Why Survive

Semi-scientific, intermediate approach, a near death gunshot fired at the distance of my ears, part of a one-time serious illness that got covered by crumbs around the carcasses of pigeons and a holistic dance between barrels in the harbour of Caracas. Do You want to kill me, she asked. Her eyes big with Disneyan fear, a joke that would resound in a sleeping room, pasted by heroes whose sweet smiles I could not match. I kind home. But not for long. I breathe home. But not at here. Two corpses roll down the stairs. The love fight had begun.

My little life, a soldier of desire patted me on the shoulder. I low attic. Gum gone soon. Tiles and broken shoulders marked a tilted head, thoughts of vengeance dripped from the lips. I war zone. Suspirious suspicion followed a slow intake of warm air. Breeze and the fresh scent of washing powdered pullovers. Bathroom dolls in a bucket full of lard. I got mine last Saturday, didn’t even have to pay for it. How long will she stay there at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me.

A slow fill for dreams. Drawn into a tent, under a masqueraded moonless night. I supply you. A shirt tight to fit, waves of possession, while a car ride through the desert clouds my life. Sand in measures. No for the next fill. The woman in the train to Rabat yawned. I thought of camels. There was no limit to it. We looked at her in awe. Her mouth was so big it could take three pipi’s of rines. Her hair was shorter then our experience. Cover me with patience. Get in later.

Fur coats, a monkey in the arrival hall of Linate. She loosened herself from the wall. The embrace was unifying breath. The next window was a little park with beheaded plastic children. We smoked a revolution. A beard from Yugo-Slavia. Walnuts in pocket rooms, houses, whilst a fig tree bend to ashes. No sleep. I tug you. No sleep. No more brain patterns in seismic waves. Cool coffee. Only if you want it. You look the same as you. One day in front of smashed shop windows. Big bald Bulgarians. She looked like one of those tarot card women. The image is hurts.

Donkey cart ride on your name is Toto, disappear over the hills. Dry earth, carved feet. Then, fifty years later you crown. I hit it. A rectangular thought leans over a brook. Daffodils define my thought. I rest my case with a Turkish butcher. Long legged memories. You were so beautiful. A yellow pear of satanic origin appears in the hand of Hölderlin. I hide honey. Over the bridge into the dusted land we go. We throw our shoes in the rivelet. Rush’o'lay. Dwindle and escape. This little car belongs to you.

Sicily was never thought of. Oranges minded. A loud market day, wacky, humid, splits and eyelashes: petrol gaze, petrol skin. Olives in an open hand. Spit on the floor. Hang your jacket next to mine. We look warm together, even if you evaporate just at the other side of the mountain pass. A bar on the highest point, lost in a shortsighted day. The valley girls pick flowers. A smile of alabaster. Breezes. Vapors. Judge me, as long as you can. I free ill. Another market, another climate. We have never been here, even if we wanted so loud. Kill. I smile.

Beat Poet

She Will Be Beautiful in Black and White

Anton Mobin and I play as She Will Be Beautiful. This video is made on a mid winter day by xxx somewhere in East Berlin, with a full moon outside. Anton and I played sounds that were recorded on the shortest night of 2011. In an other context the same source material was used for a release on staaltape: Four Corners of the Night

Working on Destiny

I am working on a book.
It will be a book on sound.
Here are five fragments
that I have written,
but will not use.

1. It is all abracadabras to you, isn’t it? You haven’t got the slightest idea of what this thing internet is. You do know about aura, the force – The Force! – that surrounds all people. The Dalai Lama is capable of caressing your aura. Internet is a people’s aura, also referred to as a cloud. You are not listening, are you? You should. You remember our friend the sculptor, when he came back from his visit to New York? He had observed T-shirts on people. He had observed that a lot of people wore T-shirts. There were opinions or slogans pressed on them. Our friend the sculptor thought that New York was very loud. Everyone walked around with a statement. He got the idea that any kind of dialogue was impossible. It was all one-way. Our friend the sculptor was glad to be back.

2. Everyone wants to be special. Everybody wants to be wanted. Everybody wants to be loved. That is the omega-part of our existence, the part where all movements end. In a commercial sense you can call it consumerism. In an archaic sense you can call it gathering. In a moral sense you can call it peace. In a physical sense you can call it wellness. Wellness is marketable. It is also the state of being when after long office hours the computer gets unplugged and time to relax has arrived: a massage with ethereal oils that makes you dream away to Elysian Fields. That is the real freedom. This internet-aura is a harness; it defines the alpha part of our existence: you go out to fight. You go out to fight for your existence. It is all about authority, on being the departure point of actions, about being a part of a slowly progressing civilisation, about being important, about being needed, about being special. And for being so special you deserve a reward, a bonus.

