Berlin, 25 June, just after we heard the news

A Long Introduction to a Short Story on Radio On

Last year, inspired by radiophonic music, I started to use a microphone during some of my performances. The collaboration with Haarmann in our duo De Drones was the biggest reason for this. Live in Paris, a recording from a live set at Madame Claude in Berlin, might give you an impression.

March, 2009 I participated in Sonor, a festival for radiophonic listening. I experienced two days of radio in the making. It influenced my view on how to built up my live sets. This decision must have been in the making ever since an evening in Paris, some years ago. I played with two other dictaphonists and a double bass player: a quartet was born. Diktat has been and still is dear to me. With them a wild cut up of sounds, a whirlwind of voices, gave access to a primordial world. Entering it, a novelist’s mouth could only fall wide open with amazement. Imagine the characters of all the books in a library come alive. Imagine the street- and nature scenes become audible: imagine the librarian doing his job in peace. You get close to the sound of Diktat.

A third collaboration started in an old factory turned storage place for artists. In a kind of “the Führer’s bunker meets the last days of Rome”- situation, I lived my first year in Berlin. Adrian Shephard and I discovered a fascination for idiosyncratic radio. We produced 24 hours. Some of those hours found access to local FM stations.

When a faction of the collection of artists united in a mutiny against the captain of the place, and rightfully kicked the madman out, I decided it was time to move. Adrian and I lost sight of each other. This year (2009) we discovered we were neighbors. The collaboration continued.

We changed our style a bit, left out the music more and more, and concentrated on building layers and layers of different absurdities. Some of them got transmitted by RadioX in Frankfurt. Verena Kuni, radio maker in Hessen, then asked for our help. Could we produce a radiophonic work within a week? We could. And here I discovered for a second time the joys of making up a story amidst sounds.

Radio On went on. A program on Past, Present and Future of Staalplaat got inserted in the radiophonic creation day. Interviews with filmmaker Craig Davis and blogger/musician Momus are stored on line, more will come.

But.

Adrian and I turned also to performing live sets. We got joined by Barnaby Tree and his cello. (And by Andy Graydon on another occasion) Should I say it added a dramatic touch to our presentations? Fact is that Barnaby’s cello acts as an extra voice, while Adrian designs the sonic setting in the best BBC radiophonic workshop tradition.

These days things seem to come together. The real experiment for me will be if I can come up with a story. It will come to me hopefully on the evening of the tenth of July. If it doesn’t the audience have to make up the story by themselves. Adrian and Barnaby will be there, but also two violin players, recruted by Barnaby: Daniella Grim and Nick Reddel.

10 July - The Tempelhof Mystery by Radio On and Barnaby Tree Trio Live at Sowieso, Weisestrasse 24, Berlin Neukölln, U8 Leinestrasse. Starts 21.00

On Narrative Listening, Part One – The Labyrinth Within

The Dead Publisher

The image almost looked like a Polaroid picture. She sat on the red soil, so typical for the island where I spend the summer of the year two thousand. Fig trees grew on the land, wide apart from each other. They seemed to be frozen in a complicated modern dance move. A big blue sky was over us, and she, uncombed black hair, was smiling the smile of a young woman, who had walked away from home long ago.

She walked away even further and stranded in a city at the other side of the ocean. I lived in her rooftop apartment close to the central market in Barcelona. Sundays were silent. From the little balcony I could see a stretch of the sea, hear the seagulls, and listen to the church bells of the nearby cathedral. The little radio would transmit for its own pleasure; a muffled voice spoke a foreign language.

According to the newspapers those autumn months in Barcelona were pretty dangerous. Eta put a few bombs, a police man died. I enjoyed dwelling the streets, imagining harbor life, that didn’t exist anymore, but had left its marks. The old popular houses downtown would have to disappear one day, just as the poor people, the junkies and the immigrants who filled the shady alleys. The smell of piss was unbearable in some corners. But in a way it added to the aesthetics of my existence as an outsider.
I worked on the final editing of my book and never in my life I had come so close to the romantic vision of a writer being poor, alone, but silently happy. I hunted the traces of a dead publisher. At the other side of the Diagonal, where streets were filled with roaring cars, I found his office. I spoke to his grand daughter who had sat on his lap, heard of visits by Céline. In the library in Hospitalet, a beautiful ex-monastery in a run down street, I read about the Spanish war, and found the article that mentioned his death.

I actually found him in a grave that faced the Mediterranean sea. At the other side of the horizon was the little village that he had left at the turn of the nineteenth century. The passage to the new world started in Genoa and took him via Barcelona to South America. The years he spend over there were a complete mystery to me. I knew of some of his moves, though. And I knew of her moves: she had made peace with her mother, and was on her way to Buenos Aires, leaving the newly found boy friend in tears.

The Last Breath

The image on the poster reminded me of something angelic, the angels Thomas Moore wrote about. Those must have been the last ones to occupy the European spheres. Put against a wall of yellow bricks, it stood out like a sign. If I consider what path I have been following ever since, it certainly was. It was the announcement of the LEM- festival. It stretched out over a period of three months, most of the concerts were held in small bars, and, what was important to me: they were free.

