das kleine field recordings festival

A Still Life of Thoughts ( a kind of essay)

2008-11-26T12:35:00.004+01:00

Essay

Let's pretend, and call this piece of writing you are about to read an essay. It is important to masquerade one's thoughts. What goes up the chimney right now is meant to be smoke for some of you, and some kind of gas to others. Fuel? Hardly.

Reading some of Momus' blog entries on post-modernism, Derek Holzer's latest blog entries (second half of 2008), and Francisco Lopez' 'against the stage', caused collateral effects on my daily metaphysical digestion system.

I owe some knowledge to the books on metabletics by Jan Hendrik van de Berg.

Perilous Persil

Momus' view that the post-modern period started with a book by Barthes on Persil and other objects and ended fifty years later with a quote on Persil by Victoria Beckham, brought to mind the books by one of The Netherlands' most underestimated writers. Van de Berg, the inventor of metabletics, stated that changes in society started with single events and that it would take forty years to have the thoughts generally accepted. Hence I doubted the period of fifty years. With Elvis as another onlooker it was easy to accept the publishing of Barthes' book as one of the markers of the beginning of an era. If van de Berg was right the end should be situated in the mid nineties. Personally I think the massive hysteria around princess Diana's death and its peak in bad taste, Elton John's mourning song, serve as a fine apotheosis.

Barthes published his book in 1957, the height days of existentialism. I don't know what the girls were like right then, but I have some serious suspicion that they must have been pretty bored by all the endless discussions going on. Talking about Persil might have guaranteed Barthes to get laid every now and then. Of course he discussed other topics as well. He did so in a time that television did not broadcast twenty four hours a day on numerous channels around the world. Tragically when post modernists invented themselves television was everywhere and in the most beautiful colours. It was not only omnipresent, but it was also inventing, shaping and exploring life styles. It was and is forever discussing Persil and other objects. Barthes was a visionary in foreseeing what would occupy the TV editors mind up to today.

In short, in TV-land events occur in a linear process: cause and effect. In this constellation strategies fit in perfectly. Add some decisive restrictions on moral issues and one can almost visualize the manager. Post modernism as in new nihilism brought us the soft revolution of the editors. In the years after the funeral of Barbie politicians like Blair and Schröder represented the office stud who kicked all those emancipated women back into the centerfold of Playboy.

Post Mortem

You don't need religion to believe in God. In post-modern times the authority of culture, politics, and other institutions vanished. In these globalist times friends and interests are either a flight, an email, or a few clicks away. An almost insurmountable distance away are those institutions that have replaced the institutions. One can get an idea of the fortress character of this newly created centre of decisions and thoughts every time a G8 conference occurs.

Irony was one of the main weapons of the post-modernist that made the mountains of authority crumble. It was a bit harder to be ironic with the ironics. Now, in a time that the word 'post-modern' leaves the doors of the Vatican to invade the ears of US-Citizens, and is meant to bother the greatest role model for future times to come, the absolute idol of every self proclaimed talent that washes upon the shores of television, now that the word 'post-modern' is used in an indirect dialogue between a religious leader and the next president of the United States, now that this word has landed on everyman's breakfast table, one can state that post-modernist thinking, is integrated in our culture.

Still, the ex-postmodernists insist on nominating the new era in post-modern terms. A not at all so funny thing is that they do it in their own language. In fact it is this absurd language that serves as a wall and a fortress. Move in it, speak it, write it, sympose, essay, catalogue with it and be sure to cash in with it. A maybe a bit more funny thing is that, apart from God, the western culture, literature, monarchs, political leaders, education, outside the fortress also intelligence itself is no longer a means to justify an authoritarian position. The new authorities are since a long time making a fool of themselves. And with every new heavily sponsored event they make themselves even more ridiculous. Unfortunately they reside within the institutions and even more unfortunately my colleagues in the poverty zone don't have any other choice then to learn gibberish.

Interlude

Elvis and his likes also initiated youth culture. In the following decades music was consecutively optimistic, intellectual, rebellious, elegantly pessimistic and exotic. After 'goodbye English rose' youth culture got more and more independent of any institution except of those that exist in the internet and on TV. In this optic there is no postmodernism or whatever –ism that defines the second half of the last century. The (technical) developments of that era are also a result of the raise in pocket money. With wisdom being a quality of the aged, it is a bit striking that youth culture is extended into the retirement zone. I (1956) don't have to feel old, as long as Mick Jagger is alive. Maybe we are living in pantheistic times (as in Peter Pan), or even pre-pantisocratical times (as in 'everybody should wear the same panties').

The Executioner – an Analysis of 'Against the Stage'

On The Official Francisco Lopez Website one can find a caption:"essays." I don't know if in nominating his website the official website, Francisco has been ironic. Consequently I cannot judge if the few items he wrote were ironically called "essay." The official Frank Sinatra Website doesn't sound more pompous thanks to Francisco's intervention.

As a result of the editors revolution also the publishing houses have been ethnically cleaned: don't think a new Isaiah Berlin will raise from the ashes. There is no more need to ironize the works of the scholars and call a note an essay. Now that the post-modernists occupy the offices of the institutions and act like the new rulers, an essay title appearing in an application form is a convincing argument to spend money on the artist who wrote it.

On this thin line between irony and bank account I really don't know if Francisco Lopez' considerations should be taken seriously or not. I once saw him end a performance in Valencia (I was too late) and there he was in a kind of class room, behind a big long desk. The other opportunity was at a performance in Warsaw where he was not on the stage before me, but behind me at the DJ desk, mixing two CD..s. I reasoned "If you don't want to be on the stage, I don't have to be in the audience." More over, it was a fine summer evening and my great friend Jeff Surak was in the courtyard; I hadn't seen him in years.

Basically what Francisco tries to make clear in his letter to the editor is that he wants to play in front of the speakers, so that no technician will have control over the sound. What follows after this statement is a description of his set up. Best is to take a look at the video clip to get an idea.

Honestly, this image made me think of Breughel's Tower of Babylon, some of Hieronymus Bosch' paintings, but also of Darth Vader and a scene from a movie by Pasolini (maybe Decamerone) in which from a gigantic arse numerous black butterflies escape together with a well tempered fart.

Francisco Lopez is in the very centre of this scene. He writes: "Not that I'm aiming at doing something popular, but I can feel I'm tapping some of the universal powers of sonic matter in an intensified way. I actually feel that most of these powers are out of my control. I personally feel transformed by the experience in the live shows. There I enter a world I cannot reach in any other way I know of."

These are words that could be associated to religious ecstasy. Lopez, the de Loyola of electronic music? A further quotation could confirm this guess. "Disappearing as performer, felt present as medium operator, felt as such in the sound."

I have experienced some surround sound concerts. I found them highly irritating. The perfected sound is at those few square feet right in the centre. It provokes a sensation of unrest, simply because every other position is always out of centre.

But hey, this is all about post-modernism, right? The word 'iconoclastic' is prominent on the official website. What is so iconoclastic about this iconic appearance Francisco Lopez got immersed in over the last years? I cannot believe it is just a gimmick which masquerades the fact that the artist stripped bare to the stage is a guy mixing two cd-'s with the help of two cd-players and a mixing desk.

Maybe the next rather ill-omened, curiously Gnostic quote can shed some light:"(…) darkness lights up regions of the mindscape and the spirit that are normally dormant and darkened by (…) light"

The whole set up is nothing but an image of the society we live in: The invisible ruler in the very centre, immersed in his very own world, deaf to everything that happens outside. He is surrounded by the obedient followers, dedicated and trustful. But in Lopez' vision these citizens are about to be executed, blindfolded in their last moments of life. The hangman wears a black hood. Expressing a sinister and utmost pessimistic view, Lopez' series of immersive concerts are an outcry for humanity at its darkest and most lonely moment.

The Sweet Life

It is so cute. Some of us out there in the field lead workshops. Since this is an institutional activity, the artist has to present a programme. The normal way is that the person behind the desk, I mean the money desk, has knowledge, decides after listening to the works of the aspirant invitee. Nope. You have to write your request, preferably in gibberish and take a seat in a virtual waiting room. In meta language we know that the relation waiting room/ office is based on power.

Of course in the same meta language the artists theoretical outline of his workshop idea, is an expression of his disgust for the situation. He/she presents himself as if talking to a five years old. A typical field recordings workshop could be: introduction to different kinds of recording gear and recording methods. Go out to places with a special acoustic quality.

