud) in l'Ogresse, for the time of an intimate and concentrated two set performance. Then we mistook an egg box for a hat, and in the end went home with nothing but some change, and enough Mongolian Tugrik to buy us a couple of pieces of candy ... [ read more __ ]

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

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

may O4th, 2008 :: i-tag-u | u-tag-me :: a portrait of the author as a musical tagcloud, derived from the traces kept by LastFM of his listening habits ... Alfa jazz, beta pop, experimental, the vitamin b12, field recording, avantgarde, ultra, krautrock, faction ... just to name a few, all were grabbed and put together by a little online script written and made available by Anthony Liekens ... [ read more __ ]

april 18th, 2008 :: Mythical beasts, corsets and kites :: As a sonic environment for Yvonne Oerlemans' Mythical Beasts installation (to be visited still, daily until the end of the first week of may, in the Visitor's Center of the Amsterdamse Bos), I composed an hour-long soundtrack, that is endlessly repeating. It is called: Where are you, Wolf? ... On the occasion of the show's opening, on sunday march 2nd, we went for a walk to discover and record the sounds of this 'Amsterdam Forest': an isle of artificial green, cut in the middle by a busy highway like a pie by a chainsaw, enveloped in the continuous distant low-ish drone of the busy life in the dutch capital, and whipped by the roar of airliners soaring onto the adjacent Schiphol airport every other minute or so ... [ read more __ ]

march 30th, 2008 :: Boezem (suite) :: Thanks to Diktat's secret action in Breda on sunday september 30th, 2007 (that is, today precisely half a year ago), and the 'noise' we made, the city of Breda has assured Marinus Boezem that his 'Visual Sound Project' will be restaured and that soon his voice will sound again on the corner of the Academiesingel and the Willemstraat ... [ read more __ ]

march 15th, 2008 :: :: For Décibels, a saturday evening program of the french national radio France Culture, Anthony Carcone made a reportage about and around the Found Tapes Exhibition ... Now listen to this ...

february 12th, 2008 :: Karlheinz' Song of Praise :: For a special tribute edition of Aligre FM's "Songs of Praise" I dug up the original audio cassette recording of our 1982 interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen; on the process of composing the 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 ...

january 06th, 2008 :: Restmuell :: Tapes found on a german Restmuell bin and elsewhere in Cologne, about a pretty poetic sort of inversion, a crown of thorns, a hanging cassette cemetery, fast-forward-ing your granny, and restauring found cassettes while zipping champagne at december's Dorkbot ...

october 19th, 2007 :: Diktat in Breda - 2. boezem :: Diktat squatted an abandoned piece of public sound art, on the corner of the Academiesingel and WIllemstraat in Breda. We secretly performed, but many questions remained unanswered. How was this 'open air sound cube' supposed to work? What sounds should one hear? Why is it no longer functioning? What is going to happen to this piece of 'art refuse'? Who is responsible? ... "A la recherche du Boezem perdu" ...

october 14th, 2007 :: Diktat in Breda - 1. dutch angle :: about snackbars and post-trash, about doctor Bibber and princess Maxima ... about how dutch tolerance at heart is merely *apparent* acceptance of many_thing 'other', and covers up a deep-rooted xenophobia ...

december 05th, 2007 :: Kh Stockhausen (1928-2007)

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this is an index the harsmedia.com domain (2000||2007) - it is sort of a welcome - thank you for reading you're welcome ... this here first page is sort of a lid - all content is below the blue colored words - much is about sound, about music - the homepage will lead you to archived content and it keeps you informed on recent changes - changes and additions in the soundblog, the found tapes exhibition, the amphibious records archive, to the sound chronicles - there are also links leading to parts and pages kept, for various reasons, from previous versions of the site and to some other domains - without links there's not much of a web - for syndication do use the feed - une partie du site est rédigée en français - cette partie n'est pas une traduction - ce sont des pages contenant des notes sur internet, le web et ses langages - nederlandstalig zijn incidentele verwijzingen naar geschriften van en over j.k. harsman - most pages on the site are written in english - so is harsman's london diary - thank you

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