When Manuel Motta, a tall young man with an introverted look, started, I soon noticed that he would not play any melody at all. It reminded of my time as a residence artist in a big house in a tiny village. It had a chapel like room with a vaulted ceiling. The acoustics were perfect for religious chants. I played my electric guitar, that I couldn’t play at all. Lots of sounds must have escaped from the chapel, into the empty houses or up to the castle, frightening the cats. Maybe they chased some birds for ever. Manuel seemed to have picked up all those loose ends, and now he got them back to me, neatly packed.

Peter Cusak’s guitar resembled a bit a rowing paddle. Peter looked like a teacher during whose class you would fight against sleep. This image didn’t work against him. Almost from the beginning his paddle produced a penetrating sound. Up to now I can not explain why I imagined him walking down the stairs in his house, heavily disturbed by the neighbor’s drilling. While continuing playing on the stage, standing in a yellowish floodlight, in my imagination I saw him executing a genial plan. He actually managed to get hold of the penetrating sound and changed it into something more pleasurable.

I swear to God, I got only a few puffs of the marijuana: two, maybe three. On the streets of Spain you share a joint with a lot of friends. We smoked an hour before the first concert started. THC, or not, my imagination got even wilder. Cusak, satisfied he had pacified the drilling sounds, walked out on the streets. It was a clear slightly windy day with a sharp sunlight contouring houses and cars. Way up in the sky fluffy white clouds were strolling along. The guitar sung the song of gentle citizens.

On stage Peter Cusak had the guitar on its lap, a stick divided the strings in left hand and right hand territory. In the village he had climbed the stairs up to the bell tower. The mumblings rising up from the town square met up with the gossip of the pigeons. I looked down, and then – I don’t know where I got the wings – I looked at him as he was standing on the very edge. He had transfigured into a weather puppet that only comes out when the bells ring. But this little puppet got mad. He hit every little voice that rose up to him as if it was a mosquito. I cannot remember anymore how he managed to calm down. I hope he did, or else he will be forever chasing mosquitoes.

I was ready for a break. But there is not a lot of things that make breaks useful when you are down and out and can’t even afford to buy a bottle of beer. I watched the stage instead. Somebody camouflaged from head to toe brought a chair. The sound engineer on my right pointed his chin as he snapped his fingers. In the half shade close to the wall and its emergency lights visitors were engaged in talks that seemed to consist of fragmented sentences and unproved thoughts.

Paolo Angeli had the appearance of a marinaio, a sailor. There must be thousands of kitchens and restaurants in Italy where you can find a painting of a fisher’s boat town on the beach, with women standing around it, the men emptying the nets. He could have walked right out of such a picture. Soon I imagined him on deck of a steamer that would bring him to South America. What I heard was the ballad of my dead publisher. The passage encountered a stormy sea at night and a peaceful one in daytime. As Paolo worked himself through the concert with enormous vigor, the world of the publisher opened itself.

I actually was him, and saw the dust and poverty of the sandy roads, the first settlements, the bars with its fights and ladies. I was lost for years following a woman. I could feel the pain of longing for something I would never reach. Then I went back to Barcelona. Soldiers and citizens were fighting in the streets. I can remember looking up at Montjuic at a cold rainy day. The rain washed away every hope that the sun would ever come back again.

Teatime

Quite regularly I read a short text in which an experimental musician introduces himself. This habit must have filtered through the mazes of my reductionist employment. In the early days of my existence I went into a short lived exile while having breakfast. The news paper then existed of only two parts, the international one at my right laying next to my father’s plate and the regional one at my left, laying next to the coffee cup of my mother. I would read the texts on the various jars in front of me.

There is absolutely no need to read what those musicians write about themselves, if not for a shimmering hope to encounter something interesting. The ultra short biographies are set in the third-person form. Verbs are most of the time absent, as is anything that could indicate that the person is 1. Made of flesh and blood and 2. Still alive. The result is a botanical account linked to a pretentious desire that the description is fit for the encyclopedia.

Introductions have also secondary purposes. They define the character of the expected audience, and they define the vision towards organized sound. Once the last obstacle is taken (the paying of the entrance fee) the visitor and interpreter are ready for a shared experience. Non-initiates would break the spell. Yes, I used terms that can be applied to ritual.

You need a megalomaniac’s mind set if you agree that all organized sound is music. To a lot of people a formula one race or language, other forms of organized sound, are a formula one race or language. In fact, in these times of disintegrating definitions it is hard to stick to abstract formulas. So, if you want to be sure, then the abstract has to be as realistic as possible. If you want to define music, it is best to stick to the notation. Once the reading results in playing, something else happens, something that is too personal to bring it back to an intellectual idea.

I don’t know of Motta’s, Cusak’s or Angeli’s intentions. The experience from that evening stayed with me as a memory, a point of inspiration, a story to tell, but also as a comforting thought: sound is at the heart of all matter. This thought is a travel companion to another one: all matter exists since the beginning of the universe. No matter how big the chaos, harmony will always remain a constituent part of it, maybe the one and only part.

