a visitor from Australia

Last wednesday it was too cold. The newspapers in Berlin include a bio wheather warning; most of the time it tells you, that today's wheather can make you sneeze or gives you a high blood pressure: meeting people can have this effect as well. With winter finally ariving, the chance for blasting headaches increased. That I know. And there I found myself waiting in a foyer, where winter was welcomed every two minutes, being the frequency of people walking in and out. It was not the newspaper that started to give me a headache. And thus I missed my appointment with my Australian guest.

This evening I was at Wendel, the venue where on february 4th and february 7th you can hear what an Imaginary Homecoming sounds like. With Martin, one of my big helps in these weeks, I was preparing the CDr, that will become available next monday. On it recordings exclusively made for this release. The Cdr will cost you 25 Euro. The acquisition of it is your ticket to six days of festival. Our Australian guest, well one of them, the other is hunting sounds somewhere in the North of Italy, came in. Easy to recognise because of his tanned face, which made me realise that there is also a world outside the Berlin townwall; one tends to forget.

Rob told about his 6000 kilometer ride from the north to the south of Australia, showed maps on the web, looked for that specific location where he had recorded the wind. He talked about his time out there in regions where hardly a sound was heard, and when there was some, it came out very articulated, as a piece of glass that reflects a ray of sunlight.
Rob is an enchanting racconteur. In five minutes he made me visit aborigin communities, made me listen to their secret language, full of strange clicks. It was dry and sunny, stones and walking around, meeting people in a land with a wide horizon. No, he didn't play any excerpts. Which made me wonder if a concert with only imaginary sounds was possible, sounds that you would hear with your inner ear?

Rob will play his bush sounds on saturday.

programme

7 - 9 February Harold Schellinx's Found Tapes

Exhibition/Installation of Found Tapes
in Gallery Transitlounge (chez Culturia)

From the 7th of February onwards Harold Schellinx
will explore various places in Berlin,
recording and looking out for tape salad, or old recorders left on their own.

He will restore the tapes,
and manifacture a brandnew tape: Found in Berlin,
to be added to his evolving exhibition of cast away sounds.

His personal installation/exhibition will be a
live version of his online Found Tapes Exhibition,

including objects, tapes, photographs and samples to listen to.

Soundtransit/Culturia
Josetti Höfe
Rungestr. 22-24
Berlin Mitte
U-Bahn Heinrich Heine
or Janowitzbrücke

7th to 9th of February
15.00-18.00hrs

or

7th to 12th of February
Gallery Takt
Wühlischstrasse 56
Berlin Friedrichshain
U-S.Bahn Ostkreuz

transit lounge
culturia

Programme of the second edition of das kleine frf

February 3
Opening of Exhibition Found Tapes Found Sounds Found Recorders
With a special appearance by Paulo Raposo
Gallery Takt Wühlischstrasse. 56 ,
Friedrichshain U+S-Bahn Ostkreuz
from 18.00 hours onwards

February 4 Day of the Imaginary Homecoming
Bernhard Gal, Stephane Leonard, Jeff Gburek, Gilles Aubry
Wendel Schlesische Strasse 42
U-bahn Schlesisches Tor

February 7 Day of the Imaginary Homecoming
Derek Holzer, Marcel Türkowsky, rauschpartikel, Udo. P.Leis, Wolfram DER Spyra
Wendel Schlesische Strasse 42,
Kreuzberg, U-Bahn Schlesisches Tor

February 8 Day of the Soundstory Telling
Jeff Gburek, Chris Hearn, Harold Schellinx, Kate Donovan
Monty, Lenbacher Strasse. 10,
Friedrichshain, U and S-Bahnhof Ostkreuz

February 9 Day of the Travelogues
Momus, Roland Etzin, Derek Holzer, Lasse Marc Riek
Club der polnischen Versager Torstr. 66
Mitte U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

February 10 Day of the Archived Sounds
Wolfram Der Spyra/Udo P.Leis, Nicolas Weiser, Rob Curgenven, Lasse Marc Riek
Gallery Takt Wühlischstrasse. 56 ,
Friedrichshain U+S-Bahn Ostkreuz

February 11 Day of the Berlin Soundscapes
Harold Schellinx, Rob Curgenven, Marcel Türkowsky, Kate Donovan
Electronic Church Greifswalder straße 223
Prenzlauer Berg S-bahn Greifswalderstrasse

All shows will start at 21.30
Entrance Fee 5 euro for each evening.

find address : c/p + Berlin

During the festival days Club Wendel will play field recordings as background music.

Presale: 25 euro for all evenings
includes a cdr with recordings by all artists
(limited edition of 50 copies.)
Please note, that the price for this cdr will remain 25 euro
untill the last day of the festival.

The presale cdr will be available at
Wendel,Schlesische Strasse 42, U-Bahn Schlesisches Tor
Gallery Takt Wühlischstr. 56 10245 Berlin-Friedrichshain U+S-Bahn Ostkreuz


more news about live radio covering the festival will follow soon.

