Ranch

The logical consequence of a long stay on a ranch somewhere in California is the release of a cassette with the title ‘Ranch.’ For the composition of this tape I used recordings I made during my stay in California. The recordings include walks, bees, frogs, foot steps on a wooden floor, the very rare Californian rain, an old piano, big trees moving in a fierce wind, a running river.

An other aspect of ‘Ranch’ is the use of cassettes I found in obsolete cassette players, amongst which a beautiful pink sony radio-cassette player. The found tapes were all recorded in the last century. A third component is a quartet of commercial tapes I was given, all four of them a reminder of the glory years of the humble cassette: albums by Joan Baez, Waylon Jennings, The Beach Boys and Judy Collins.

The fourth ingredient is a cassette with a reading on it. These types of cassettes were very popular in the last century. They provided manuals for a better life, a better economy, a better mastering of language, a better way to present yourself in public space, but also recordings of meetings, talks or telephone conversations. The qualities of a cheap and easy to reproduce medium as the cassette were used to its maximum effect. The tape I found was a reading of a Zen Master’s wise words.

When listening back to the recordings, all of which the result of a different mix, I couldnot help noticing that I had captured a moment in the newest history of the West Coast. This didnot happen because of my composing skills, if at all I have any. It is a simple result of the radio voices, the dated music and the snippets of the book by the zen master that got destructed or highlighted, but also mixed with the more intimate sounds of my recordings (that in fact could have been anyone’s recordings).

I connected three walkman to a fourtrack and used the fourtrack as a mixer and a player. In this way I could do a mix using four different sources and record them at the same time on my Marantz. All the twenty tapes of ‘Ranch’ carry the recordings of a different mix. The tape will cost you 7 Euro and will be available at the shop, or at my concerts.

NEW! The first issue of Staaltape’s Audiozine – Glenn Branca

The cassette comes in a custom made cardboard package with  X-Ray pictures on the front and back side. The inlay is a high quality color print, plus a written piece of paper with the basic liner notes. Every copy has a different X-ray.

Price 8.00 Euro, available through staaltape at staalplaat.com or directly from the shop.

In how far this is an Audiozine, is of course to be judged by the listener. It was my intention to combine elements of essay-writing, travelogues, documentary and, in this case, docu-fiction.

If to some of you it still sounds like music, well, then let it sound like music!

More

Daguerreotypes is my new release on Zeromoon

Released by Zeromoon, the three-track Album

Daguerreotypes

is now available on bandcamp.

It will cost you $1.99 for the whole album

or $0.99 per track.

Track list

The Great Whale

The Opium Merchants

Winterspaziergang im Schnee

Notes

All source material was recorded by or given to Rinus van Alebeek.

All source material was directly recorded onto cassette or mini-cassette

with the use of a professional walkman or a voice recorder.

All tracks were composed with the use of a four track recorder.

Notes to The Great Whale

Captain Ahab by Gregory Peck

Piano music by Claude Debussy

Ocean by Salem

Notes to The Opium Merchants

source material recorded in

Washington DC, Berchtesgadener Land and Pistoia

No I Ching oracle was consulted during the composing process

Notes to Winterspaziergang im Schnee

Adolf Hitler by Tobias Moretti

Kammermusik by Berchtesgadener Alp

Toilet music by Blenno

Cover picture by Barbara Gessner

Working with Tapes – Reading about Tapes

It is two years now that I take care of staaltape, staalplaat’s cassette label. In doing so I have noticed that releasing cassettes follows its own law, but also a bit my own law. I thought of themes to which I could invite an artist, but I also had to think of the packaging. With every new release the challenge became bigger, simply because I had to think of a new design for every new tape. This was an appeasing process during which the idea took shape and form. Then when the first results were ready to be photographed, fulfillment defined my day.

For the sonic content, its structure, I also followed my taste: I like diversity. I also like to hear that someone took care of the composition of a piece, rather then taking care of having an occasional jam or try-out published.

I found it hard to find reviewers. (But maybe you can find me? Drop a line if you are interested in writing about staaltape releases).