(Way In) = (Way Out)

A long time ago I got almost killed. Willem de Ridder, a myth in the radio phonic world that spans from Beromünster to Mt.Carlo, had organized an evening for the Holland Festival. I was in my thirties, immersed in elegantism, and floating on waves of great expectations. Boy, did my shoes look good. De Ridder’s idea was to have ensembles play in front of the closed shutters of the shops all around the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. These ensembles should all play at the same time. And all of them should play a composition by John Cage.

Wondering what that would sound like I visited the event and walked from one ensemble to the other. The musicians looked like street musicians in a Hollywood musical. I didn’t like what I heard. I decided to walk around and have my ears guide me to the place I liked best. There was no traffic for the duration of the multiple concert. I actually found a place; the cacophony was perfect. At one point I saw De Ridder and Cage walk by. Their faces were shining with joy. Maybe they also had decided to compose their own piece of music by walking around. I thought of going up to the old master to shake his hand. I liked too much what I heard, didn’t move from my spot, so I let them walk past me at five meters distance.

I must have been lost in sound. A tram came around the corner, its wheels screaming in the tracks. At the same time a taxi claxoned behind me, passing with great speed. Before and behind me there was hardly half a meter. I had found a place at the most dangerous point of the Leidseplein. I looked up and saw trams gliding through the neon landscape from all angles. Taxis were coming and going. The usual snotty Leidseplein youth was walking around in groups. There were no more musicians playing in front of a snack bar. The concerts had stopped. I never realized at what point exactly.

There are these images of conductors in which they rise from petrifaction. Statue like they stand, lost in concentration, and then suddenly, either with gestures that resemble the movements of underwater plants, or bodily contractions as you see by people in a deep deep sleep, they loosen themselves from the temporary immortalization. Conductors tend to become legendary in their after life. They have offered numerous people a unique experience.

Classical music survives because it is written down. The notification, and the sheet of paper that has carried the information through the ages, is music at its purest form. Once a conductor starts working with his orchestra, the result will be different from that what the composer could ever have heard with his inner ear, simply because the composer and the conductor are two different persons. But also because there is no way out of the experience, unless you leave the concert hall. Even then one will need time to hear the outer world with every day ears. By the way, a member of the orchestra will never walk out.

Immersed in absolutism it might be hard to think of expiring dates. Knowing things are short lived is also a comforting thought. This article that I am writing ( and is read by you after an interval of time, that seemingly doesn’t exist in the traffic writer->reader) has its intrinsic truth. Enclosed in a temporary absolutists capsule it will create a universe of its own with a very unique constellation.

But Then It Stops

History is made from written down accounts. One can only guess why somebody wants to write down the report of a period or event that – obviously – has made a big impression. My curiosity goes out to the sounds: what did the chronicler hear while writing, what had he heard when the story came to him? Was there a sonic environment that caused an inner fine tuning? Are the body and soul elements of a much bigger part that can be tuned? And once they are tuned, is any creation, be it music or a written account, the result of a special touch? In our present day language we can still be touched, even if English is not spoken.

Every moment of intensity needs to be followed by relaxation. Peace is a (collaborative) result of (re-) organizing, or if one prefers (re-) composing a certain space at a certain moment, for a certain duration of time. In this two-step thought, the enthusiasm is left out. Maybe I did so, because I am writing at this very moment. Spielberg would make two hands grow out of the screen… to strangle you, to caress you or to draw you in? You can relax, I am not Spielberg. Though you might hear my voice…

Joking

24 June Appointment

read it in the mirror.

June Appointments – continued

I spend twelve hours in Brussels. Margarida Guia got me from the station. When we walked out we saw two ambulances. A person covered by belts and sheets was lying on a bar and pushed towards the open door of one of the hospital cars.

After walking for five minutes the air was filled with the howling cry of sirenes. It disappeared behind some blocks. A helicopter snorting life from above had replaced it with its nervous flutterings. I hadn’t seen a single soul yet, who was eating flemish fries.

At the little gallery with the beat basement I met up with Crys Cole and Julie Rousse. I never played with dolls when I was young. The girls world was at my doorstep, but seperated from mine by an impenetrable veil.

We arranged the tables and chairs as if we were preparing something bigger. Soundcheck with biological beer and talks outside followed. I thought about Moresnet, while listening to an older man talking about linguistic facts. His face close to me while lecturing, it looked like an author’s portrait on the back cover of a book of literature. The pages had turned yellow with time.

Playing with the girls, I was allowed to enter their world. Our sounds grasped after each other and let each other go. Some time I will remember how I laid on the grass and watched the clouds. Clouds that slowly lost their form. And then the warmth of the day was the only notion present. I think, therefore I am a sensualist.

Next day in Margarida’s wonderfull house. Back gardens full of darker green, and the houses that had cried just too often. I looked into a landscape described by Jeroen Brouwers, some fifty years ago. I didn’t want to leave. And when I did, I saw crazy little people driving around in crazy little toy cars and it sounded like wuwuwuwu all the time.

