I am at the Belgian Coast these days, making recordings. The long ride with the coastal tram took us to Knokke. If a totalitarian regime will send me into exile, I am afraid I had to go, wearing Pushkin’s coat, to this resort. Of course, a modern day guard with the appearance of a personal mental trainer and recovering assistent, would advice me to look at sunsets in a ..say, evangelistic way, not very much thinking of religion and God, but contemplating on beauty and feeling well and being a part of a global family. And the next day he/she would escort me to main street and help me buy a new mobile phone.In fact, walking the line of the appartment blocks that seem to cover the complete 70 kilometers of the coast, one can recognize the sizes of the houses that once stood here. Buildings are between four and twenty meters wide. Those of four go as high up as the others, and make you wonder if they remain upright, only because of the neigbouring blocks. The monoteistic, one room one window one view, appartments look like giantized versions of the automatiek, which mostly contain the Dutch contribution to gastronomy.

But sure, there is still a possibility to dream, as the picture below shows. The text on the left reads “Here the appartment of your dreams ?” I am sure they really mean ‘dreams’ and not ‘nightmares.’ I am one hundred percent positive of that. Look at this man dream over his empty glass of beer. You can almost hear the song he listens to. all pictures by Barbara Gessner, except for the ‘automatiek.’

The idea of this festival of outsider music is born during a few summer days in Normandy.The L’Agrippa festival, organised by a group of outsiders from Rennes,  hosted a wide variety of French musicians and groups. Also present a DJ couple from The Hague. After three days of listening, but also being part of the very special atmosphere, they decided not to go back to their home country with only nice memories. At the last day of the festival John revealed to me he would do everything to bring these groups to The Netherlands, and me as well! A man a man, a word a word: Four months later the promise came true. I told him I would like to come with Jeudi Pop, my duo with nincaleece. She is from Rennes. A duo like that would only add to the idea. And that’s why we will play late on the second day of the festival. All info on the flyer.

3/4 Oktober I will be in the deep south of the Netherlands, where Toon Hermans drank his wine and Jean Nelissen wrote his poems. It is here where you can climb Dutch mountains and watch down on the river Meusse and deep into the hinterlands of Belgium: Maastricht. What a town! When dandyism hit the early seventees just as hard as it hit me, it was in this town (twenty kilometers from my hometown), where I bought my shirts and shoes. In later, very much later years, I only went there, if I had a good reason to visit it. In oktober I always have a very good reason to visit my hometown Heerlen: my mother! The same weekend Art Space Het Rondeel organizes Waiting in the Wings, a festival that happens every two years. When I offered to come by with some tape machines and such, they accepted my invitation, and promised to save a little niche for me.

If someone is waiting in the wings, or in the wings, they are in the background, but nearby, ready to act on short notice. The festival visitors will encounter performers that could be as well tableaux vivants or sculptures or nailed by the ears against a wall. At the moment I am thinking of applying the definition. My performance on 3rd and 4th might see me mix my newest release “Poets in Exile”, it is, get the cassettes ready for sale. My set up will be 4track, two walkman and three tapes that hold the source material. Since “Poets in Exile” is not a plain copy from twenty minutes prepared material, but an ongoing mixing process of 150 minutes of source material, each copy will be unique. But the twenty copies all together will reflect the same moods and mysteries, much like a landscape will change during a year and even during a day.

3/4 Oktober 21.00 hour Art Space Rondeel Rondeel 2 Maastricht(NL)

On 6 and 7 Oktober I will be in Cologne to perform with nibble nibble kiss. Organized by Georg Dietzler, these two days in the big city on the Rhine, offers Angie Nina Yeowell and me a perfect possibility to expose our various thoughts and ideas on modern communication through language, gesture and sound. Please don’t write this down in your notebook. Angie much more then I has prepared a show close to modern dance, then again far enough away from it to make our visual presentation come close to a vision of a novelist (someone I used to be in the last century).

We will perform outdoor on 6th and indoor on 7th. Both shows will be different from each other. Quite different, to say the least.