But luckily I found Ed Pinsent of The Sound Projector. His review came unexpected. (It had been six months since I sent him this packet.)

In his review I could read what a great person I am ( and I thought: “O boy, couldn’t you have waited until my funeral?”). But to my heart warming pleasure I also encountered someone who recognized the work put into this releases by the sound artists, how they picked up the general idea, and – yes- my work doing all this packaging.

Here is some excerpts of the review:

“Guaranteed 40 minutes of odd cranial stimulation with this white mouse of mayhem, where the banalities of life on the street are gradually and subtly remade into grainy patterns of truthful radio interference.”

“Read all the contextual information you like about these performance-art like events, but nothing really serves as a map for navigating the low-key, nondescript experiences. Again, banality is another keynote and a general refusal of any form of conventional aesthetic grooming in favour of a directness and simplicity.”

“Wrapped up it be in tissue paper like a mummy. It was glued up at seam so I thought I would snap a photo before I broke the seal. Now the wrappings have fallen from the bones of Paris Tape Run 2″

“A real pleasure to receive these genuine, hand-made and vital pieces of radical avant-garde art.”

Read ‘The European Canon is here’ , the complete review

For Sale! Diktat – In Berlin

Last year Diktat performed inside and outside in Berlin. The digital album Diktat – In Berlin documents the audio part of these performances.

Throw in your Dollars or Deutschmarks and make it yours:

DIKTAT in Berlin

Read Diktat outside/inside the Manufactured Normalcy Field

Follow DIKTAT @diktat_us

SLEEP

In the last two months I worked on a four hour sound piece. These four hours will be transmitted on FM radio in Paris by Radio Libertaire.

When putting all the sounds together I thought of a small radio transmitter in a semi dark room in Paris. Maybe someone couldnot sleep and heard all these unusual sounds, sounds that yet were strangely familiar.

I imagined the radio as an animated object, a de-materialized guide that would bring the listener safely to the other side of the night.

But maybe in my subconsciousness I had the title of Céline’s great novel in mind.

Sleep has sounds from the last part of the second hour (orange side) and the first part of the third hour (green side) on it. I made twelve copies, simply because I didn’t have time to make some more.

You can get a copy at my concerts for seven euro ( or eight dollar) or in exchange for a review or a nice cassette.

And Oh! There is 40 minutes of sound on a chrome quality tape.

SENSUAL FASCINATING INTELLIGENT MYSTERIOUS

“scrummy kosmischeplundernoisemuzak where discrepant pop culture, field recordings, playful noise and speechless poetry collide,” is how Yannick Franck describes my cassette release on his label Idiosyncratics Records.
.

For the composition I used a great variety of my own recordings and adopted tapes with awkward music on it. Cuts and repetition, collage and excerpts plus the possibilities that working with two fourtracks and a Marantz offer come together on this 23 minutes opus.

You can (pre-)order it here
or buy it at my concerts.

The tape will be presented on 9. September in Brussels.

Chapters from the Book of Shadows, Story of a Tape

The tape is solo by Rinus van Alebeek, and you can only get a copy by sending mister Van Alebeek a tape in return. The very foundation of the world of cassettes. You will also receive a small plastic bag with rubbish, which you can throw away and save Van Alebeek in doing so. Maybe the nature of recycling is what this is about. Snippets of field recordings are used, along with a collage of disco records, dictaphone stuff and such like. The sort of sounds we use or throw away, but Van Alebeek decided to keep them, stick them together in a rather random order and call it music. The music is copied on a recycled cassette – Irena Seda in my case – and looks strikingly familiar to the ones released by RRR as part of the ‘Recycled’ series. Not entirely my cup of tea, this whole ethos of ‘I can do it, you can do it’ which doesn’t necessarily give cassettes a fine name for great music. (FdW)

Blindfold

It was curious to read how Frans de Waard, the reviewer, pondered about the nature of my tape. I realised I had send him too little information. He writes as if he walks around in a room blindfolded, picks up things and wonders what it is. The outcome is an honest report of his listening experience. But I remained in my seat long after, with the image of a blindfolded man taking care not to bump against or fall over obstacles.