Then, shortly before leaving, I was the only person I saw eating flemish fries. It was the perfect peace for our times sandwich: maroccon sausage with flemish fries and an andalusian sauce.

Nothing to do in Paris,except for enjoying the calm of the days at palazzo Carcone. Its doors open on Plaçe de Nation. Instead of walking into Paris, I got Paris walking right up to me.

One day in Montreuil to see Sudden Infant and Billy Bao. I arrived too early and had a walk around. Recorded North African voices. Walked a bit more and encountered a black African enclave. People sitting on benches, talking. Smooth voices in an allowed lizzard like lazyness just beside the obligations of the day. The appartments looked as if they could catch fire any moment. In one courtyard of an appartment block I saw a small market going on. Anthony told me they were from Mali. You could buy a piece of soap there at three o’clock in the morning. The president of Mali went there when he visited France. It is the kind of place where Sarkozy would cover his nose and mouth with a handkerchief.

Hello to Mattin and Joke. And then they performed. Mattin with guitar and his rockabilly hard working drummer boy. Hardcore impro goes hardcore noise. The organizer gets on the stage and reads the contract. He reads all of it. Mattin plays high school love song rhytm guitar without amplification. It goes on and on. Contract reading finished, bloody noise tearing the walls down. I think of very dark New Yorkian political statements. I was never in New York. Mattin was.

Joke is sudden infant and has brought a female companion who wears a plastic inflatable parrot head. Maybe I am watching a performance. But whatever I am looking at, Joke’s extremely charming stage presence contradicts equally charming with his screams and moves. I get transported to early day Charlie Chaplin. I connect with the dirt and poverty of the streets. Times I have never lived and visited come alive. Was this what Dada was about? Joke throws rhythms. The girl without the parrot mask throws invisible flowers into the audience. Joke scratches his legs because of a sudden flee attack. Different rhythms bring visions of shadows on the dance floor in a cocained city somewhere in the early eighties. Is this good? Why should it be good. Is that what you ask when hanging around in somebody’s appartment? This is what it is. And I am very curious what sudden infant will sound like this weekend.

Then I will be in the Normandy

here

June Appointments

After dedicating a lot of time to Staalplaat Workng Space, I will leave Berlin for a short period. Before doing so, I will play at two evenings in different settings.

Friday 5th of June I will play with topmodel at Sowieso, the neu nostalgic cove designed and run by Dutch ex pat Marc van der Kemp. Those who want to see the Flughafenkiez, close to Tempelhof, before gentrification will restyle the neighborhood, should come now, while it is still, well… authentic? This evening is the first one in a monthly series, curated by and featuring me in different constellations. In tonight’s episode Hilde Tropengold will play alongside with topmodel.

flyer by chrizzi heinen

Friday 5. June
Sowieso
Weisestrasse 24
U-Bahn Leinestrasse
topmodel
Hilde Tropengold
start 21.00

Saturday 6. June A new feature in the Berlin marginal circus is “not so loud,” which is held in the k77 dance studio. It is located on the Lonely Planet fähige Kastanienallee in Prenzlauer Berg. Together with Adrian Shephard and Barnaby Tree I will present a dramatic piece that will hold elements of inversed theatre, radio drama and modern dance classics. The collaboration with Adrian is rooted in our idioclastic absurd radio sessions. One afternoon while recording a radiophonic work we were joined by Barnaby Tree and his cello. Adrian played recordings from occult and earthly fields. Barnaby added a dramatic almost filmic touch to my neu realsitic stories from colonial India. We discovered the combination worked pretty well. At the very relaxed studio of k77 we will try to add another chapter to the cartography of radiophonics.

Saturday 6. June
K77, dance studio
Kastanienallee 77 2HH. 3rd Floor
U-Bahn Eberswalderstrasse
Barnaby Tree, Testcard and me

start 20.30 (!)

Friday 12 May, Those who think that the capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, is the place where you can visit every kind of cultural event possible, from high brow mainstream to the dungeons of noise – culture are wrong. Except for the mediatic noise there is nothing that links the Dutch capital to this form of (anti-) art. I don’t know for what reason this should be so. Maybe you will find or hear an answer if you come to the current noise capital of the Netherlands: Tilburg. Thanks to the nozems of vatican analog the tradition lives on. The collective even links it to fluxus and what more. So if you are on a museum/gallery tour of the low countries, then make a stop in the very heart of it. A whole evening of disintegrating activism and other assorted assaults on fundamentalist believes you will feel and hear at Optimus Prime Noise Fest. Twenty performances or more, I will play there as well.

Predicting the Past

Commemoration

In “A Still Life of Thought” I brought Persil and The Pelvis together as markers of the beginning of an era. I applied metabletics, a one-man-science invented by Jan Hendrik van den Berg. Metabletics deals with the change of mentalities through the ages. Van den Berg states that the mentality leading up to a significant event would need forty years to be spread among the broad masses. So that is how Persil and Elvis came together at the funeral of Princess Diana, where a dry-cleaned Elton John could sing his tearjerker.