3. His stomach was filled with wobbly eggs. It was a kind of voice that some people use as a starting point to imitate a howling dog. It was also an evangelical voice, the one that would re-sound solemnly in a church or in a hall of great historic importance. The appearances and the speeches of a president are history in the making. Wulff made the impression that he was very well aware of the fact that he should have this appearance. He also made the impression that he did all he could, so that he would make this impression. But there was something wrong with his voice. I hated it from the beginning. I had a big dislike for Jeltsin as well right from the beginning. Both Wulff and Jeltsin reminded me of spoiled children who start to whine and cry when they have done something wrong, then, with trembling under lip and still tears in their eyes ask for forgiveness. They know that this form of humility masquerades and at the same time defines the space where their true actions take place.

4. I travel quite often by train. It is a fast and expensive, but comfortable train. In the language of Deutsche Bahn I am a client. With every ticket I purchase, I collect bonus points. In some coaches you can pick up a magazine, the bahnbonus magazine. It has more than one hundred pages. Every page shows at least three items that you can choose from. The more points you collect the more special the bonus is. A voucher for a breakfast, a luxury suitcase, a holiday under the sun for 500, 12.000 or 30.000 points; you know that every point is a result of one euro spend on tickets.

5. With just a bit of money on hand, the kind of middle-class wages money, it would have been possible to transcend the feeling of wealth: 14.000 bonus points, clean shaven, dressed as a manager, sky-blue shirt, my jacket loosely over my brand-new luggage trolley, I arrive in the lounge of my office building. It has big clean windows, and it shines its transparent shine on a skyline where everything else is transparent as well. I don’t have to care about money, because my money has started to care about me. My life is as clean and weightless as a brochure. In fact I wouldn’t mind if this one moment could last forever. But it doesn’t.

The Hacker’s Story

On the 6th of March my account has been hacked. rinusfiles@gmail.com it was. The password has been changed by the hacker. Google help is a disaster. You never get access to them. No real help comes in return.

A friend from Sweden was curious enough to send the fake Rinus a letter. (Also I got the request for help, telling me that I was in Barcelona and that I had been mobbed).

This is the letter.

Its been a horrible incident but am glad I was not hurt. Please lend
me €1510. Western union is the fastest option to wire funds to me. See
details needed for western union. I will square up in due course.

Name on my ID: Rinus van alebeek
Location: La Ramblas 8894 Lc 35
Barcelona, 8002
Spain

All you need do is go to the nearest western union agent location or
post office and request to make transfer to me in Spain

You will need to email me the western union MTCN number as soon as you
make transfer so I can receive money here, I have my passport as a
means of identification. I will receive money from WU with it.
Other than this nightmare,how are you doing?

Shit, I now realize, I don’t even have an ID.

Four Corners of the Night

Title: Four Corners of the Night
Artists: Anton Mobin, Rinus van Alebeek, Christoph Limbach, Pierce Warnecke
Idea, art work and production: Rinus van Alebeek
Track list:
Side 1
Bribes de Nuit – Anton Mobin
Berliner Schule – Rinus van Alebeek
<chance|eng> – Christoph Limbach
<chance|bré> – Christoph Limbach
<chance|cag> – Christoph Limbach
Abstrakt Intiem – Rinus van Alebeek
Anhalter Bahnhof – Rinus van Alebeek
Side 2
A Sparse Topography – Pierce Warnecke and Christoph Limbach
NoxoИ – Anton Mobin

All compositions come from original recordings made on 20/21 June during the shortest night of the year 2011. Recordings were made by Konrad Korabiewski in Eydistjorgur in Iceland, Pierce Warnecke in a barn in Montagny les Lanches, France, Anton Mobin on a walk in Belleville, Paris, Christoph Limbach on a bicycle ride in Berlin and Rinus van Alebeek on the Museuminsel in Berlin.

Total time: Forty Minutes
Price 5 Euro ( ex shipping)
Order from staaltape at staalplaat dot com

Forty Minutes is copied on a white chrome cassette. The cassette has been spray painted with mat and normal blue colour. The package is hand made from heavy black paper. The inlay information is hand written with a white and with a black pencil.