6. Oktober 2009 Di / 19.30 h / Tag 1 Ebertplatz / Köln Fußgängerunterführung/Treffpunkt vor dem LABOR Nowottny, Mies und Staab/Laden 5  (Europäische Kunsthalle)

7. Oktober 2009 Mi / 20.30 h / Tag 2 praxis projektatelier staab /Eigelstein 112 / Köln

Eintritt: 5/3 EUR pro Tag

On the 13nd of Oktober it is Jeudi Pop time again. Jerome who does Eyes for Ears will watch every movement of our hands. This macro climate will be projected on a screen. Nincaleece and I will concentrate on more evocative sounds, combine melodies, distant voices and field recordings. She did some music for films, so it might work. The sounds will go in space. The second hour Geert Jan Hobijn will paly his ganesha turntable and probably a bit more.

13 Oktober 20.00 Staalplaat Flughafenstrasse 38 U8 Boddinstrasse

Just two days later a long time awaited collaboration will come true with Stefano Giust, the man wise enough to detest the internet, and sweet enough to conquer the heart of a very good friend of mine. Stefano is a percussionist. And how this duet will work out I don’t know, but somehow I think it might not be just fun alone. I think if it were only for fun, I’d probably won’t do it.

15. Oktober ( Thursday ) 8pm at 2-13 Atelier Club @ Rauchhaus / Mariannenplatz 2a / Berlin-Kreuzberg

From 16 to 18 Oktober I will be in Leipzig to attend and play at the das kleine field recordings festival set up by To bias Luther at the gal.lery.org, Eisenbahnstrasse 109, Leipzig from 20.00 hours onwards, sunday matinee from 11.00 onwards.

In Berlin, well in certain niches of Berlin, you cannot come around the name of Clayton Thomas. The name has a good rhythm to it, like Waylon Jennings or Perry Mason, which makes it easy to remember. Then one day he stood before my nose and what I heard I liked a lot: not a unique experience, I say. Clayton is one of those improvisers who a lot of U bahn passengers will be able to recognize by now. You don’t move unobserved with a double bass on your back. Due to an intuitive injection I proposed him to do a duet. His only available date was the 19th, a monday. It will happen at Wendel.

Concert with Clayton Thomas is postponed, because of slow train connections between Bucarestia and Berlin. I will perform with Radio On instead

19. Oktober 22.00 Wendel Schlesische Strasse 42 U1 Schlesisches Tor

The last Oktober performance in front of an audience will be at my own place:staalplaat working space. Together with Radio On and the help of Daniela Grimm on violin we will accompany the readings of Adam Thomas. Most Berliners, a handfull Parisians and some Albionists might know Adam as Preslav Literary School. In his sound a longing melancholy combines with otherworldy bliss. As I consider the art of writng the highest form of art there is, I wonder how this sentiment colors his works of literature. In this first official edition of The Radio On Series we aim at a live creation of a radiophonic event. The unofficial premiere is now drowned in obscurity, and got Momus read, sing, act from his The Book of Jokes. This time no jokes will be told.

21. Oktober, 20.45 hours The Radio On Series #1 with Adam Thomas, Flughafenstrasse 38, U8 Boddinstrasse Berlin

The last days of the month I will spend trespassing Belgium with a recorder in my hand.

At the beginning of September it all looked different. I was supposed to make some noise in an old cigar factory in a former DDR residential area. Giorgia Angiuli had booked a flight to come over to do some shows and the long awaited collaboration with the visual genius Claudio Sinatti would finally become reality. Then some holes got burned in the time/space texture that we Christians call the month of September: The cigar factory couldn’t be electrified, and the alternative to play in the cells of the nearby police office got considered too late. Giorgia had to deal with the deadline of her thesis, and Claudio’s extra day just fell outside of his basket. But nothing of this I knew when I saw Duo Tham perform at Staalplaat.