The Games Must Go On

When writing that piece it started to dawn upon me, that I might have been wrong in choosing the period. I went on however, because I wanted to attend the funeral. I also thought it an attractive idea to live in an era that was still at its beginning. Sometimes you are what you write. In the weeks after I realised I had picked up some bones that were lying at the entrance of the cave. The place where the corpse had been roasted was deep down in the cave.

In the years 1972 – 1974 some significant events were the advent of the colour TV, the fall of Richard Nixon because of the Watergate Tapes and the incident in Munich during the Olympic Games.

The colour TV made the creation of a parallel life almost perfect. Today we are at a point that this fact is not only fully accepted, in Second Life the process is taken even a step further. More over, people undergo the weirdest initiations to deserve themselves a place on TV. Television has replaced myth. To appear on it is like gaining immortality for a brief period.

Watergate showed that journalism was stronger then political rhetoric. Journalists acted like the care takers of democracy, in a way replaced the parliament. Today the newly elected President of the United States also acts like the chief editor of a big newspaper. He speaks up before the journalists come up with an issue that could discredit him.

A crucial point in history happened in the summer of 1972 during the Olympic Games. Palestinian terrorists (or freedom fighters) took Israeli athletes in hostage. Helicopters and snipers ended it all. The whole liberation action was covered live by television. Kidnappers and athletes were killed. The president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, declared: “The games must go on.”

Building a Transparent Wall

A message can contain direct information. The games went on.  Another game became more serious. The end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies saw a great increase of political actions, some of them in the streets, some of them at universities, some of them on leaflets. All of them by people who could be classified as extreme left in their political opinion. In fact they were so extreme that they supported the Palestinian cause against a so called Zionist=fascist state.

The decision by the Olympic committee was disrespectful towards the victims, their family and the other athletes. It was disrespectful towards the moral values of our civilisation. The message was clear. In ignoring the point the Palestinians wanted to make, the significance of a dialogue with all the critics of the western political/cultural system was ignored. The coup in Chile on 9/11 -1973 when the elected left wing leader Salvador Allende got replaced by a the military regime of Pinochet was a loud and violent echo of the Brundage Declaration in Munich.

The era that started in 1972 would bring us to an accepted reality in which we are living in two parallel worlds. One of them is defined as mainstream. You can visit this world at every mediagenic event. You can see it on television. The other is not mainstream. If nobody reads you, you don’t exist.

Home

“hey, hi where are you?”

“ Somewhere around the Galapagos Islands…”

“Yousaywhat?”

“ Joking.. listen, I will get home a bit later.”

“oohhh..”

“ It won’t take long … can you wait?”

“ …”

Darwin

This year it is two hundred years ago that Charles Darwin was born. In his time the use of steam in ship and trains added movement to the landscape. Factories with their chimneys heralded a new era. Day to day needs and its seasonal rhythm of rural activities got replaced by an abstract notion of time. The future had arrived, and it was not called Utopia. Whatever happened and whatever would happen, it was very important to think of what couldhappen. Life got organized in a different way. So did Darwin. And he gave the western world two key words to work on: struggle and survive.

I don’t care to find out if there is a missing link that connects the chicken, the German Alsatian or the firefly to a primordial being. As far as information comes to me, I even don’t know if it is proved that in some time in history the purring cat walked out of the bushes and laid itself down in the lap of some cro magnon heavy metal freak. I only know, I don’t believe in Darwinism.

Anti Darwinists get classified as creationists. Of course this is the Darwinist point of view preaching conflict. If you are not with us, you are against us. It is how rulers reason, no matter whether they belong to the inquisition, the French revolution or if they are called Stalin or Berlusconi. It never occurred to followers of a dusted 19th century theory that an other point of view, not connected to a 6000 years old idea could be brought up.

Darwin analysed the political moves of mankind. His work presented the glorious British Empire the “ rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves “- empire as the jewel on the crown of evolution. In fact western man was so superior that it was no problem to kill the savages by the masses.

Our culture is drenched with the notion of superiority, conflict, struggle and survival. Gentrified neighbourhoods, politicians surrounded by an army of security guards, G8 meetings creating temporarily fortresses, Africans embarking on a dangerous mission to reach the shores of an enlightened society, even the language used in the official (= funded) art world mark the two sides that are opposed to each other.

Darwin stated that a tree became the present day (it is:1859) tree thanks to natural selection. He attributed some kind of intelligence to the plant: the tree seeks its way through history and nature to make his kind survive. If one would state that the same tree exists (where is his missing link?) because it loves to be here, you would get dismissed as a tree hugger, and there fore as not serious, and not fitted to be part of society. Nowadays, in the EC, it is regulations and airports that do the natural selection.

Another form of psychological exile was implanted in our culture thanks to a massive wave of “positive thinking.” Yes, it is very good to be positive and to praise. But it also helps to maintain the sense of doing so, by praising and encouraging those who have accomplished something. Positive thinking has invaded every day life to an extent that one could think the entire western civilisation is suffering from a traumatic experience.

The opposite of positive thinking is negative thinking. You don’t have to go far to find out what mentality is behind positive thinking, because we are also sucked into a system of winners and losers. A disrespectful way of defining people or individuals is widely accepted. It is a Darwinist definition. Critics are outside society. If nobody reads you, you don’ exist.