Imagine a writer proposing this kind of workshop. He would tell that you can actually write with a pen, a pencil or a ballpoint. Also a computer or a laptop can be used. Then there is different kinds of paper to write on, as there is a whole range of computers one can choose from. Once we know what to use to write with and on, we can consider where. A café, a library, at home in the kitchen, the attic, the basement? Or maybe in the underground, or just everywhere.

Would some institution accept my proposal if I would say the participants should come to the first day of the workshop with their recordings and that we will use the time to shape it into a composition? Could that be enough?

The Stage and my Fridge

Winter is near, so is the end of this year's festival. I have chosen different locations, mostly in the Berlin Neukölln area, because I prefer to go home walking after the shows. I also like diversity. Luckily the area of Neukölln that confines with Kreuzberg has gone through a significant change all through this year. For a very long period the lack of bars and small galleries underlined the poor and in some corners dangerous character of the neighbourhood. In 2008 there was a new place opening every week.

I have seen over fifty people perform at my festival. A special series within the festival evolves around the collaboration between Seiji Morimoto and Francisco Cavaliere. The theme is 'imitation of nature recordings' (referring to the tradition in painting; imitation of nature).The places where the festival lands don't have a stage in the traditional elevated sense. (The newly found bar/theatre Sowieso, excepted. I will write on the evenings there in a next entry). But in a kind of 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' reasoning, it is inevitable that with listeners and performer(s) in the same space, the performers defines the stage with their presence and their gear (yes! In front of the speakers and in charge of the mixing desk), and that from the very beginning on the listeners accumulate as an audience.

Whenever I listen back to my own recordings I focus on loudspeakers, or on the moving light columns of the recording level indicator or on the four track itself. Sometimes it happens that I wake up from the trance and wonder why I don't look outside the window. Well, it is about concentration. The same rule applies when looking at the least spectacular performer of all, the laptop artist. It helps with the concentration. And also the performer is helped by this attention.

Then there is times that the fridge bursts out in tears, because she feels so empty. Leftovers reside like tramps. And still, a little wonder occurs every time when I cook a meal with the last pieces from my fridge. It tastes just delicious. A comparable sensation comes from watching the performer behind a desk full of self made instruments and/or equipment that he bought for a few cents on the flee market.

Seiji and Francesco use cheap electronics and branches. They are visible, entertaining to look at, sound and movement are connected. They don't need the hocus pocus of blind folded audiences, an essay to defend this all, and an overall listening situation that I, in a heated discussion and strictly of the record would call:" Bullshit."

All the people I saw perform can do without the degrading observation of Francisco Lopez:" With sound we can do much better then that" (it is playing on a stage.) I can assure that, to my surprise and excitement, the artists that I saw/heard at my festival, already can do much better then that.

Halfway through the Year of the Rat - 9th of August Kim Laugs, ongaku- hh, Simon Whetham

2008-11-06T11:15:00.001+01:00

This years festival official opening ceremony was on the 7^th of February. At that day I was in Amsterdam. The Year of the Rat was about to start. I thought that was a good doorstep to use. Around midnight on a rather mild and therefore humid and still cold winter’s day I arrived at the Nieuwmarkt, where one of the town’s oldest buildings is to be found, but also where narrow streets lead into the red light district and other not that narrow streets make up the Chinese quarter.

Chinese quarter, Chinese New Year, Chinese fire works and Chinese girls with voices like tiny Tibetan bells. Dancers, banners, acrobats, chap soy and drumsticks. The Olympic Games were still far away, and already some minuscule part of the opening ceremony invaded my mind. The Nieuwmarkt, though, was as deserted as you could expect on a week’s day in winter. An announcement said the Chinese New Year celebrations were to be held on the 9^th of February, a Saturday, in a big tent. Now, would the pope sell Christmas? Maybe he did so long ago.

Still I decided to record my walk through the Zeedijk with its Chinese restaurants and the Chinese temple and Chinese shops full of waving golden cats. I took a turn at the binnenbantammerstraat, just to find out if my resonating footsteps would sound the same. Around the corner and back again. I walked streets so familiar to me years and years ago, but other then a belated Christmas ghost asking for a place to buy cigarettes, there was no living soul. If there were some party going on, it must have been a very quiet one.

In August winter is very far away. Great white clouds hang motionless over the city. The sunsets seem to finish the same day over and over again. Mosquitoes dance over the water, little black almost transparent dots, ever moving like some undecipherable scripture. Then there is bicycles and girls, people lying on the green, smiles and laziness. And there is the dusty golden light, the trees, open windows; the cars finally shut up.

Suddenly I realized that this episode of the festival marked the end of the first six months. When I invited the three artists, I didn’t have in mind to do something special. In fact, having roamed the virtual festival ground in these past months, it was no more but logical, that trespassers would reveal themselves as friends. “Why you give notice so short time in advance?” a listener from Hamburg asked. When I saw the microphone in his hand, I answered: ”Why don’t you come over and play?”

In real life Kim Laugs was always around some corner. If it weren’t for his programming activities in Maastricht and The Hague, it was because of his move to Berlin. Way back in February 2007, he played with his group Feedbacksociety at the unofficial opening of the festival, co-starring with Paulo Raposo. While Paulo’s intended concert was eaten by his laptop (the spellbinding alternative he had composed in the night before), Kim & Co were in Berlin as tourists. I considered them found artists, gave them my dictaphones to record Berlin, and my tape recorders to play with and they succeeded with great bravura. That’s why I knew I could invite him.

In the days before I asked every now and then what he was preparing. “Well,” he said. “I am going to use some nice sounds from soundtransit.” I knew he was not joking. I would have been a joke had I instructed him to use his own recordings. Having the laws of plunderphonics applied to field recordings amused me. “What else?” I asked. Then he told me that parts of the low countries had been struck by a tornado recently, a very rare phenomenon in that part of the world. “Ah?” So he would use some weather reports as well. “You also have some recordings of your own?” I can’t remember I got a clear answer to that question.

Then on the evening of the concerts, Kim spread out his gear over the floor, connected strange looking self built electronics with a toy keyboard, some tape recorders, all with lamps and blinks, and when the lights went down, and the thunder storms came in, it was as if he was sitting somewhere high up in a lighthouse. When more winds (directly from outside?) and voices (ships in danger?) whirled around, it looked and sounded like he was actually creating the weather on the very spot. The concert was way too short, but maybe that was for safety reasons.

The man from Hamburg looked like a person one could only meet when life is a kind of Mary Poppins movie. His musical background was a very long way from the places where I move. It was so far away that audiences queued up to enter it, and paid good money for the admission as well. We are talking Brahms, Bach and Beethoven. We are talking about Mahler, Mozart and Mendelssohn. They went out listening, and came back home composing. It is too easy to imagine what the B’-s and the M’-s would have done if recording gear had existed in their times. It is not easy to imagine what we would have been doing if those wig heads really had had the possibility to go out and record.

Udo used the artist name ongaku-HH. Thanks to this ongaku ( a word that came into his life when he was still a student in West Berlin), meaning ‘ music’ in Japanese, we had one accidental Japanese person in the audience. HH is Hamburg (Hansestadt Hamburg), especially when you see a car. I knew Udo had studied classical composing, and still did so, for piano and cello. He later told me that he had given up playing himself when he married. His wife could play Bach’s quattremain pieces with two hands. He didn’t want to sit next to that.

I wanted to know if he applied the same composing laws when working with field recordings. He answered two times. One was saying:” yes.” The other was playing four pieces, that together made up for something noble that in literature is called a sonnet. To describe the pieces Udo played requires a vocabulary way bigger then mine.

From where I sat I could see his profile while playing. I saw his hands rising from the keyboard as if he’d just touched the keys from a grand piano. Maybe he saw his wife’s image again as he’d recorded her while she was singing. In the glow of the screen, I could see intense satisfaction and pleasure on his face. Lasse, Paulo, Dale are you reading this? Udo’s work should appear on CD. He can take our kind of music one step further to recognition. .. should, actually.

Simon Whetham from Bristol, UK, approached me the official way. He sent a mail. Which among other things meant that he knew dkfrf existed. I just point this out, so that you can tell your local art councillor. I sent Simon an official invitation to show to his local art council. With the money of a grant it is less painful to spend money on travelling and bring your art to new ears. We all can see in every day life where a lot of the cultural support ends up: big posters in the streets, flyers, ads and whatever visual pollution one can think of. Simon’s request for a grant got turned down. Well, here is an appeal to those who decide over somebody else’s money.