Four corners of the night can be listened to as a journey from the beginning to the end of the night, with all its density of a warm summer evening, the small mysterious sounds that appear when the whole town seems to be asleep and the start of the new day with all its activity. It is also a story in various episodes. Sounds that are prominent on one composition become less apparent once an other protagonist takes over and guides the listener in a different direction.

Of course there are many ways of listening. On a pure musical level it is a proof of virtuosity, and offers the listener also a possibility to investigate how different compositions can be made from the same source material. On a narrative level there are enough leads that can fuel the imagination and open up visions of a night on earth where-ever the proud possessor of this tape may find him- or herself.

On Narrative Listening – Part 6, The Sound of Thought

Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union four members of the Leningrad Philharmonic escaped from the Russian winter and went on tour. I saw them on Dutch television. I saw them also play next to the entrance of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The string quartet played beautifully. Onlookers were very generous. In front of the camera they said that they earned more money as street musicians then as part of the Philharmonic orchestra back home. A few weeks later I saw them again in Malaga, city of palm trees and Mediterranean Sea. Also a winter in Amsterdam can be cold, especially if you have to play on the streets.

Another ten years later trained musicians can get a permission to play in the subterranean walkways that connect the platforms of the subway system. Other trained musicians, who were more lucky or more trained or more talented or deeper rooted in a network can still play as a part of a Philharmonic orchestra in one of the many concert halls that were built and designed for the performance of orchestral music.

These concert halls with their architecture, acoustic qualities, programming and its institutional micro-cosmos are an important expression of the achievements of western civilisation. Hence, the music performed in there defines and re-assures western culture. But what gets defined and re-assured by trained musicians who play on the streets or under it?

It took a Dutchman to invent a machine to sell air. Gas stations have installed this machine. You insert one euro and you get one minute of high pressure air in return. It is not as radical as claiming the air as property and sell it by cubical meters. Also here a question can be raised. Thanks to the air sounds can be heard and recorded. Do these sounds have a copyright?

Another achievement of western culture is the invention of machines that can record and reproduce sound. People who work with sound have also machines at their disposal that can change the nature of this sound drastically. The primal bang is not necessarily a tune that classical trained ears recognize as music. The hum of a refrigerator or a bumble bee can be used as well.  But also the recording of a trained musician who plays ‘Einstein on the Beach’ at the Metro stop of Odeon in Paris can be used. Another fine question: to whom does this music belong once it has ended on my recorder? Can I use it again in one of my performances without having to pay for its copyrights? And why should I use this particular recording, which comes with the sounds of foot steps, random conversations, the distant calling of the metro train?

Western culture finds its expression in the works of Hildegard von Bingen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg or his daughter by means of their music. All through the centuries instruments got invented to add different tunes or nuances to music. Music defined the instruments and the instruments defined the music. In most households playback devices are used to listen to this music.

In the margins of sub-culture, those margins that only catch some light when a police torch shines on it, the little effect machines, the playback and recording devices, are used to not only manipulate sound; with it the artist creates a completely new work of art, for which a common denominator still has to be found.

If art expresses a period in time or a moment in eternity, then this new art form in all its turmoil is in the first place a manifesto. The declaration is not put in words, because words get absorbed by other words and then find their deplorable end in a blog or among zillions of other words on printed pages. The message is in its repetition. With every performance and mini-release a marginal culture gets defined and re-assured.

One first step out of the great confusion is marked by the use of field recordings. The listener leaves the bomb shelter and can see more clearly. The artist uses recording and playback devices as his instrument. Sounds are used from our immediate environment. To play back a simple recording creates certain awareness, defines and re-assures our appearance in history at a certain place and time. Paradoxically enough, dislocation creates unification. Awareness is created, not by means of words, but by playing back the sounds of the environment.

Playing field recordings is not a form of music, but a form of free speech. In quite a few cases the intrinsic moral message is just a few liner notes away: to take care of our environment. Apart from the activist point of view the new art form is also an expression of a thorough research on how to re-organize social life on a non-institutional and non-commercial level. It points at intuition. It also wants to provoke a shift of perception in which the apparent not seems to be so apparent. It points at responsibility for the world we live in as a clear reaction to consumerism.

Therefore elements from our environment get incorporated, defined and re-defined in the work of sound, thus creating a three-dimensionality that stretches through diverse layers of time. It is this quality that clearly distinguishes the new art form from music.

Winter Tour 2012

full schedule

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