Thinking creates a duality. It starts from understanding. Next step is either to preach, dictate and terrorize, or to forgive, be tolerant and support.

There is a very subtle difference between positive thinking and believing in someone. Once the thinking stops to be positive one might believe that there are alternatives.

Left Ear, Right Ear

Environmental sound has become an essential part of the way we represent the world to each other in art, whether musically or non-musically

The Wire 300: Will Montgomery On The Changing Uses Of Field Recordings Published 13/02/09

Auditory fields are not music and by trying to present them as such we end up depleting them of their grain and deadening their soul, leaving little of value to share with the listener.

the grain of the auditory field – Kim Cascone published in Geometer

These are last lines. There is a hint in it that leads us away from music. Will Montgomery’s entry reads as an introduction to field recordings. The picture that adorns his article, a man standing on the rocks of a stormy coast, has an epic touch to it. The image resembles Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer.’ Montgomery’s mentioning of Cusack’s and Kirkegaard’s missions to capture sounds at dangerous places, suggests that there might be more to field recordings then sound alone.

Kim Cascone follows the trace a bit further in his calmly written very convincing self-portrait.  Apart from the anti Darwinist line by rejecting the things that don’t fit we end up reducing the dimensionality and complexity of everyday life his piece can be read as a walk into unknown territory. It is unknown, because he is been mislead by a false  guide: John Cage.

It is comforting to read how the argument used by Darwin’s savages to refuse to have their pictures taken, returns in Cascone’s short story: By recording a field we steal its soul.

It is not that dramatic, of course. What he calls the auditory field will stay, also after he has walked away from it with a recording. What might not come back is his experience of a transcendental atmospheric sum greater than its parts. There is several ways to describe an inspired moment. Not only did Cage implant the wrong definition on him, also the self misleading description of a field as auditory causes doubts and struggles.

Kim Cascone’s piece starts of with a quote. A man in an elevator is listening. There is mention of the sharp tocks of a secretary’s heel. Then Cascone starts his article with an autobiographical moment: a woman arrives. She is a harpist, starts to play. Cascone unwraps his sandwich and his ears. He drifts off into a reverie about the ideal listening situation.

The Romantic Notion

Let historical periods last longer. Maybe then reflecting becomes a bit less frantic. And why not have twined periods? Can’t naturalism, romanticism and modernism live happily together? Add a baroque touch to it, some pre-columbianism, shintoism, animism and druidism if you like. Just take a look at the objects you would bring into your living area, the sounds you listen to. Oh, this new bricolage might be presented as alter modernism on an other page of this endless book of thoughts, maybe even as next year’s hairdo, but then you have to click this one away.

I will take those who remain on a haunting ride to the ruins of medieval castles; they will hear the wind howl and fear that the wolves are waiting in the deep dark forest. Tales of children getting lost and held by witches mingle with inflaming fantasies about oriental women dancing in the scarce light of an oil lamp.

Emotions knock on the doors of our souls and the brain doesn’t know what to think of it. However, the games must go on. The romantic notion of the other side of the horizon made young men embark on a voyage to an unknown world. They came back as naturalists. The children were encyclopaedists. And their children were alchemists, put things together and started an era of inventions.

Those inventions lasted longer then human life. Suddenly society could be defined by its organisation. It was modern. Modernity as a final result of the Enlightenment, because it gave us prefab and life styles to choose from; it gave us expiring dates. Political and religious imposing served as a motor. And when that motor choked due to post modern disturbances, all the intellectuals got confused. In fact every one got confused. But there is no reason for it. Either you have the money to buy what you like, or you don’t have it. Well, if you belong to the latter category, enjoy the view. There is nothing that you can do to escape from it. Maybe if you are interested in recording sounds you can escape from it all.

The Invention of Nu Folk

Ancient Greece was a society with vertizons. I know this word doesn’t exist. There is no believe for it. We have horizons all around us. But the ancient Greeks had Gods (up there) and the underworld (down here). And they had a lot of stories to fill the space in between. One of  them is about a guy who lost his wife. He is a poet and a musician. Nowadays you would call him a singasongwriter. The present day parallel would be that the girl had enough of the pyjama attitude of her lover with his endless yormywondawàààh, would jump on a train and go boogie with some trash metal fellow.

Or maybe not, maybe she is a harpist as well and waits eternally in a shopping mall for her next lover to step out of the elevator. Who knows. Thanks Gods and anonymous writers, things were way more clear in the old days. Your wife dead? Go find her in the underworld. And so he did. Mind you, not every mortal could do this. But the Gods were full of pity. Ehm, let’s see. No, the Gods basically wanted to fuck and drink and beat each other up once they were pissed.

It must have been one of the lovers to whisper in a God’s ear while licking it as well, that this dude who could sing such nice love songs, had changed his repertoire ever since his wife died. His new songs made even the dogs cry along with him. One just couldn’t tell the difference anymore. The cats are in heat as well. That is what she tells her God, who grunts in between his tidal movements that the fellow can go down to get his wife, on one condition.