A bit bored with the abstract description of their music, I wrote a rather murky introduction text to their staalplaat show. As soon as they started playing, my initial worries to have booked a thirteen in a dozen kind of noise band disappeared. They got me listening to the tip of my ears from beginning to end. Anton Mobin and Thomas Thiery put on a highly dynamic show. And once again I got fascinated by the French experimentalists approach. Now the French language as it is written down seems to be the first step to disintegrating language into clusters of sound. Second, if it is as a non conformist reaction to the petit bourgeois way of furnishing their houses with ever more small objects, a result of working on the tradition started by Schaefer and Ferrari, or an expression of this strange mixture of rooster like behaviour and the capacity to add a nostalgic distinction to everyday experiences, and not to forget the very existence of the word ‘poetry’ that puts an extra metafysical layer to everything French, in an order that the sole expression has a ceremonial function that goes way beyond the one occupied by the French president, it seems to me that all this animating and (yes!) deconstructing of objects is a great way to built the most fantastic crystal palace that will get destroyed once the applause indicates that the show is over.  Am I talking music? Maybe. Duo Tham visualized grammar and moved through the mazes of syntaxis with their sounds much like Charlie Chaplin got lost in the machineries in his movie Modern Times. Flee marketed objects whistled and screamed, the table leg moaned and sighed, echoos of Debussy opened a window to nineteenth century colonial dreams. Anton looked ever more like Frankenstein, while Thomas next to him got deeper and deeper into the nerd’s universe of unidentified sonic objects.

The after show party at Simone’s Bar in the Sonnenallee where beer costed 1 euro,got me in a pensive mood for a short moment. I considered, if I could take the liberty to ask those friendly young frenchmen a question to which it was hard to say : “No.” But luckily they were pleasurably surprised and accepted my proposal. That’s how I got to play with them at Wendel. We played for almost 45 minutes. And could silence the crowd pretty soon, a thing which is quite hard to achieve in this bar where there is always some conversation islands to be found. Anton Mobin’s stage presence (his long solo with a balloon, spilling beer on it, throwing a cassette player in the audience) helped to focus the attention. The audio track is now awaiting approval. It might be published as a netrelease soon. I will keep you posted on that.

The morning after Adrian Shephard and I met up for an interview with Costes. Adrian’s way of conducting the interview went very well. Costes filled the hour with a wide variety of stories. Listen to it here.

When the 11th of September came near, Markus Schwill, the noise philospopher who had put up the conference at the cigar factory send out the message that the show got cancelled, but the floor of the factory’s basement got sweeped. One day later he texted us to an apartment deep down in Friedrichshain. The apartment looked absolutely intriguing, much like a defunct haunted house where Bluebeard had just left, or an artefact from early eighties Berlin, meticulously reconstructed as if Kusturica and his crew could rush in every moment. Here we found two young Danes worthy of Hamsun’s Hunger, a Japanese guitarist, Billy and Markus. Angie came later with her bag full of self built microphones. We did a nibble nibble kiss open rehearsal with an old radio as our loudspeaker. Markus judged it softpornmusic, before he lectured for a good hour and a half on Die Frage der Zeitgenossische Lärmmusik und das Verhältnis der Kantianischer Weltanschauung im Bezug zur Protestantischem Umwentlung der Familiären Strukturen in Nord Deutschland 1961 – 1963.

The day after I played with topmodel at Trickster. Read an eye witnnes review by NoHonestlyNews

The TopModel triangle holds for me,  the attraction and horror of those Saturday evening tv shows ov olde with their cheap overdriven homage to the limitations of early casio keyboards (thankfully no 8 bit barking dogs). High frequency vocals from Mireia, something between how Siouxsie Sioux should have sounded and  those arguments of the neighbours heard through my adjacent wall through a large plastic glass.TopModel remind me of an even earlier version of Portion Control with that fat bass underpinning their near chaotic concrete sculptures, – very Berlin!. They have a total non-performance position in this place sat amongst a side table in a dark corner with a lonely candle (for lighting those lcd displays no doubt). Their apparent disinterest for the audience gives an inpression that we are the invaders in their bedroom. Is this the new punk or too much net-landia? As the beats progress on a relentless knee bashing manner and they sink deeper into a critical soup trance I’m reminded of the advantage of dedicated intrumentation, there are no laptops here. We are a minimal audience, but, as the late great Tony Wilson  once  remarked , ‘how many were at the murder of Ceasar?’ five,” says Wilson. “The smaller the attendance, the bigger the history.”  As they finish, the bar  crossfades with – ‘ what a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you’ a suitable Lynchian ending to my evening.

Part Two

On Monday 14. Ninah Pixie and dAS, together with Stefan from Troum and Drone records came to the Staalplaat Working Space. While dAS and Stefan were moving objects and catching other soundfiles Adrian Shephard and I spoke with Ninah about BCO’s life long career. The complete interview is here.