Simon’s request got turned down for a lack of public engagement. Those who turned down knew better what they meant by ‘public engagement’ then Simon and I. But that is not the point. The point is someone going out to offer his recordings in an artistic way stands in the line of the aural tradition. One may think that aural tradition is about story telling, and passing on historical events, be they on local or cosmological level. In thinking so, one is partially right. Aural tradition is also about the listeners and the society they are part of.

In a society based on aural tradition people move by foot. This results in a different pace very, but really very opposite to the ever more futile world of television and mobile phone applications. Opposing these two ways of experiencing life doesn’t mean that I would like to make a distinction between good and bad. I just want to underline the difference, and the importance that a new generation of story tellers, those who use sounds from our environment, is about to embark on society. The cultural value of having each one of them tell their story, doesn’t lie in the immediate artistic resultm it is twenty-five minutes of sound composition. Okay it does. But the main importance is in the medium that is used. A medium, I repeat, that comes from and transmits a different pace. A medium that invites and seduces the audience to listen. Where silence and attention is created, a sense of orientation originates. Field recordings create a different sense of space and time.

Having said this, I can return to Simon. Some days after his concert I talked with him, to know more about his career. There was more pre-history then history to it. He started to make recordings somewhere out there, when he was in Iceland a few years ago. As part of a group of artists, each one of them with a well-defined task, he concluded that to record was the only thing he could do. What strong impact such recordings could have while listening to them, he only realized when he came back to his hotel room. He had been recording without headphones. This changed quickly. Headphones, different microphones, recording gear, Alps and other geographical destinations came soon into his life. I envied him for the lost recordings of the Gobi desert, and complimented Francesco Lopez for all his efforts; the Amazons reunion being one of them.

With all this information my memories of his concert was provided with some fresh connotations. I already had heard that he structured his piece as a novel, dividing it into several chapters. Tension in the last lines, and precarious explorations of new life forms in the first moments of every new chapter. But with the additional information I could hear in retrospective also the almost eighteenth century like enthusiasm of a natural scientist. There were no cracklings of dinosaur eggs and mating cries of a new specimen of the audivalirius moonbratum to be heard, but there might have.

Ancient Life, a report, an essay, a story

2008-11-05T17:02:00.003+01:00

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. These words were written by Luigi Russolo in his letter that we know as the manifesto: The Art of Noises. It is not known if Luigi had pulled a feather from a goose to provide himself with a pencil, or if he had used a typewriter that, after all, was an Italian invention.

Russolo got his vision of noise providing machines while attending a concert of a musical piece composed and conducted by a friend of him. In the letter to his friend the composer he sums up different sound sources that can be understood as noise. If Luigi had made recordings of these sources he would have been one of the first out in the field.

One can have doubts on the suggestion that ancient life was all silence. Assuming that men had ears and have used them from the very beginning, there must have been sounds as well. These sounds didn't come with a well defined intellectual notion. These sounds were probably detected to define one's own position for safety, navigational or communicative reasons, more or less like we do today. Human being is homo-centric, otherwise we would never have grouped together to create religions, civilisations, cities or myspace.

More recent thoughts on noise come from Harold Schellinx in one of his SoundBlog entry's:Writing a "Meaning of noise" <...snip...> would undoubtedly lead one to re-consider much of our history. Does not noise stand to signal as a yin stands to a yang? It is part of any kind of communication, and it is communication through which we shape ourselves and our world. But then, should one ask, are we shaped through the signals, or rather shaped by the noise ?

One must know that Harold is part of a quartet. Three musicians (Harold included) use cassette players and dictaphones. Fifteen cassette players and dictaphones might run simultaneously at some point during a performance, each playing either found sounds or field recordings. Each of these recordings can be listed as a signal. But fifteen signals signalling at the same time produce noise, or do they?

If we compare Luigi's noise to Harold's signal we notice that they both sound the same. The answer is in a yin and a yang. The symbol doesn't represent a static situation. What once was a yin is now a yang and will become a yin again and so a on. If Schellinx assumes that writing on the meaning of noise would re-consider much of our history, I somehow sense that the noise he talks about is much the same as Russolo's silence of old days.

As a mathematician Harold takes the question to a decisive step. What will happen if signal interferes with itself, he writes. I write now: If, in that question, we replace 'signal' with 'God' one could expect a mathematician proving that there is more then one God, and more then one noise. For sure experiencing noise can only lead to listening better and hear more and thus push history in a different direction, unless you understand noise as sounds played at a very loud volume.

Michele Spanghero is more or less from the same region as Russolo, a not too populated area close to the Austrian and Slovenian border, a protectorate shortly after WWII, and geographically slightly out of focus, more noise then signal so to say. In discourse you get more noise then signal once there is an excessive use of slogans and rhetorics. Both Russolo and Michele live(d) in a country dominated by this kind of noise. Both Russolo and Michele were at one moment in their lives intrigued by the sounds of machines.

A double bass player with double bass player's ears, he walked into an exhibition of projectors. Well, that was what he encountered. The idea of the exhibition was to show the projections, mostly abstract and full of colours. All these projectors were handmade by the artists, therefore different in shape, and in sound. Michele got intrigued by the rhythms the projectors produced, and recorded each one of them. Then he wrote to me, and asked if he could bring these sounds to the festival. I agreed, because of the direct line to futurism.

I also agreed because I understood his recordings as a sonic essay, not only because of the direct line to futurism, but also because of the constructive aspect. Constructive as in semantics of a memory, or rather the semantics of an imposed memory. Old school sovjet scholars were very fond of these enterprises: they tried to construct a collective memory of a country's past. Sentiments in politics can't withhold the contemporary artist, or curator of a field recordings festival to add a postmodern notion to the idea of construction. That's why I liked the chaplinesque idea (modern times!) to offer the listener a journey right into the machine room of his imagination, and have sounds of projectors represent the psychological process of visualizing sounds. Michele's concert lasted hours, neatly divided between the projection room (noise) and the screen (signal).

When I first saw Melanie Velarde she was struggling with the elements. She was supposed to be performing, but laptop, one loudspeaker, the amplifier, the quality of the sound in general, the interface and everything else that could obstruct, obstructed. The concert she had in mind, remained there. One could wonder that some sound was coming out of the other speaker at all. But it did. It was playing, like an unmanned assembly line filled with plates keeps running, even if at the end of the line there is nothing to pick those plates up. No plate crashing sounds, but on the running side of the performance Peter Prautzsch, the organizer of the evening, who kept running in and out of the room. Melanie's spot became the crisis center. Luckily she didn't interrupt the performance, because all the outside rumours, like the footsteps from the people passing in the corridor, the rhubarb in the kitchen, became, as by magic, a part of the ongoing soundscaping. I was delighted. Melanie was surprised, but hey, it was my ears against her intentions.

In O Tannenbaum she brought two cassette walkman. Melanie was seated on the floor, on a carpet, because the basement floor of the venue is really cold and concrete. The walkman were lying in front of her. She picked up one of them, pushed play, placed it at the side of her. The walkman played a walk. Then she picked up the other walkman, pushed play, and placed it next to the other walkman. The walkman played a garden. Then her fingers touched the black keys of a little casio. Every now and then she looked up, smiled and looked down again.

The walk and the garden were at the other side, like everything is at the other side when you press your nose against a window. On rainy days you will hear rain. On windy days you will hear wind. On sunny days you will hear the neighbours. At night you will hear an owl. But it will always be at the other side. And on this side are thoughts, memories, longings and a slow song coming from a casio.

Sean Barret came to the festival as Sean Ferguson Barret; I really don’t know where he got the Ferguson from; I had always thought he had some Bavarian moms amongst his ancestors ; never mind the household. I have seen him perform like kobayashvili, or whatever georgian name he had chosen as an alias; I have seen a movie in which he throws around his effect pedals; I know he is very much into noise as in NOISE, and that his pants are kind of tight and Mattin loves his work; we even have spend some fine moments headbanging in front of a guitar amp when everyone else was buying souveniers from the that evening to become ex-stralau 68, but that he had recordings from westcoast would never have occurred to me, untill the day he approached me and asked if he could play at the festival. Suddenly it all made sense : Sean as cross-over between a somehow upgraded hobo and a beatnik, yes why not : he could take it on the road with sounds that smelled like an ocean’s breeze.

But then he arrived at the venue, a bit depressed, because his computer had eaten all the recordings. My first thought was like his comment when he discovered my page on myspace : »what ? Sean works with a computer ? « Eventually he had planned so. His set would be of left over recordings and his favourite drone.