Don’t look back, not even in anger.

That was good news for the poet and musician. Off he went. He found her. Anticipating on a song that a madman would sing a few millennia later he told her that he was coming to take her away ha-ha. Alles klar, said the wife, packed her bag, stood up, asked if she should bring the scarf she was knitting (ah, no, you won’t need it), and followed her singasongwriter to the end of the underworld.

But then, almost there, he looked back and whoosh, she disappeared for ever. One can only guess why he did so. It is almost impossible that he doubted his wife would follow. I mean, life was good, and she loved him, right? And why should it be impossible for her to return, he did go both ways. Personally I think it was for another reason that the sucker deliberately turned his head. He was too used to singing nu folk songs. He wanted to return to the girls who came to comfort him, and served him breakfast the day after.

Silent History

The thing about this Gods and Myths from Greece make me wonder. There is these temples and valleys scattered around the whole Mediterranean. Gods are mentioned by their names in the books of those days. But the myths? Were they written down once the comedy was over? Also Jesus came to life a long long time after his death. What I want to state is: can this myth and religion stuff be seen as a giant fall out after an enormous atomic explosion, But what was the character of that big explosion? And is atheism a conviction of all times? Could it be that at the very edge of our civilisation the view is blocked by an impenetrable veil? I am sure Einstein didn’t resolve that problem.

In the year two thousand and two I spent one hundred days in Morocco. A number of them I stayed in a place so marginal that it didn’t even appear on the map I got from the tourist board. It turned out to be a stronghold of Amazigh culture. I learned that there was not a lot of positive thinking going on between them and the other Moroccans. A people with an own alphabet, their history goes back to the Egypt of Pharaoh’s times. The Arabs who conquered the African north were still seen as oppressors. All through the ages of cultural and political isolation the alphabet was safeguarded as a tattoo on the skin of the women. It made me think of the power of aural history. But what amazed me most was the psychological and cultural vicinity of an event which had happened thirteen hundred years ago.

A day earlier, somewhere around fifteen hundred years ago Clovis Christianized his people by the masses – and through them us Europeans. Those who refused were tied together and drowned in a river. That is what I learned when I was a kid at a catholic school. And I accepted it with my comic strip imagination. Clovis must have used also other methods to convince his subjects. The culture that had to disappear, didn’t go underground. I don’t know of any ethnic minority whose aural history connects our time with the days before Clovis came. But don’t I?

Is it not that the words are the carriers of a feeling rooted much deeper in time as it is in language? What if we try to visualize the arrival of Clovis and his bible and his men? The rumours must have travelled faster. Did people escape? And those who didn’t escape, because they wanted to resist, why were they convinced? Fact is, the killings must have left an impact on those who witnessed it. If it is not words that would transport this pain through the years, up to the coming of other massacres, and so on, could it not be, hurt itself was passed on from one generation to an other? Despite all the positive thinking there is an awful lot of anger and distrust hidden in this society of ours. To survive the traumata you have to struggle.

Every Mother Loves her Unborn Daughter

Once you come back from an excursion, you can be sure the place you visited will never be the same again. Pictures, be they moving or still, just as souvenirs of the experiences you share, might bring back emotions and memories, but the actual place will continue to change. That’s what time and gravity does. When you come home with a recording of a place, and listen to it again, you will hear the sounds of the past, of a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Yes, death can be very futile. It even finds a place to rest in your last footprint.

Like a modern day Orpheus the field recorder descends in the underworld. He might be unconscious of his death wish, but isn’t  it that what makes fascination so puzzling? It is not a death wish in its most morbid sense, no it is about knowing it as a living being, as someone who can return to his life. It is about being a reversed ghost. The fascination continues once we start listening and working with the recorded material. Those sounds we hear, are the sounds of the death.

Like Orpheus we must have a reason to go down. It is clear that we cross a border. This happens even twice. Could it be this border is the impenetrable veil I mentioned earlier? Do we want to point our microphone in the direction of a place where hurt doesn’t exist? Maybe way beyond the sounds of the traffics, the oilfields and all the voices, lingers this one seducing melody to a different song: the daughter’s love song?

I don’t want to make field recorders the puppets of my imagination. This piece started of with an attempt to find out the character of our times. As cultural historic scholars want it, our times change pretty often. Or maybe there is a longing to end it all, whatever it is that needs to be done with. Today’s most popular drug is alcohol. Following metabletics the period that started around 1972 will end in 2012. By then two civilisations will live next to each other. Money and institutional power will mark the border. Asking for funding will be like playing in the lottery.

To change a time drastically you need drastic changes. The coming of Christianity was one. The application of perspective in painting was another. This last innovation took place at the end of the 15th century, Brunelleschi and Masaccio being two big names.

Now imagine Brad Pitt at the Venice Film Festival Press Conference, with his post Gatsby look and his earphones elegantly dangling from his neck; I choose Brad, because the Pitt/Jolie couple has some affinity with both Greek mythology and Cyberspace. Question for Mr. Pitt, what are you listening to? Answer from Mr.Pitt, a guy called Lopez, don’t remember his first name. My wife bought it for me, she thought it was a brother of Jlo. Same Journalist, Pardon me, Jay Low? Some of his colleagues tell him Jlo is short for Jennifer Lopez. (laughter) Mr.Pitt again, it is pretty strong stuff, a bit ambient. I can recommend it.