Cassette

In the early seventees my father gave me a cassette player he had found on one of his daily walks. It was a Philips portable mono machine, my first possibility to listen to my own choice of music. Up to then the portable radio had been my only gateway to the scarcely transmitted music from the beatlesandstones age. As an experiment I bought a compilation cassette of Jimi Hendrix. It was way too expensive. My collection of cassettes was a result of visits to friends. I cannot recall when that collection of tapes disappeared. At the end of the eighties I started to visit Italy over longer periods and eventually ended up living there. Here I encountered the cassette again Friends made mix-tapes, choose a picture for the cover or designed one themselves and gave them as a little present. I liked that and I liked to make those tapes as diverse as possible, so that every new track would come as a surprise.

Long story short

The tapes and cassette players on my table have joined me at some point in my life during the last ten years. I still make mix tapes, but of a somehow dfferent nature. One is with recorded sounds, the other is re-arranged with the use of a four track. Every now and then I perform.

Tapes from the Crypt

In the month May of the year 2012 I performed at Ateliers Claus in Brussels. This happened upon invitation by Jean Jacques Duerinckx. The theme was ‘scary but funny’ and I had to play in a duo with Flavien Gillié. When I received the invitation I thought about what sounds to use. I asked Adrian Shephard with whom I present Radio On if he had some scary sounds. Adrian is a great connaisseur of the occult. He gave me a tape with a recording of ‘chapters from the book of shadows.’ and made me promise not to loose it and to give it back. That was scary. The tape itself was not as scary as I wanted; soap bubble voices spoke against a background of soap bubbled music: “O thou hor-ned one.” I decided not to use it and returned the tape.

A recycled cassette

A few years ago I saw a box with Turkish music cassettes outside of a thrift store. I went inside. The shopkeeper showed me piles of boxes that reached up to the ceiling. They would cost 5€ per box if I bought all of them. I bought one for 8€. At home I counted two hundred commercial music cassettes, all of them in a plastic wrapper. When I considered to copy the scary cassette I chose one of them rather then a new one. New ones cost money. The one I had picked, had the portrait of a lady on it. I wrote the title over her face in my typical left-handed (I am right-handed) calligraphy: ‘Chapters from the Book of Shadows.’

A strikingly familiar look

With RRRecords recycle series,” Frans writes. What strikes me when I watch the cover of one of their cassettes is the manifesto character of it. Recycling might have been a worthy revolutionary message back then, now in an age of food container divers it is common behaviour.

The cover of my cassette is a bit similar to these of the special ‘Tales for Tapes #7′ edition that I made for Anton Mobin.

I will not publish the picture of the tape I discuss here. Let it be your surprise, in case you decide to trade.

Sounds we use or throw away

There were new cassettes in my collection. Probably they’d jumped in the box to shmousz with my regulars when I was away on tour. I listened to them and heard what scholars call ‘music.’ Together with my other cassettes ( and pencils and ink and paper and cassette players and notes and cables and keys and coins and glue and oddities of all kinds ) they lay scattered around on my table. “Hmm,” I thought when I listened to the supposed scary sounds. And then it hit me. I was curious to find out if the first five frightening minutes would go along with the sounds I had in mind. It did. I continued and filled the tape using my own and the cuckoo cassettes.

In a rather random order

Ever since Kris Limbach contributed a few sound snippets to the ‘Four Corners of the Night’ cassette album, I knew of chance. Chance was when you did something randomly with a precise idea behind it.

[chance|RvA]

Once upon a time it was a very conscious act, to choose the recordings I would use in a performance.
Then I found out: 1. whatever I choose, it will always be me. That made picking a cassette much easier and less time consuming. Consuming time gives me a head-ache. Other discovery I came across was that 2. there is always some sound you can use in composition, no matter what kind of recording or piece of music you want to choose from. Together with 3. Every listener will try to hear harmony and 4. I can do what I f*** want to, because of 1. plus a handful of 5. Don’t bore yourself you are equipped enough to get yourself accustomed to 6. Your Intuition is always ahead of you, which makes endlessly working on a composition senseless, also because of 1-5.