He played last. Remaining on the hobo/beatnik trail of imagination, in the glow of the red light at the end of the basement, a glow so darkening that one could see through the layers of time into a stage coach, or a small room above an abandoned bar somewhere in San Francisco of the Kerouac years, that drone came. Sean lit a cigarette and sat aside on a chair, and smoked that cigarette to its end. After all it was his favourite drone. He went back to his instruments at daybreak, and at that time one could clearly hear the ocean rolling its waves upon the shore.

The Pavement Tapes – dkfrf intiem – 5th of July Harold Schellinx, Ben Roberts, Soinumapa

2008-08-28T17:06:00.005+02:00

harold schellinx - picture by wolfgang dorninger

I wondered where The Ramones had their music from. In the middle of the seventies there was nothing that sounded like it. Their songs were funny, fresh and explosive. They were also easy to hook up with. Those Ramones could have lived right around the corner. Everything else I heard then lived around the corner from years before.It took a few weeks to understand. I got a little help from television. It showed a piece of ‘paranoid’ by Black Sabbath. Now listen for yourself: “PT boat on its way to Havana, used to make a living man picking the banana” or “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 dàdadàdadàdadàm dàdadàdadàdadàm”, that “dàdadàdadàdadàm”, is half the riff of ‘paranoid’ which ends more like “dàdaaa dàm”, but needs loads more of dàda’s to come to the point.

I can imagine The Ramones sitting together drinking beer and throwing empty cans at the loudspeakers. They somehow like the song, but Black Sabbath are a bunch of hippies wearing big silly crucifixes. The song is too long. The song is too long because it has to many dàda’s in it. And they don’t like the dàdaa dàm. The first Ramones long player is a 28 minutes remix of ‘paranoid.’ “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, o yeah.” That ‘brat’ was Ozzy Osbourne singing “Can you help me?”

Now I think this remodeling was a postmodern act. And if it was not a postmodern act, because I am too dumb to understand postmodernism, it was at least a liberating one. Black Sabbath and such were still battling with their formative years, when they were forced to listen to headmasters, and morality weighed heavy on the young souls. Their resistance was a moral and philosophical discourse; it hadn’t anything to do with street life. Their generation gave us the yuck of last century: Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

The cover of the first album is in black and white. Everybody knows that cover. Everybody who has seen that cover remembers the position of Joey’s right foot. Everybody knows that all four members had chosen Ramone as a family name. That was funny. In those days other families included The Waltons, The Partridge Family, The Carpenters, Sly and the Family Stone, The Osmond Brothers and The Monkees. Baptizing oneself Ramone could be classified a postmodern act, if I weren’t so ignorant about that.

The Ramones were unique. Maybe only the Cramps can be compared to them. The Cramps used swamp zombies as their running gag. It is not a long way from Ozzy to the swamp, though the bookshop where they sell comic strips is almost next-door. Donald Duck and Ronald Reagan were equally important to the Ramones.

Just as their first album marked the beginning of a new era, so did disco. Disco is gay. The gayest of them all were Village People. Their songs came directly from Hollywood, an endless mix of ‘There is no business like show business’ and Kojak. Disco tried to restore the Hollywoodean America of the twenties, when everyone was gay (as in having or showing a carefree spirit) and white, well dressed and rich. The only black people around then were stall mates, waiters or chubby house helps. The disco blacks served their beats with a smile; all of them were very well mannered. Disco gave us funny diseases like Aids or the Beegees. But it gave us also postmodern philosophies, o yes.

In the last years of the twentieth century postmodernism was really big. Every newspaper and periodical bulged with articles on postmodernism. Postmodernism was not only mainstream, it also defined what belonged to mainstream and what not. This mixture of being the nominator and the nominated was of course very postmodern. No wonder it attracted loads of persons who only wanted to talk about themselves and sneer at others.

Postmodernism was about editing; thoughts, fashion, arts, politics, city center’s, logo’s, companies, health care, shopping, language, social behavior, dna, the human body and Michael Jackson were all subject to this editing. If the Ramones and their likes behaved as if a new era had begun, this new era had to be defined. In politics the isms disappeared. In discourse serious thinking and arguments disappeared. Popular insult was to call someone moralistic. Immoral behavior makes you end up in jail or in big business. Mainstream postmodernists never admitted that they were in fact post nihilists. The meaning of ‘to bother’ and to care’ got mixed up. Buddhist maxims like ‘detachment’ were used as a disguise. In the nineties everybody was on its way to enlightenment. Everybody was wearing shades as well; you simply had to.

These days the very margins of society are well defined. And though Tuned City was big, as in lots of things happening, many people involved, hundreds of hours invested in organization, I consider it a marginal event. I don’t think Carsten Stabenow compromised a lot. I admire him for setting this up; I take also courage and inspiration from it. Carsten knew what he was doing: the subjects discussed in the symposiums reflected his personal interest; the sound installations came from artists he knew, the same for the performing artists. He didn’t look at numbers or curriculums; he looked at character and quality.

On Saturday fifth of July Tuned City was built under the roofs of Funkhaus Nalepastrasse, former home to the GDR radio studios and equipped with one of the best recording halls in the world. I also read one day that in some parts of the buildings the marble floor was brought in from Hitler’s Reichskanzlei. This mere fact alone constitutes my fascination. Some day I want to go there and record echoes of footsteps that have died down long ago. But I was busy on Saturday. They won’t confiscate the building right away. MTV has still to colonize the more central river part of Berlin.

In fact we were sitting on the sidewalk of the Weserstrasse in Neukölln. Next to us was a tailor studio, owned by a lady who had lived here for more then twenty-five years and had seen the rise and fall of her street. For long years she had lived between black windows and the noises of empty houses. Cake and Coffee records shop was yet another little store that opened in this dangerous neighborhood. We got in, while restoring work was still going on: the perfect space for Harold Schellinx’s Found Tapes Exhibition. Most of his equipment comes from flea markets. The tapes he finds along the road. While the neighbor repaired clothes, Harold repaired tapes. The idea to launch a tape repair shop came up. Maybe we will do so next year, when we can afford to pay the rent.

Sunday afternoon might have been better, but most of us were leaving on that day. So there was Ben Roberts rushing in directly from Madrid who talked about his fascination for abandoned tapes and the sounds on it, especially the unintended sounds, because they evoked so many images and thoughts about life that once was and now is not any more. He played some of these recordings causing a kind of tap dance for three cassette players whose play, fast forward and rewind buttons were pressed continuously: in came voices from answering machines and African missionaries and lots more.

When that was done we went outside and had a long talk with Xavier Erkizia about the sound map of the Basque Region and his exceptional ideal situation in the Basque Art World, where he has carte blanche at the San Sebastian Art Centre, because the director has a blind belief in his moves. Of course also this situation is threatened by bureaucracy and political programs composed by editors. We ended up with hours and hours of recorded material. What started as an interview turned into a very long talk among friends. All the time Oier Iruretogoiena played sounds from his closed laptop. Some day it will be heard. But then again the program for ‘some day’ is quite full already.

24th of July - Barack Obama's imaginary concert

2008-08-11T13:27:00.002+02:00

Back in 1981 when the godfathers of emo carried white flags, I joined one of the biggest demo’s the Netherlands had ever seen: hundreds of thousands marched the streets of The Hague and protested against the neutron bomb. It felt like we the people really could influence politics. Similar protest marches were seen in West European capitals. Whatever the result of the protest was, the people also gathered in such huge masses because they were sick and tired of the cold war atmosphere.

Cold war ended in 1989. Now the godfathers of emo wear Gucci, and Bush and Blair have given us another cold war. In times of sloganism and endless zapping, of hyper realities and internet friendship, saturation is reached far more faster then in those days. Barack Obama carries a message of change and hope for a better and peaceful future.

When Obama came to Berlin I claimed his speech at the Siegessäule as a performance at the dkfrf. This news was read by maybe one hundred and sixteen persons. It didn’t shock the world. It was not my intention to shock the world. The evenings of dkfrf have an average attendance of thirty-eight persons. Maybe some of the possible thirty-eight went to see Obama, and thought of his talk as an imaginary concert. Wasn’t it a visionary who would talk, and wasn’t this vision one of a better world? Does a better world also sound better? Obama didn’t know he was playing at my festival: The letter I send him along with an english version of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin was identified as a dangerous object by security.