It is very well possible that perspective in painting was used hundreds and hundreds of years before it became fashionable and therefore entered history. Who knows. Fact is, showing the three dimensionality and the horizon brought a new subject in life: progress. The objective got defined as well, create a uomo universalis. The painting has been replaced by a computer window. Despite multitasking, the objective, however, is not reached. (Yet?) The epoch that started with the Renaissance has still to end. By defining periods that hardly last a generation, all we are offered is an attempt to identify the tool. Communication is hard these days. Maybe the work is done in silence.

Songs from Paris

With Emmanuel Rébus, on the picture, and Har$, and not Jean Bordé, who had to polish his double bass, I walked from Rue Dauphine over the bridge and the gardens and courts of Le Louvre to the Needle to install ourselves with our dictaphones. We didn’t put a head on the pavement, and neither a hat, so we didn’t find out if experimental street musicians can earn a bit of money as well.

March Appointments

A great part of the promising month I will spend in France. On 6, 7 and 8 March I will be found in the bar of Le Lieu Unique during the Sonor Festival.

That’s how it sounds in French:

Rinus propose au moyen de sessions de mix courts, à base de bandes magnétiques, d’atmosphériser les moments de transition entre les différentes performances de la soirée.

In real time it sounds like a lot of people talking and some sounds that move in between their conversations. Now in Nantes writing this, I had the luck to arrive on a bright sunny day, so that I could marvel at the beautiful sharp light in this part of the world. Unfortunately the day ended with ‘drewling’ wheather, as John Morin, my host put it. Also this evening I will mix sounds from my box of cassettes. On Sunday midday I will do a live interview for the local radio JetFm that organized this, somehow, unique festival of radiophonic productions.

7 – 8 March, Le Lieu Unique, Foyer Haut, Quai Ferdinand-Favre, Nantes

On the 8th of March I will return to Paris, where I will live a week in a small appartment in Quartier Latin. I hope I can finish a piece I am writing, called ‘predicting the past,’ and maybe do some recordings to add to my parisian collection. Paris is also hometown to Diktat. This means that no visit to the French capital will be without a performance. The first one will be at the studio of radio aligre and will be transmitted live on the songs of praise.

9 March,  AligreFM 93.1 , Paris and RP

I will use Harold Schellinx as an unmasked ghostwriter for the following two announcements.

At La Comète 347 in Paris, you may attend the first ever SIMULTANEOUS EAI concert , curated by Jean Bordé. That evening in three different corners of La Comète three different EAI-groups (La Brocante Sonore [Belgium/France], DIKTAT [Paris/Berlin], andNozal Cube [France]) will perform at the same time … Be there at 20h30 …

13 March, La Cométe, rue du Faubourg du Temple 45, (fond de la cour), Paris,  M° Goncourt / République

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PETIT PARIS: das kleine à PARIS :: Radio Aligre FM/SoP and Ana-R present the first Parisian edition of das kleine fieldrecordings festival, the renowned running festival organized and curated by Rinus van Alebeek, dedicated to the divers ways in which artists make use of fieldrecordings: the recorded sounds of our environment … Place to be: Espace Radio Aligre, 42 rue de Montreuil, Paris XI. Rinus himself will be the event’s maître de cérémonies… Performances by Gaël Segalen, Emmanuel Mieville, Julie la Rousse, Emmanuel Rébus et Kim Joeun, Jean-Philippe Renoult and Seth Cluett  That’s from 17h till 21h …

14 March, DKFRF at space of Radio Aligre, 42 Rue de Montreuil, Paris XI, M°: Nation / Rue des Boulets

In the middle of the month I will return to Bretagne, this time to Rennes, to meet up with the musiciens from  attaché.

19 March, La Bascule, 2 Rue de la Bascule, Rennes

The day after I will leave France and make a stopover in Maastricht. There I will meet Kim Laugs. We will perform the theatrical piece ‘Adam Leb’, a post romantic tale about an astronaut lost in space, drifting through the galaxies, who every now and then tries to start the engine again.

20 March, Het Rondeel, Rondeel 2, 6219 Maastricht

The rest of the month it will be Sturm der Liebe in Wuppertal.

promotional part: Diktat’s new release on DvD

Topmodel live at Studio Aporee

On a late february evening topmodel performed at the living room/working space/labaratory/karaoke bar/playground of Udo Noll. Udo developed aporee.org/maps, a humboldtian marking system for sounds. One could think that at the beginning of the 21st century we experience a renaissance of the natural historic approach. His maps surely read as a natural history of sound.

Next to this activity his space is also popular amongst those experimentalists based in Berlin Neukölln. All is very modest, low profile and spontaneous. That’s how Topmodel could make a last minute appearance alongside to the duo Carn de Porc.

Enjoy the sound of their concerts here.