3 - 12 February: Found Tapes, Found Sounds, Found Recorders

From the 3rd of February to the 12th of February
Gallery Takt will host the exhibition
Found Tapes, Found Sounds, Found Recorders.

The show will open on the 3rd of February
with a performance by Paulo Raposo

opening hours will be comunicated soon

Berliners and every one else on our planet are invited
to contribute to this exhibition in sending/bringing us:

*tapesalad (with a description/design/drawing/recording/picture of the place where you found it +
the actual time you found it)
*sounds (be it on cassette, on mobile phone, on dictaphone, on answering machine, on reel to reel, on cdr, on everything else you can come up with)
*sound related items
*postcards
*whatever you would like to expose

You can send/bring your contributions to
Found tapes, found sounds, found recorders
Takt Kunstprojektraum
Wühlischstr. 56
10245 Berlin-Friedrichshain
Germany

All contributions (envelope included) will go on display in the gallery
and will be for sale for 25 euro, we keep 5 euro, you get the rest.
All sounds that arrive will go into our jukebox.
50 cents for three 'songs'.
You will get money if your sound ends in the top 5.

Last Updates

For some days Adrian Shephard was part of the line up, scheduled for the Day of the Archived Sounds with his recordings made in haunted houses. But he will not be there, maybe.

One goes, in come two other recorders:

Gilles Aubry will play on the 4th of February on the Day of Imaginary Homecoming, along with Stephan Leonard, Jeff Gburek and Bernhard Gal.

Paulo Raposo contacted me to tell me he had booked his flight back to Lissabon on the 4th of February. This information inspired me to arrange something on the 3rd of February.

And also the information on Paulo's appearance is part of the next entry:
Found Tapes, Found Sounds, Found Recorders.

Concept ( january revisited edit)

Das kleine field recordings festival will be on different places in town. These places offer all their own audiotope to the visitor, turned into a listener. Field recorders work with different views (and different gear, uhhuh). Our acoustic surroundings are very generous; each one can find his own story in it. Each one will hear something different. The completed works have titles that serve to the listener as a portal, or a guide for his sonic adventure.

I have made up five themes. There are more to be thought of: The Elements! Riots! The Secret Life of Plants! Jumbo gets married! But alas, maybe I was more prosaic: and thought of imaginary homecomings, storytelling, travelogues, archived sounds and Berlin soundscapes (we are in Berlin), recordings for the soundscape day will be made by the visiting artists during their stay or were already made by the Berlin based artists.

This chapterisation of the festival can be copied everywhere, with the one exception to change the name of the town on the soundscape day.

New to the festival is the exhibition Found Tapes, Found Sounds, Found Recorders.
I will write about that in an other entry.

concept (january 2007 edit)

I look with wonder at the world wide web and see how it has become a reservoir, a storage room of each individuals creative outcome. (Of course there is so much more, but as in a city, I don't knock on every door and I don't enter every shop/gallery/bar/cinema and what so ever.)
Sometimes it makes me think that a person's website is the final destination of his productivity. One of the reasons I organised this festival is to visualize, or maybe better, to materialize the information I got through the web.

The majority of the performing artists I met through internet. It is easy to maintain a digital relation. But to my idea there is also life after the world wide web. Webbing is communicating fast. The result could be meeting in a bar and have some chats and then go home to check some more e-mails. But this is the age of production. And I wanted to produce a Festival and thus present a place where an artform like field recording could have a platform.

I choose field recorders out of another wonderment. By now I know that Berlin can be considered one of the cities in the world with a amazingly lively experimantral/noisical scene. Musicians who have dedicated themselves to this artform often incorporate field recordings in their performances/compositions. But they seldom make appearances where exclusively field recordings are used. I don't know of any venue in Berlin with a programme that includes at least one weekly performance of pure field recordings.

The line up of this Festival (sixteen persons; on the first there were eight) shows the eagerness of the field recorder to present himself to an audience, I mean a real live audience, and not a digital audience at the other side of the computer who will download his netrelease, and whose presence often is diminished to the figure that indicates the number of downloads. I hope that this Festival will result in more initiatives, be it as an evening, be it as a festival. In the end it is all about listening and hearing what is going on. If you like you may read an idealistic statement in this (last) line.

I consider the worldwideweb as a means of communication. I often consider communication as a means to get together and produce something. (Yes, I have my moments of nice goodtime nonsensical blablaing, but hey, this is also what talking is about, but I don't like to be so technocratic that "having a good time" equals "communicating good vibes", before you know, it will become a registered trademark).

I would like to respect networking:
That's why I have contacted (internet)radio's around the world to ask them if they would like to dedicate some of their time to the festival. A list of these radio's will be published soon. I like radio, because I can imagine sounds swirling in some space where ever on the world. And I also like the excitement, knowing that sounds produced in Berlin will go travelling into orbit and from there back again to the Australian desert.
And that's why I will also contact field recorders around the world. Their recordings will become available on line, as a festival to go.
Soon.