I did record his rally. I walked from Unter der Linden U-station to the Pariser Platz, where I found a crowd gathered in front of hotel Adlon. I took position among the onlookers, convinced that they were waiting for Obama; it was 18.25. The speech would start at 19.00. I thought, well he will come out, step into the car, drive to the stage, do ‘toctoc’ on the microphone and say: ”Hello Berlin, my name is Barack Obama, I’m the next president of the United States.” At 18.45 I thought that Obama was living up to Berlin conditions and would start his performance half an hour later. At 18.48 I thought to hear crowd cheering in the distance. At 18.51 I finally realized what fool I had been and started walking towards the Brandenburger Tor, and from there, together with others, to the Siegessäule.

I recorded fragments with the inbuilt microphone of a cheap cassette Walkman. Longer pieces, like the mumbles of the waiting crowd, some police walkie-talkie messaging, the footsteps of the people walking towards the stage I recorded with a separate mini microphone of a very good cassette Walkman. As soon as I heard the voice above the sounds of the moving crowd – he thanked the Berlin fire brigade – I started to record my walk; It was my intention to get as near as possible. I started at approximately thirteen-hundred meters from the stage.

On my walk I first encountered little improvised beer and wurst stands, uncountable rows of people in front of me, building an impenetrable wall, TV-screens and a massive loudspeaker system. The road to the Siegessäule is slightly going downward, so everybody could look over everybody’s head. Over all those heads there was nothing that could lead to identifying Obama as a person existing in real life, holding a speech. Since I didn’t want to fill the tape with sounds coming from the loudspeakers, I decided to enter the park at the left side of the road, and continue my walk towards the source of it all.

Here I encountered individuals sitting on the green, solemn faces, drinking every word they heard. Then I thought of Jesus who after his talk did this wonderful thing with bread and fish. Now I think of habitants of this earth, who, by attending the rally, gave expression to their concern about the current political state of things. My Walkman recorded people walking by, the sounds of little branches breaking under my feet. I ended up at a point where I recorded the voice coming out of two different loudspeaker towers. The message was captured by a sonic whirlwind; the sounds that escaped the centrifugal power were not detectable any more as words.

I finished my walk at three steps from a policeman, who joyously asked me where I thought that I was going. I recorded the question, but I didn’t record my thought. I was joined by some young men who had no problems with the policeman’s wit, and even got a decent answer after four attempts to find out what those white tents were at the other side of the fence. From the answer I learned where Obama was to be found in the immediate hours before stepping up to the microphone.

Then I walked back through the centrifuge of sounds and recorded the end of Barack Obama’s performance.

4th of July - Tuned Citizens

2008-08-11T13:24:00.002+02:00

On the first days of July an event called Tuned City was held in Berlin. I quote from the programme: ”Tuned City between sound and space speculation is an exhibition and conference project which proposes a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic.” I was invited to curate one evening of dkfrf on the Wriezener Bahnhof, a stretch of wasteland in Friedrichshain along the railway track. The idea was to have a pleasant evening of listening under a star spangled sky, given all visitors a perfect example of a new evaluation of an architectural space from the perspective of the acoustic.

Derek Holzer who invited me and Carsten Stabenow who agreed on having the dkfrf at Tuned City – and my gratitude goes out to them, also from this digital screen – must have had similar visions to mine: A warm summer’s evening, sounds coming from a perfect sound system to give every listener the chance to dive into an acoustic wonderland, no outside noises to disturb the sonic flow, and enough land to walk around for those who wanted to chat without disturbing the dedicated listener.

Alas.

The great weather prophet in the sky looked down on Berlin, saw a blending sheet of white sunny days spread over the city, and decided to treat that image in the same way Lucio Fontana did to canvas: He took out a Stanley knife and made a deep and sharp cut. On ’our’ Thursday temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Rainstorms swept over the barren land. It was cold, wet, humid and unpleasant. One could expect a theatrical remake of Moby Dick, with Ahab climbing the mast and going berserk. One could expect the most violent scenes of Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman.’ One could even expect Vietnam, Beirut or Managua. But one could not expect that the audience, who had been listening for three days to lectures and stuff, would lean back and listen. No, now it was their turn to talk, and talk they did. A lot.

Were they sitting in the mud? No, no, wasteland had it, that one of the buildings had a sane roof. What we had was a hybrid between a hangar and a market hall with excellent acoustic qualities. Too bad that only the ceiling had been complete renewed Made entirely of wood, it was an absolute masterpiece of German craftsmanship. Whoever commissioned it, was the secret star of the evening. The building also had doors, or rather, entrances, huge and wide entrances that gave a clear view, but above all, feel, of the weather conditions. The ambience was kind of brrr. The audience was kind of half eared. The performers were kind of lost. The dkfrf was kind of shipwrecked.

The next day summer had returned as if nothing had happened. The shore we had washed upon was a sidewalk in Neukölln.

An extensive report on the dkfrf evening at tuned city will appear in Harold Schellinx’ SoundBlog. He will also present an on line audio-impression.

Playing on that evening were ( in a continuous flow) preluded by a walkman performance by Harold Schellinx.

The Phonographic Arkester

Peter Prautzsch

Richard Francis

Somaya Langley

Soinumapa

Lasse Marc Riek

The recordings (from the mixer) will become available soon.

14th of June - Through the Mazes of the Map – Koen Holtkamp, Stephane Leonard, Daily

2008-08-11T13:16:00.002+02:00

The man who tried to find the origins of money committed suicide. He was a German who studied in Munich in the seventies. Germany in the seventies was a good place to take your life. But why one should become so desperate on the way to the very beginnings of money has always puzzled me. And it also disappointed me, because he had arrived at some strange places where coins looked like stone wheels, had a hole in the middle and were left outside leaning against the house. They were bigger then a man who would stand on the shoulders of his stronger brother.

I mean he got so close to the solution, or did he? Was he cursed? Money is about organizing a society, or a community. It is also about here and there, and us and them and a sense of geography that stretches beyond the horizons, thus adding past and future to a present that probably never was experienced in such way. But inventing money is about knowing this all, before every one else knows.

It is said, written and printed that scripture was invented in a civilization that was coming to its end. The writer felt like packing his suitcase. Just like Abraham did at one stage in his life. Maybe he was also a writer. He counted the stars.

Everybody is in ispace. The second coming of oneself can only be canceled by an eternal electric fall out. Did you know that the first politician who will be treated as a rock star wants to come to Berlin to talk at the Brandenburger Tor? There are two sides to the Brandenburger Tor. At one side is the Pariser Platz where the new USA embassy has found its home and JFK is the name of a museum. At the other side is a long road that leads up to the pillar with the golden angel. In times of popular demand this stretch of land becomes a zone known as the fan mile. Love parades or the matches of the German football team projected on big screens attract up to one million people. Obama might not talk directly from the Obama main stage on the fan mile, but I am pretty sure that at the other side of the Brandenburger Tor the biggest crowd this place has ever seen will follow his speech. The next day you will find the videos on youtube.*

What is it about this frantic archiving that has invaded our lives? Why should every move be recorded/filmed/stored so that it can be seen or listened to by an invisible audience? Are the number of views or downloads the poor mans substitute to the millions of dollars from the rich? Is someone packing his suitcase? Sure one does so, because he has the tools. But what would a historian write about this phenomenon in a few hundred years from now? “File under gossip”? And will the satellites with all these data be rusted or even disintegrated by then? How futile is it all?

Field recordings are related to a space, even if you record refrigerators. Some of them are site specific. The rain forest sounds different from a rainy day in Berlin. Field recorders have discovered the Humboldt in them. Not the cdr or the hard disk became the storage place for their recordings. Internet has provided them with a visual aid. Futility? It gives the user a possibility to experience one aspect of life outside its physical boundaries. But this visualization is also an important help in the process of convincing curators and politicians to consider field recordings as a groundbreaking discipline. And it defines ‘home’ to the field recorder.

Then they walked out one fine summer day.

Koen Holtkamp’s parents probably took the plane when they emigrated from the Netherlands to the U.S.A. Koen (short for Koenraad, that is the Dutch Conrad, the ‘oe’ is pronounced like ‘ou’ in ‘you’, but short, so more like an ‘ou’ in a James Brown song) arrived in his new homeland at a very young age, and grew up in the American language. He speaks this language like every other American, with a deep round voice that seems to come from somewhere below his knees.