Nincaleece’s performance at topmodel’s trickster evening had raised some eyebrows among my experimentalist friends. To them experiments don’t include beats. On that saturday I sat listening to her, and to the sounds I didn’t hear. Nincaleece and I met first a long time ago at the house of Giorgia Angiuli. And our half serious half jokingly proposed collaboration was born on that moment. Jeudi Pop would be our name. Giorgia cancelled her flight. This made me remember I had a dusted phonogramme somewhere not so very far away on the shelves of my memory. All of a sudden it played Jeudi Pop. I heard it very clear, and maybe too clear.

Anne Cecile is a trained musician. She has a great voice as well. And she looks good, no doubt. I am not a trained musician, but I am a trained listener. What we both heard, or thought what we had heard while playing at NK on 15th, was not what we had imagined to hear. The immediate after-concert feeling was that we hadn’t produced the sounds we would have liked to. But then Ninah came walking past us, mumbling:”that was great, great, great.” And as the evening proceeded it rained more and more compliments and congratulation, which only left Anne Cecile and me looking at each other, mouth open, question marks evaporating from our brains. What we had understood, though, was that in some way or an other we would like to create a work that would unite field recordings, melodies, beats, noise and spoken word. Most of these ingredients are present in Luc Ferrari’s work. Yes, we would like to create the same calm, and the same sighs. Also Pierre Henry includes some disco in his compositions, but Heaven beware us of creating something as dull as that.

Part Three

Ever since I have made a narrow escape into the 21st century I have been wondering why the modern day raconteurs, I mean that rare specimen, one time close to extinction, called a writer, or, even more hard to find, a poet, never made use of the fine sounds produced by the experimentalists to provide their reading with a sonic background. I know that the usurpers in the world of literature have almost succeeded in making that depiction meaningless, and that their background (a TV studio) was the legitimation for showing of with the emperor’s new clothes. I am not referring to them. I even don’t want to hear them.

In Berlin and in the networld resides Momus. Sometimes we meet. Sometimes we communicate very short. It reads a bit like this. “Hey Nick, Can you/would you like to play there and there, then and then?” Answers take 12 words.  The resulting shows mostly twenty thousand more. As one of those old fashioned socialists, he doesn’t see himself as a rockstar who starts considering proposals from a certain standard upwards. That’s why he decends into the dungeons of showbiz and accepts an invitation by me to come along and do some life blogging.

A few days before this hagiography was published by The Guardian (=important English newspaper), Momus came to the Staalplaat Working Space to read some chapters from his book. I had suggested to him to do so while my radiophonic duo and Nick Reddel on violin would play on a low enough level to make his words still audible. Maybe the place would have been packed, if the article had appeared a few days earlier. Those who came to witness The Murder of Ceasar have heard and seen a very inspired Momus reading, no,… impersonating, no,… being – diabolis personas eo ipsum ad absurdum – the characters from The Book of Jokes, while we, together with his partner Hisae and her slides, helped to create the imaginary landscape where it all happened. The recordings will become available soon. Some pictures were taken on that evening, but I don’t know by whom.

Part Four

I am sure six would have been okay as well to those who dress their words with wings. It was supposed to be a kind of Dutch evening at Marc’s Sowieso. The new poor dressed in their rags from Christmas stores were reduced to shadows on a windshield. The rain drums of afternoons spend in an Amsterdam caffee had silenced. A few friends had shown up. They didn’t understand a word of what we said. Not that we were so talkative. Big tables and benches cut from a catholic oak tree served for our temporarily explosion of little and bigger gadgets: buddha machines, canned sitar players, a four armed record player to produce some sunwheel sounds. We could have waited for ages, like the illuminated would have done. Kim Laugs  was plucking through his audio cabinet as if he were ordering a pizza on line. As soon as we had agreed upon that the setting was perfect (after all there were two unknown couples whispering over their beers at two tables at the far away side of the bar) we embarked on our journey. Put a couple of Dutch together and you get endless talking. Geert Jan Hobijn had a couple of records with him he had bought in New Delhi. You could smell from the covers how long they’d been stored. Without even wanting to be post-nostalgic about the great past of our country we went to the far east, and managed to get back before midnight. Our concert lasted two hours. According to Guillaume, the experienced listener from Le Petit Mignon, the last thirty seconds of it were ‘really fucking fantastic.’ I don’t know if he told anyone.

