Biography

Rather then write an artist biography in which I will call myself ‘Rinus van Alebeek,’ ‘Rinus,’ ‘He,’ ‘he’ or ‘van Alebeek’ and write about ‘his work,’ I will leave you with some information from which you can compose an adequate presentation in 10, 50 or 100 words. However, to make life easy for you, I have put the copy/paste version of a short bio at the very end of this entry; it is in Italics.

1.
If you like to be brief, just call me a writer who now uses his (environmental) recordings on tape to narrate a story.

2.
Those who would like to give out a bit more information, could add for example my year of birth (1956) and my place of birth (Heerlen in the deep south of The Netherlands). Also the fact that I have published two books (pseud. Philip Markus) could be useful in understanding that my approach to sound is non-academic. A sense of quality could be given in mentioning that my first novel (De Weg naar Oude God) won the prestigious Geert Jan Lubberhuizen Prijs, a yearly award for the best first novel.

(But then again this last bit of information is a bit puzzling as well. Why did the young and promising writer never became an old and established writer? Well, because of editors who change works of literature into products, and a stubborn character like mine whose ‘take it or leave it’ offer got accepted for its ‘leave it’ possibility.)

I encountered the marginal world of our kind of music in the year 2000 in Barcelona. The concerts I visited made me understand the nature of my experiments with environmental recordings. Entering this sound world was pure accident, as was my encounter at the same festival with Zan Hoffman, a key figure from the cassette culture. He put me right in the middle of the great world wide current. Being active and productive would do the rest.

(In short. An accidental encounter with electronic and avant garde music in the year 2000 at the Lem festival in Barcelona, and an introduction to the cassette culture gave way to my further artistic development)

The not so concise biography could end with the notion that in the first decade of this century I found out how to make or manipulate recordings. Thanks to a great number of concerts, sometimes an average of ten in a month, I developed an approach of which people say it is ‘ between noise and pure poetry.’

There is always people who like to know more. So what will follow is an extended version. Edit it as you like.

3.
In the year in which I qualified for biographical notes, 1991, the year of my debut, I lived in Florence, Italy. All through the nineties and some years of the two thousands I lived on several locations in Italy. Those years were not only formative in a gastronomic sense. As a personal assistant to a conceptual artist I developed a sense for proportions, detail and structure, a quality which I find very useful when it comes to the distribution of sound within a composition.

Once I was banned from literature, the doors to the DIY-world opened widely, I spend more and more time recording. I discovered a great variety of possibilities on how to treat or use the microphone.
In late Summer and early Fall of the memorable year 2001 I visited Zan Hoffman in Louisville, Kentucky. In three months time I got engaged in some kind of crash course dealing with the sonic importance of the cassette culture. When I came back home, I  definitely knew how to create sound works with no other use then the objects I found and my little microphone.
A great deal of my so-called ‘unwitnessed performances’ (me and my microphone, walkman and headphone doing strange things in public spaces) were made in Malaga and during a 100-day stay in Morocco in 2002. A tape send to me by Francisco Lopez – Paris Hiss – comforted me: from then on I knew that the tape’s hiss was a significant part of my sound.
Back in Italy I lived in a hamlet for a couple of years. I continued with my writings, but also with my unwitnessed performances, in and around the house. The first editing of this work resulted in releases on CDr and cassette by small labels in the United States.
In 2005 I visited Berlin and managed to play four concerts in eight days. That’s where I understood that a move to Berlin was inevitable.
I arrived in 2006, and was welcomed by the Salon Bruit crew. They introduced me to the Berlin scene, and gave me a chance to set up a series of shows at K77.
From then on it went very fast. On an international level, Jeff Surak, introduced me to a lot of persons. Touring, meeting people, organizing made me arrive at the very heart of the DIY-culture. On this blog you can find a lot of reports, which will make you understand better what I have done so far.

Some Words on my Work

Initially I worked with magnetic tape, because my Sony Walkman was too beautiful. When I had to decide to buy a multi tracker, my friends advised me to go on with analogue, because of the warmth of it. Over the years I found, bought and was given dictaphones, cassette players, walkmen and multi trackers. By now I know how to use them.

Half way through the nineties, when still a writer 24 hours a day I changed my approach. Until then inspired by facts as you can find them in footnotes, I realised that every fact of life was the result of accident or an initial idea. This meant that I could make up persons and stories up to a degree that it became difficult to believe whether these persons and facts were for real or not. Call it para-realism.

Years later, it is exactly this para-realistic quality that you can find at the heart of my works. Sounds from different parts of the world, pieces of conversations are brought together. Our mind wants to understand the things we see or hear in a cognitive way.

One of the main attractions of the use and sound of magnetic tape is what I call ‘The Tarkovskian Notion.’ Tarkovsky’s movies all have the same mesmerizing flow. By some experienced as unbearable slow, it is this camera movement that links the narration and the images to a general sense of time passing. If I remember well, it is in “The Mirror” that a longer shot of a flowing river is shown. The pace of the river is the same as the pace of Tarkovsky’s camera movement, but, in my ears also the same speed at which a cassette runs. And those cassettes play moments from a life that is passing by, or has passed by. A life that is full of stories.

Hear it

During a Radio Show Ludwig Giersch asked the right questions. The result is a fine example of my para-realistic approach mixed with autobiographical notes and an insight in my activities. Additional sounds come from my tapes: Listen to We Live in Clouds

Label director
(since 2010) Staaltape

Curator
(since 2006) das kleine field recordings festival
(since 2009) staalplaat working space
Co-curator (with Anton Mobin)
(since 2010) tales for tapes

About me as a sound artist:
“Rinus Van Alebeek is a peculiar observer of reality and an artist who instinctively transforms lo-fi tape recordings into evocative sound poems, being able to create a “détachement” towards the used media, which is a characteristic of the most original artists.”
Luis Costa, president of Binaural and Associação Cultural de Nodar,

“One of the most influential figures in Berlin’s cassette renaissance..”  exberliner

“Rinus is the poet of lofi field recordings” – Jeff Surak, artisitc director of Sonic Circuits Festival, Washington D.C.

About me as a curator:
“I too felt the need to go further out; rather than just singing songs, I felt I owed it to Rinus to take things into stranger, more risky areas.”
Momus, musician, performance artist, writer

Ready – made bio for your copy/paste skills

Rinus van Alebeek (1956, Heerlen, The Netherlands) is a writer who uses his (environmental) recordings on tape to narrate a story. During the nineties he published two books (pseud. Philip Markus) in his native country.  The first novel (De Weg naar Oude God) won the prestigious Geert Jan Lubberhuizen Prijs, a yearly award for the best first novel.

An accidental encounter with electronic and avant garde music in the year 2000 at the Lem festival in Barcelona, and an introduction to the cassette culture gave way to his further artistic development.

In the first decade of this century van Alebeek made a thorough research on how to make or manipulate recordings. Thanks to a great number of concerts, sometimes an average of ten in a month, he developed an approach of which people say it is ‘ between noise and pure poetry.’

“Rinus Van Alebeek is a peculiar observer of reality and an artist who instinctively transforms lo-fi tape recordings into evocative sound poems, being able to create a “détachement” towards the used media, which is a characteristic of the most original artists.”
Luis Costa, president of Binaural and Associação Cultural de Nodar,

Website: rinus.zeromoon.com