Alessandro Bosetti might still wonder why different languages resonate in different parts of the human body. He might have been flabbergasted if he had heard Koen speak, or rather stumble through a restricted vocabulary of Dutch words. I found myself not listening at what he was saying when talking to him; actually –sorry Koen – I was listening through him, because I couldn’t understand what I heard. Untill I realised the virtual time travel: I had been listening to the Dutch language as it was spoken some thirty years ago. Language is an invisible continent: this one opened up a vision of the Netherlands in the late seventies. Now go and be touched by far away years, and see what happens.

The dkfrf evening turned out to be a meeting of travelers, but geographical distances were not the only ones to be covered. Koen played binaural recordings from a walk through the forest. If there is one thing besides the clouds and the canyons that the first immigrants to the Americas found on their way, it was a forest. So his walk could easily be listened to as a momentum in American History; If then from the crackle of the bushes a most angelic voice arises the momentum becomes monumental in its reference to the enormous almost supra – religious impact this landscape must have made to the stranger who entered this world for the first time; pure bliss!

Dkfrf-veteran Stephane Leonard had freshly arrived from Brooklyn, New York City. ‘Brooklyn’ is not only the name of one of the Beckham kids; it is also an answer to a popular Dutch quiz question. What part of NYC is named after a Dutch city? Breukelen is now a part of the city of Utrecht. Van Breukelen, Hans was for many years the goalkeeper of the Dutch team. I am sure the Beckhams weren’t thinking of him when they made love under the Brooklyn bridge. Their sighs must have gone since a long time.

In Bosetti’s imaginary discourse Manhattan was a small island. It is a strange thing to realize how field recordings can visualize the layers of time. Now imagine a young man from Berlin, born and raised in the last years of a now non-existing country who comes to New York, stays at a friends house in Brooklyn and who is confronted with the bridge almost every day. The bridge has become a symbol of the new world and everything this new world stands for. As a photographic and cinematographic icon it has entered our minds even if we will never be able to see it, touch it, go over it. Stephane found out that it produced noise. And noise he played for thirty minutes, like a kid would play with cars and trains. Or should I say like Woody Allen imagines playing his clarinet alongside Django Reinhardt? Or do you hear Gershwin poke his stick to the ceiling of his coffin? Rhapsodies sound different today. Stephane should return some day to get us the next movement.

When Daily embarked for the first time on the German part of the western hemisphere he spend some time in the regions where volcanoes seem to have fallen asleep eternally, but in fact observe the land of whine and wheat from under half sunken eye-lids. The town that was chosen as the capital to the BRD because one of the greatest composers of all time was born there became his second hometown. Here, walking the streets at daytime Daily got stunned, because he actually saw a fast running animal that resembled a rabbit but is larger, has long ears and legs, and doesn’t burrow. It was not the reason he moved on to Düsseldorf, or maybe it was. At the Art Academy he heard Yannis Kounellis tell long stories. That was then. Now he was in Berlin, because Baruch Gottlieb, an assistant professor at a Seoul university popped up in my mailbox for a short chat. A few weeks later, kindly supported by the Arts Council Korea, Daily arrived in Berlin.

He stayed at my house and we watched some matches from the European Championships together. He amazed me that he never had one favorite country. He laughed and booaad just the same when the Turks scored or when the Germans did so in the same match. An extensive portrait of Daily can be found on Hars’ sound blog. While staying at Berlin he was either out shooting pictures or making recordings, cooking dinner or working and cutting until very late at night. He had to. And guess what? The Arts Council Korea also sponsored the propaganda! Ten nice posters were made, that looked so good in fact that I put up only four of them in public spaces. I am sure the ATK can forgive that move.

Also because more people showed up at our evening, then at Daily’s show in Amsterdam where three guest musicians played the city nightscape turned musical score. On the evening of DKFRF we agreed on showing two of his compositions. The first one was made in Seoul. It would give the general public an impression of what Daily’s work should look like. It looked like a lot of white dots on a black surface that slowly moved from the right to the left. Each dot was a light in the nightly city. To each dot a computerized note was played, a very dry note, as you can expect on short wave radio. It made me think of the art movements in the sixties when intellectualism met good-looking women smoking cigarettes, and men looked like scientist who read poetry.

Those days poetry looked like

Summer in a dry shirt wrinkles over the low cast frowns of your face shuts up in a factory when the sirens call and the trucks drive charcoal in a baby’s mouth in a winter of drug stores worn down petticoats forgotten hillsides and row row row if veronicas drench the shiny part of the birch and beasts come nibbling from your nipples and weasels are fearless in the shadow of America America moon love dairy mothers and olive trees washingshiningshirts come back from next summer

Or maybe it didn’t.

The Seoul composition also looked like a short movie one could encounter on television. It looked good, but it looked good in a world that was not mine anymore. The composition with the field recordings looked good as well… a different good. It was fascinating to see the result of two days hard work. It was also fascinating to see how the images floated with the same speed from the right to the left of the screen, the same slow as Tarkovsky used for his camera shots. His pictures showed Neukölln, the most dangerous area of Berlin. Daily can be lucky he didn’t fall victim to a robbery.

All his pictures and recordings came together in a composition especially made for the festival, an enterprise in which Daily showed more courage then when walking the extremely notorious Rütlistrasse at night. He risked very much to fail. He did not. No way. Watching his composition was like daydreaming behind the window of a bus that after a long day of traveling drives through the streets of a new town. One is too tired to get excited, even a bit anxious because the hostel has still to be found. The bus slowly moves on along shops and bars that somehow look familiar. Daily stated that he would need another two years to perfectionize this concept. Yep. That was to be seen. I guess that is part of the fascination: if you leave enough space for the onlooker, then the story will meet another story. In this invisible space that got created by Koen, Stephane and Daily a lot of stories must have been told. Most of those stories will remain unheard. And unmapped.

*This paragraph shows how much time it took me to finish this report. Barack Obama came. He was not given a stage right under the Brandenburger Tor, where the German football team shared cheers with the most sought after dumbo’s from German television, but he was offered a kind of ‘taxi zum klo.’ He stood right under the Siegessäule, the pillar with the golden angel on top. Not my expected one million people showed up, but with a crowd of two hundred thousand he still could beat a German chancellor who had held the record for more then seventy years. I claimed Obama’s appearance as an imaginary concert at my festival, since no one ever presented the rally as his or her event.

16 august in kule, auguststrasse 10 berlin mitte

2008-07-26T13:44:00.003+02:00

What to expect?
For sure it won't be a regular evening of field recordings:
This evening will focus on the imitation of nature.
And nature is the great reservoir of sounds.
Scholars are talking about caves
and the pictogrammes on the walls:
deer and buffles,
hunting and dancing.

Caves with resonances
that would carry the sounds into nature.
Did they imitate those sounds at those times?
Would they have done it for artistic reasons?
Or had they already figured out
that they had to bow to some
higher being?

Will the scene on the 16th August resemble a cage or just a venue? What is to be found at the heart of field recording?

Can the human voice help?
Can radiowaves lead us to a way of better understanding.
Is there life on earth?

Forget all the questions.
Come and see
Minuit DelaCroix,
Haarmann
and
Seiji Morimoto & Francesco Cavaliere
do a mindbubbling show at Kule,
and maybe they will touch
your soul
as well.

The Tao of Sound – Michael Northam, Soichiro Mitsuya and Alessandro Bosetti

2008-07-13T12:34:00.000+02:00

1. Sound and Archeology, Sound and Biology, Sound and Cannibalism, Sound and Dermatology, Sound and Endomorphism, Sound and Futility, Sound and Geometry, Sound and Holography, Sound and Industries, Sound and Justice, Sound and Kinesthesia, Sound and Loathing, Sound and Marxism, Sound and Neighbors, Sound and Orthography, Sound and Picasso, Sound and Quaternity, Sound and Revolution, Sound and Space, Sound and Triviality, Sound and Universalizability, Sound and Villosity, Sound and Warfare, Sound and Xenophobia, Sound and Yoghurt, Sound and Zen.

2. The most popular combination of all is Sound and Architecture. Of course it is just another sign of the times. The success of an architect like Calatraves is a flag on the building of popular opinions. His monuments magnify the esthetics of the 55cent shops.

3. Communication happens by means of slogans or by the use of one sole word: Architecture. It combines power, control and structure. It evokes movement and decisions. It promises a better world. It doesn’t make any sound, because it is just a word to describe a discipline.

4. Building houses and palaces must be one of the oldest professions in the world. To imagine that it is even older then prostitution would radically change the view on our society and its history. Architecture is closely related to the law. But it is also closely related to the occult side of the law. And it is closely related to human engineering: designing ways of living.