A long long time ago when Sicily was still a regular travel destination, I worked together with Dario Sanfilippo and Antonio Mainenti on some recordings that turned their house in Ragusa Ibla inside out. One infamous action we undertook at the end of those sessions was a concert in the courtyard of their house: the urban scoring kit. An idea for an album was made. It should include pictures, short stories and video’s. Oberbaum City never saw the light. One video emerged however. “And then the day began” was made by Jan Philip Müller.

As usual, when I perform in Berlin, it always happens in various constellations. On 11. September I will attend the Noise Conference. It is set up by Markus Schwill from Dienstbar. He has found a location a bit out of centre. But the fact that it is Zigarrenfabrik Garbáty (Cigar factory) makes it all more intriguing. Since it is situated in Pankow, the former residential area of DDR -vips, I have choosen the name The Honecker Tapes for a unique collaborative moment between Der Tapeman, Angie Yeowell Blue and me. We will be one of the 20 noise conferenciers that evening. The month of September is full of holes. This evening is cancelled.

The day after on the 12th of September I will perform with topmodel at Trickster. You will find Trickster at Schlesisches Tor. Just follow the U-Bahn towards Warschauer Brücke for some 40 meters. Next to the first (and only) house at your right hand side you find an entrance to a courtyard. There. We share the bill with my friend from Monopoli, currently Florence, near futurely Berlin: Giorgia Angiuli (aka Metuo). Okay, while topmodel’s sound is moving towards the raw and beautiful, closing in on early 80’s ever more without wanting it, Giorgia is on her way to Ibiza smoothness, but surely will exhibit her more joyful and wilder side at Trickster.

Not. University bondage forced Giorgia to cancel her flight. She will finish her study first. I will keep you posted on her Berlin arrival. She will be replaced by her friend Nincaleece.

On the 14th of September I will meet up again with Ninah Pixie and the great dAS from Big City Orchestra. With Adrian Shephard we will conduct a radio show from the Staalplaat Working Space. Expect words on their 30 year long career and inevitably on the cassette culture of which they are part for an equally long period.

15. September BCO will play NK. And like the last time they hit Berlin back in 2007, when we shared the bill at the Zentrale Randlage, I will be joined by Giorgia. The concert then was one of my best in that year. Alas, the near future has moved a bit forward in time.

Let’s see what the picture will be like this time. And this line has another meaning right now. Giorgia (see above) has cancelled her flight. If I play solo or with someone else will be decided at the last moment.

On the 17th of September it will be radio in action at the Staalplaat Working Space. Momus will read from his The Book of Jokes. He will present it as a puppet show. He agreed upon having Radio On (Adrian Shephard and me) and violinist Nick Reddel with him, to provide the story with a sonic background. It is an idea I have for years now, from when I was part of  Dutch literature and fantasized about having readings. I think it is still uncommon among writers to have musicians with a taste for radiophonics accompany them. My thanks goes out to Momus for accepting my proposal and join us in this experiment.

My final evening in September is part of the regular monthly I organize at Sowieso in Berlin Neukölln. This time I have decided to turn it into a complete Dutch evening. Geert Jan Hobijn was a regular at the Radio 100 studio in Amsterdam from 1986 to 1997. Radio 100, an FM radio is irreplacable, and marked an era. Geert Jan Hobijn’s Amsterdam has disappeared as well. He became an international renown sound artist. The evening at Sowieso is by no means a tribute to a lost period. But it will offer a different acoustic approach to sounds that you normally encounter. DJ Kim Laugs will complete the trojka. Saturday 19 September, 21.00 hours, Weisestrasse 24, U8 Leinestrasse.

End of summer: 21st of September.

picture by marc zendrini, showing staalplaat shop, adrian shephard and me behind the window and marc behind the camera

On Monday the 24th of August, one of those days that found the bees humming and dancing above the flowers, Marc Zendrini came to the Flughafenstrasse 38 to ask some questions about field recordings. I proposed to stream it, and store the result as well, because requests like this arrive with every season. A future interview could start from here. (click to listen to the interview)

]]> http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/echoos-of-august-and-other-days-an-interview-by-marc-zendrini/feed/ 0 rinusvanalebeek staalplaat Marc0154 http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/298/ http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/298/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:50:39 +0000 rinusvanalebeek http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/?p=298 ]]>

Souvenir from Bruxelles,

where I played with Crys Cole and Julie Rousse.