What this is about

I don’t play drones. Playing drones is like playing acoustic guitar next to a campfire, with people slumbering away in their sleeping bags. I want rapid ear movements. When I compiled ‘Chapters etc” I thought of people at night searching the radio frequency’s. My sounds would work like an ambush. Before you realise what it is, you would be in the middle of the next soundquake. On the scale of Richter “Chapters etc” is more like this

and this.

Rubbish, which you can throw away

Anne F. Jacques sent me a postcard from Montreal, a real one, that I found in my letter box. Anne has a tape label called “Crustaces.” The only way to receive a copy is to send her a postcard or a little present. Her postcard was in need of an answer. I wrote a letter, and I thought that I could send her a copy of ‘Chapters’ as well. But German post doesn’t distinguish between one or four tapes in the packet. It will still cost €3.45. I decided to put some small things in a transparent plastic bag, well chosen, not to many, a good variation of sizes and material. All these things were lying in my house since ages. I never found the courage to throw them away. To every item there was a memory attached. By sending them to someone I would not get rid of the memories but put them in the trust of the other person. This was not the only reason. I also thought of modern archeology and my own interest in seeing/touching things that come from a daily life thousands of miles away from mine. And, it did look like a cover.

I can do it, you can do it

Frans writes it is an ethos, this do-do thing. I figured that I had missed something, thought of the teachings of Gurdjieff (becoming a master through mowing a lawn endlessly) or a master-pupil relation in general, that had replaced the more egalitarian ‘every-one can do it.’
I looked it up and found out that ‘I can do it, you can do it’ is a yell used by weight control support groups in the US.

Return

Though I had images of a portual town as Graham Greene visited on his travels, I doubted very much if ‘Port Saïd’ would have been the right title.

I also thought of ‘Cargo.’ I am surprised by the calmness of the piece, and a feeling of warm summer days. At some points it feels like walking through narrow winding streets.

Some of the tapes I used in this radio performance contained snippets of conversations, meetings, evenings with friends, all bringing back memories that lay dormant on one of the shelves of my subconsciousness. It was a pleasure to go there again.

‘Return’ was first played 18. january 2012 on the radio show ‘A Maïzing Session With…’ hosted by Anton Mobin in his apartment in Paris.

I used various cassette players and dictaphones, an effect pedal and a small box full of tapes.

Return is released on zeromoon

Authentic rip-off

The cassette release Authentic rip-off is an authentic rip-off. What you see is what you get. A commercial cassette in its plastic wrapper is used to produce this release. The title is written on the front, so that everyone knows what to expect. To make things even more clear the following text is written on the sides: origina – l don’t listen – throw – away cassette.
On the back side the advice is given to ” pay 1 euro.” The release will cost more: 2,49 € at least.

However, Authentic rip-off is a must-have for every art student, art historian, art critic and everyone else who likes to built breath taking thought structures.

In Authentic rip-off you see the medium ( the music cassette) and message ( authentic rip-off) clearly divided. The unity is preserved as long as the seal ( read the wrapper) remains intact. Already on this level one can experience the direct connection to laws, religious consonants or Schrödinger’s cat.

Marshall Mcluhan would have been driven mad by the constant shift of meanings between the medium and the message.

But if you include history in the observation then one will see that just as the drawings of animals changed the caves of Lascaux, the pyramid of Cheops changed a geometrical unit and the Mona Lisa changed the smile, Authentic rip-off changes the concept of every product late capitalist society has on offer.

Scholars can encounter extreme adventurous reasoning if they just let go. What did scripture do to the clay tablet, and Jesus to the cross, Einstein to space and Edison to the human voice? Go think about it. But be sure to buy Authentic rip-off first. It is your portal to insights you have never dreamed of.

available at staalplaat store and my concerts.