5. Every new form of power attracts its supporters. At the beginning of the 21.Century the editorial revolution started by managers has almost come to its end. The new world looks great in the designer magazines, in the frivolous bars and restaurants, in the restructured and partially rebuilt bigger and smaller city centers. The new look is the result of politics and architecture. Architecture and Sound. Get a special permission, get a nametag, design sound.

6. Index of an imaginary exhibition on Sound Art: Architecture and Morality in the Dark Ages. Joan of Arc meets Enola Gay. Movies and Modernism. Lights and Glasses. Gallery of Thoughts. Benzedrine. The Shorelines of Waste. The Tao of Sound. The Sounds are Down.

7. There is always a before and an after, even if you’d like to discuss the beginnings of the Universe. Marcel Türkowsky was one of the first persons I met in Berlin. He was playing Asa Stahl`s found tapes in a twelve square meter gallery in the Torstrasse. Indian voices and instruments were turned into blissful layers of sounds by his loop machine. Meanwhile we talked. Months later we were part of the Tape Only Gang that played over twenty concerts in Berlin during the summer of 2006. When we exhausted all possibilities to tear down the walls with our lyrical tape noises, I invented das kleine field recordings festival. Marcel is one of the dkfrf – veterans. He was close to desolation when he had to cancel his appearance at the 3rd edition, due to severe toothaches. Then he started traveling. In fact he traveled so far, that I had the impression he’d never come back.

8. Nothing had changed when he returned to dkfrf. We talked when the concerts were done. Somewhere behind the black windows in the Lenaustrasse people were contemplating their phone calls to complain about the noises. I asked Marcel about this new thing, this soundendarchitecture everybody talked about. It is hard to follow discussions by connoisseurs. He explained. He was qualified to explain because he had studied the subject. And then he talked as an office worker. And I understood that I might as well forget right away what he was explaining.

9. Then two or more weeks passed. The thoughts got covered by the fermentations of time. Some thoughts are like passionflowers.

10. Michael Northam is from Indianapolis. I saw Indianapolis once, when I was in a car driving from Louisville to Chicago. Indiana was a flat stretch of land. It reminded me of the Netherlands. Indianapolis was a town on the horizon. It was there for a while. The skyscrapers reflected some sunlight. And then it was not there anymore. There was green land instead, for hours and hours. On the way back it rained without end.

11. It took Michael some time to arrive in India. When he performed at the festival he had just finished a six months stay. His suntan was from an Indian sun. For his achievements during a musical career that spans over more then twenty years, he should have been the main act. I made him play first. Michael looks like a person who could take care of a hard winters work. With the right hat on, he could be one of the Amish people: his set made the venue glow for the rest of the evening.

12. Boxes you can buy in India. They are smaller then a bird’s cage. The boxes produce drones. The boxes look like boxes. They contain sitar drones or harmonium drones. I guess Indians put them next to their little house altar, burn incense, put the switch on, and pray; they won’t have a PA and big speakers in the room to have the drones float from their doors and windows into the dense Indian night.

13. When the last drones had died down on the nearby Kottbusserdamm it was exactly that dense Indian night that fell upon us. It was almost tangible. Behind the visitors that were seated on the floor a parallel world unfolded itself: a night on the countryside with distant voices and a sky with zillions of stars. Michael walked around, played a shrieking flutesomething, his clothes still smelling of India. Too bad he had to take us back to Neukölln with another drone that scared the neighbors out of their easy chairs.

14. Soichiro Mitsuya showed me his walkmen a few years ago, and asked if he could join our Tape Only collective. Soichiro played loud, because of noise attitudes. But what is noise? If a sheet big enough to catch the winds of the most severe hurricane could be held up, it would mold itself to the most beautiful forms.

15. This cassette Walkman is always with him. If you live on the poor side of Berlin, all your crossroads come together on Alexander square. Such an ugly square. Ever since he came to live in Berlin, construction works were going on. He passed it in the middle of the night, on weekdays and peace days. The square was always filled with noise. He started to record.

16. Construction noises were shaped into a choir of mechanical voices. Neighbors had wondered about Indian drone machines, now they heard the mating calls of prosperity. People endured hours and hours of everyday life drills: to them those noises must be part of a greater design. To Soichiro they came from a breeding place of trash. His treatments made them sound good.

17. As soon as the room was vibrating with the hidden sounds of Alexanderplatz, Soichiro started to lecture. He always does this. Our listeners bended forward, frowned, tried to listen hard, but his voice was just under the surface of sound. He had a large cylindrical self-built loudspeaker that would tremble and shake: it was a representation of the television tower. It nearly fell down. At the end he stood up and walked to the sliding doors. He played the sliding doors, used them as a giant fan, and said it was hot inside. Then he thanked everyone and wanted to know if there were any questions. Months later I still meet people who had seen his performance. They all laugh and tell me how remarkable it was.

18. Break

19. Alessandro Bosetti moved from Milan to Berlin. I knew him by name. He was one of the seven musicians who always played at Ausland, a club in Berlin that once was known for their fine concerts. But since the programmers adapted a more sectarian policy, concerts are getting scarce. Then he moved to Baltimore, a place where a lot of experimentalists are gathered. But when I asked a good friend of mine why he’d never performed there, living so close, his answer was: ”45 minutes to the ghetto.” Funny enough I would need just as much time to arrive at Ausland.

20. Alessandro’s is another known name in this small world of ours. Even my girlfriend knows him. His sound of the month appeared every evening shortly before midnight on the little radio in her kitchen in Wuppertal. Last year he was praised for his African recordings. Last year private reasons made him cancel his show at dkfrf.

21. This year he succeeded in setting up a tour of Europe. On the festival day he arrived from Prague, a young man wearing a white shirt carrying his belongings in a little mobile suitcase. On the way to my house and his dish of the day (pumpkin stew cooked following an old avignonaise recipe) he talked about a radical visitor to his Praguean performance that never stopped ranting. Part of the audience thought the man had been recruited to act as an upsetter.

22. After the break Alessandro sat down and started to talk, not using a microphone. Unclear if it was an introduction, and disturbed by the voices from outside I had difficulties following the contents. It was only after picking up some geographical indications (Manhattan as a small island in the north) that it came across my mind that he was impersonating a traveler to the new world when that world was still new. The pedantry of those early raconteurs added a beautiful touch to his performance. One could imagine a young man traveling around to collect plants and stones.

23. This follower of the natural history of science, however, was investigating the great variety of languages that were spoken in the various regions in the southeast of what now are called the United States of America. We heard voices coming from the eighteenth century that for their sound alone was a pleasure to listen to.

24. My guests had also planned to play a set together. This turned out to be a surprise and gift to everyone present on that evening, yours sincerely included.

25. This all happened far away from any discourse or theory.

30.May

2008-05-27T13:14:00.004+02:00

flyer design by soichiro mitsuya

Alessandro Bosetti will report in from his travels through the southern states of the USA and will perform translations from gullah/pennsylvania dutch/creole/cajun french/tewa and navajo languages.

Soichiro Mitsuya will translate his amazement and wonderment about the ongoing noise constructions on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and will use a special setting to amplify his recordings.

Michael Northam has freshly arrived in Berlin after a six months stay in India. His soundworks will be based on recordings made in that period.

Ben Owen from freepoint radio in New York will be the DJ.

come in time.
shows will start at 22.30

The American Trauma - Report on John Hopkins, Ben Owen, Brandon LaBelle

2008-05-22T14:42:00.010+02:00

A good thing about a book that holds almost one thousand pages is that it can be worthwhile to read it. It might absorb you and make you forget everything around you. Dom DeLillo`s attempt to write The Great American Novel that made him create Underworld is such a book. But growing into the story of a baseball that covered three generations of Americans I wondered where my cinematographic memory from my youngest years when I watched the comedy capers interfered with the situations DeLillo described. More and more impressions from movies and photographs showed up before my inner eye. I got lost in the book and didn’t get the sense of it. It was a giant flood of pictures, which made me shipwreck and ask myself at the last page why I had read it to the end and why I felt as if I had been wasting my time.

Should there be a clue to understand this? Another book by a US writer, City of God by Doctorow left me with the same question; The book was far more superior to Underworld, but still I couldn’t get it that such a simple and even boring plot of a crucifix being stolen from the roof of a church could lead to so many little stories without a point. Some of those stories were pure gems.

The American culture must have some qualities at its very core that could give us a key to understanding. Where the pompous themes The American Dream and The New Frontier has given the world John Wayne and Apollo 11, the rest of the world might return the favor and state that poverty and persecution has given the Americans a good reason to come into existence.