Mana.art provided a very nice post-existentialist ambience for our set.

An eye-witness made these and some more pictures, bought a tape of mine and wrote a thirty-six words report on his blog.

On the first of August I travelled to Leipzig where I played at the Electric Garden Festival. In a very intimate setting surrounded by parents and their children I weaved a carpet of sounds to accompany the small talk and chit chat that saturday afternoons are good for.  The very young kids guarded the texture and volume of my set. As soon as it got too many layered or too loud they started yelling with high pitched voices. Since those are not the kind of field recordings I like, I sticked to the mumbling volume around me and provided the visitors with some alternative lounge music for a good hour and a half .

On the 8th of August topmodel was meant to play at the raumerweiterungshalle. Also scheduled were Suki Tawdry and O.D.A.L. the latter one of the aliasses of Peter Zincken. The Raumerweiterungshallians are a group of politically correct gays. This slightly mental disturbance urged them to ban Peter from their premisses after looking at some vids on his space side. (I point to the political correctness rather then to sexual preferences, as I don’t see much difference in their sectarian approach compared to groups like scientologists, fundamentalists of any kind or hard core soccer fans). The evening there got cancelled. Aubrey of suki tawdry was very disappointed by this and on fridaynight the 7th we decided to move to Staalplaat. They had their extravaganza of costume, dance and spoken word and lots of glitter. Topmodel played in the front room of the shop in what was – according to modelmagnus – one  of our best performances since long. Very varied and very dynamic as a trained violin player confessed after our show.

flyer by minuit delacroix

nibble nibble kiss is my duo with angie nina blue yeowell. I look up and envision Rumi’s tomb. Memories fly on the wings of love. It is blue, blue as her name, and in the evening it is dark. There is a hole in the top of the dome. The Universe is a plate full of pearls. They fall in my lap, around me. I hear poems.

Our performance at Sowieso on 13. August was seen by momus. He wrote: “But really I want to talk about the joy of unpopular art, and why Berlin is so great, and how I never get tired of it. This was a Rinus van Alebeek show, and the drone guru was followed by Nibble Nibble Kiss, Rinus’ band with Angie Nina Blue Yeowell. I say “band”, but nothing so vulgar as rock music was involved. Rinus mumbled narratives and activated handheld tape machines (mini-dictaphones using bizarre tape formats, things you have to scour flea markets all your life to find, although Rinus says friends just give them to him free) and Angie sang directly onto a sheet of metal — I’ve been using plate reverb all my life, but I’ve never seen someone achieving the effect by singing, literally, onto a plate of metal. It was great, an intriguing 3D sound experience made immersive by the many pinpoint device speakers being used.”

Nibble nibble kiss will play again on 24th of August at Madame Claude.

On the 15th of August the composition “Achter het Behang” was played over four cassette players in a darkened room at Sturm und Liebe Vol.3 in Regensburg. Mainly recordings from very early morning piano playing and the geodesic dome in Brandenburg, Kentucky were used for this piece. To catapult the imagination of the listener into the right direction, it came with the synopsis of a short story about a young woman alone at home while her husband is working in a mine. She tears down the wallpaper, discovers old newspapers behind it and reads bits of them while she continues the work. At eight o’clock she discovers a hole in the wall.

Apart from the unrolling sounds, the story also gets its suspense if you know it refers to an accident in the mines of Lengede. The rescueing operations were directly televised in 1963. My father was a miner as well. As soon as  Albert Plank, the curator of the festival will send some impressions, I will post them here.

The rest of the month I should dedicate to composing a piece for the upcoming Framework Cd.

]]> http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/august-appointments/feed/ 0 rinusvanalebeek 3796599338_dcb190dd72_o CamelFlyerGreenTweek http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/where-is-tibor-macek/ http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/where-is-tibor-macek/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:21:27 +0000 rinusvanalebeek http://rinusvanalebeek.wordpress.com/?p=277 ]]>

A few months ago I wondered what ever happened to my net releases. A few of them are stored on the Archive.org by Jeff Surak who runs the major label Zeromoon. I clicked through to the Zeromoon page on archive after I had seen that the release ‘Diensteingang’ had been downloaded more then 10.000 times.

I noticed that Diensteingang was number 1 in the top 5 of most downloaded zeromoon releases in the ‘last month’ (back then it still existed) as well as in the ‘last week’ category. I was amused and puzzled. Why would so many people download these songs? And how had they found them? The creation of the space page by Jeff a few years ago could be the reason. The track ‘when I first saw you’ was by far the most popular one. It starts with a recording I had made in Coccorino, a faction of the small town of Joppolo, on the Calabrian coast in Italy. Barbara and I were visiting a hog. She was feeding it, and I held my microphone close to the grunts and chants of the poor animal. At some point I started singing. ” Parlez moi d’amour” and also “La Vie en Rose.” The pig was delighted, made more happy squeeks and at one point got on his back legs and actually danced. The arrangement by Tibor is pure beauty.

I met Tibor Macek by chance. I was a kind of artist in residence who had to water the plants. Meeting Tibor resulted in a series of site specific recordings, a range of beautiful pictures shot by Tibor and an insight into the fauna of the place I lived. My new friend had botanical knowledge. (Later this knowledge resulted in a study of the trees of Innsbruck, where he lived.) He had also a perfect sense for sound, and a computer. Our first collaborative work resulted in the release ‘now you know the truth about bamboo.’ I wanted to find out if field recordings could be arranged as pop songs, and Tibor who back in Innsbruck worked on Goa and other party tunes was very much interested in following me into this experiment.

I went on to live in Italy. Another artist in residence possibility brought me to Castiglione del Terziere, a hamlet in the very north of Tuscany. Tibor came to visit, and again we brought site specific objects and recordings together in short compositions.

Just as our first work (originally released in a handmade package as’Ein Bildung’) also this second Cdr was a multi data release. It contained pictures by Tibor, but also several cover designs by friends. This one shows the cover by Andrea Gabriele. The original cover was a product of pictures from newspapers, glue and one hour work pro Cdr. I made more then seventy different packages. All of them ended with friends or those who were willing to pay some money for it. Then it got to Jeff, who released it on his label. Some songs fly around in the internet, like ‘Liebe and Kleine Haustiere’ a poem read by Barbara over the phone, recorded by one of Tibor’s high class ultra expensive microphones. We willfully combined hi and lo-fi to create a sound as varied as possible. Playing my recordings over the earphones that were plugged in a cheap walkman was one of my great pleasures. As it was to come up with titles for each track.

I moved to Berlin. But I kept travelling. Innsbruck was always a stopover. We discussed our next collaboration, but never got to recording. But we did get to Burg Güssing on the Hungarian border, close to Slovania. Austria still smells of the old Habsburgian Empire. We got to Burg Güssing because we were invited to play there. I liked the idea. I liked the idea of playing on a Goa trance party. The flyers showed gnomes and fairies. It didn’t tell explicitly what drugs to take. We played at sunrise, when the first ravers withdrew in their tents. And when the 160 bpm wandered over the lands, we were in one of the castle’s chambers to prepare our next work.

When Tibor came to Berlin he carried the Burg Güssing recordings with him. Again he went for long walks. He explored places I had never been to. The pictures ended on the Cdr. From fifteen tracks we chose ten. The five remaining tracks were b-sides. Among those b-sides was the pig who went to heaven.

At the moment of writing, ‘Diensteingang’ – the collection of b-sides, has entered the Zeromoon Top 5 of most downloaded items. It is number one in the most downloaded items of last week. Who are these people? Why do they pick these songs? How did they find them? Some weeks ago I decided to download the songs, because I never stored them. I can imagine why we decided to leave them out of the origianl collection. A smile comes to my face when I think of words other people use to describe my actions. Sometimes the result is a mini – portrait of somebody who is slightly familiar to me. Me is of course another voice then the voice I hear myself. Maybe the impersonality of the tracks is the secret to its succes here in the margins of big industry.

Meanwhile it is about time that Tibor and I sit together to produce a new work. Even if the last one – The End of Hip – never got released. His mailbox is full. I lost his phone number. Maybe he is counting trees in Solferino.