As a warming up to the last edition of dkfrf I had a dinner at my house in Neukölln. Chance made it that three Americans would perform: Ben Owen (who came with his girlfriend Sara) from Brooklyn, New York City, John Hopkins from everywhere and Brandon LaBelle from Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. When talking about the American culture, one of them brought it up that exactly this escape from poverty and persecution is what united most of the early immigrants.

picture by John Hopkins

Fear for poverty and the fear for losing one’s God given right to individual freedom have burned enormous holes in the heart of the American society. Watching every now and then the Obama/Hillary marathon run I see star spangled smiles and star spangled swollen breasts; I see speakers almost overwhelmed by their own heroism; I hear messages to a people that still seem to be moving west. It all makes up for epic television.

I also see barns and sport halls behind all that decorum. I can imagine tractor shows, junk sales for charity and Miss Lollipop elections to be held there; I can imagine rows of empty seats, and volunteers drinking endlessly coffee in the backroom. I can imagine that it will get cold in winter, and that there is no money to pay the bill. To cut it short, I can see a lot of individual lives behind all the glamour of a tantalizing political circus that has come to town. And these lives have very short lines to the early generations that arrived to the Americas with a lot of pain.

John Hopkins - picture by Ben Owen

John Hopkins dinner talks included information about his early years. Born in Alaska, his parents moved with him to another place. John described a communtiy he couldn’t relate to, nor take part of. He lives like he lives, being a nomad for almost half of his life, crossing those wonderful frontiers that so many Americans before him had aimed at. His performance gave an insight in his dwellings. A hurricane of images projected on a screen was accompanied by their sounds and unsounds. Dislocating, discomforting, wild and seductive. You need a lot of guts to live like John does. In an abstract way he demanded a lot of civil cultural courage from the onlooker; courage to dive into his experiences and have these sounds and images grow upon them like a second skin. No wonder he split the audience in two. Outside on the doorstep the Republican Party was holding their rally.

Ben Owen, picture by John Hopkins

While John took us running over unknown lands, Ben Owen returned to the silence of home. He played in the dark. From my other end of the performance space it looked like I was at the other side of the street, watching out of my window; Ben was a small figure, computer screen light on his face. Unidentifiable shadows were around him. The room at the other side of the street is always without sound. Still I could hear something, a monotonous drone as if to underline the alienated waiting situation. Then it started to evolve and I shifted my attention to the speakers. It sounded like they were animated, possessed, and they were discovering the wide range of little crackiling and dripping sounds that they held. In the room across the street, in the heart of darkness other sounds were heard, sounds from Brooklyn, where silence meets the far rumble of a big city.

Brandon LaBelle, picture by Ben Owen

There is no escaping to the American Myth. Brandon LaBelle`s set was pure pleasure. It evolved around a very simple scheme: Young, soon ripe, but still not old man shows a picture. Four pictures were shown, four different stages in a life. Four stories from four decades leading from heroes, dreams, identities to the present day; just the story of somebody’s life who is Brandon to friends and family, Mr. LaBelle to those who need id-pictures. There was also sound in between those picture stories, sound that served as an elevator, bringing the audience to higher levels of empathy.

It was the first time Brandon LaBelle presented his work in this way. It is hard to imagine that he will stop at this point. It is far easier to imagine that he will continue working on a theatrical piece where pictures emerge from his smooth tale telling voice. Imagination can send you into orbit, away from the little stage where the next story will be told, up through the clouds, past the plane that will bring Ben and Sara back to the States, higher were time stands still and spirits whisper, and where one can look down to the Siberian woods and see smoke coming from the chimney of John Hopkins next residency.

12 April - Between Natura Morta and Lanterna Magica

2008-05-11T14:36:00.005+02:00

Nicolas Wiese lives in Berlin Neukölln. His house is close to Tempelhof. In Billy Wilder's movie one, two, three there are scenes that show this airport in its black and white cinemascopic glory. Probably a lot of the nostalgic feelings for this remarkable place in Berlin were inspired by the reports of glamourish arrivals of the stars of those days. Now the airport is almost closed. In its last months it is used by small business planes. You have to be lucky to catch the arrival or take off of one of those planes.

The future of Tempelhof is still uncertain. One wishes for a big park; money people long for a massive commercial project. I would like to see it as a zeppelin port, or a place where worldchampionships kite flying can be held, or hot air balloons can have their home, even leaving the place like it is, as a monument to airports could be an idea. And then have Eno come over for an annual festival.

Nicolas went to record sounds, shoot pictures, make short movies. He did it in the immediate vicinity of Tempelhof, where borders become unpredictable and generate their own esthetics of refusal and terra incognito. The result was shown in a small room with the audience sitting close to each other as if they were posing as illegal African immigrants caught by the sicilian water police.

But so much hardship he had to go through to arrange his room. Walking to and fro between gallery and his home he slowly changed it into a kind of white cube. I heard the sounds coming from outside, while in the main space the audience was waiting. And got a bit puzzled when they heard applause. Nicolas had been doing a private concert for his friends.

I couldn't get a clear impression of his sounds. It made me think of the cloud covered days of last winter. In fact I hear those field recording conceerts more and more as a biographical audio portrait . Music is on Nicolas' last Cd, so rich and overwhelming in its guirlandes of sounds. At one point I was thinking of a very richly decorated synagogue, and every object in it was singing with his own voice.

nicolas wiese

In the opening of the door, next to the video image, you might recognize newspapers. Albert Plank

helped me all day to put them up. Lanterna Magica means magic lantern. This device has found its way to the museum. The bewonderment aroused in those days should still linger among us. I tried to capture a bit of this, recreating a poor cinema, with unrecognizable images, and the expectations glowing in candle lights. I don't know if I succeeded. but the space looked strange and intimate. The newspapers were shining dark and golden. The portraits looked familiar in a way, but the persons on it seemed to have been immortalised many years ago.

Albert Plank is not on a picture. His audio portrait was a long slowly moving one, as morning fog creeping over the fields, o yes. The audience was listening intensely. Surely they imagined stories to it, or were mesmerized into some memorial activities. I had to think of Alberts homeland, a region of Bavaria that had been a niche, a kind of dead end area in the days Europe was still divided into two parts. A region full of natural beauty, so close to the romantic wanderworld of Heinrich Heine. Field recordings travel by foot. And that is a beautifull awareness.

Seiji morimoto and francesco cavaliere (pic by udo noll)

The Natura Morta in the title referred to the collaboration Seiji Morimoto and Francesco Cavaliere have started. Seiji is from Tokio. Imitation as a learning process is an important cultural feature in his country. He uses electronics to imitate nature sounds. Francesco is from Siena in Tuscany, a poetic relation with nature is an important part of Tuscan culture. Francesco uses nature to built his instruments. The duo will be a regular feature all through the festival, because theirs is an ongoing process of how to use and imitate the elements whose sounds other collegues capture with their microphones.
Their humoristic, playfull and yes indeed poetic performance provoked a bravo and a long applause by the audience. Listen to an excerpt.

To be continued in August.

April 2, 3 and 4 reports and comments

2008-03-29T17:02:00.009+01:00

Wednesday April 2 might have been the last time that the Wendel Bar hosted the festival. Martin, one of the owners, who has been a loyal supporter from the very beginning of dkfrf, brought the bad news. Inspired by international warning signs, pure logic and a notion of the invisible and the invincible, he made clear that the way the artist’s rights were protected in Germany was not compatible with the festival’s idea of protecting the artist’s rights.

This said and done, the strict policy of convincing everyone to pay, changed into a non-violence attitude, which is so en vogue these days. Like a blind man just having arrived from Eastern Europe, I went around with a piece of paper. On it was written, that I would accept a mini-sponsorship of 5 euro. One out of twenty people paid 4 euro. A group of seven young Basques shared a five-euro mini sponsorship between them. Very cute. Unfortunately they thought that the contribution came with a bonus: a vocal feature during the first performance of the evening.

This episode of the festival showed the crossroad character of Berlin. Perri Lynch, a Seattle based sound artist and sailor, on a Grand Tour in Europe with her partner Jim, had just freshly arrived from Budapest and would continue for Nice. The four young man of the Paris based ensemble Les Molaires de L’Est were on their way to Gdansk. Colin at some time had left his hometown Vancouver to explore the remote regions of Nepal. He, in fact, was still under the spell of that visit, having left the country just a week before coming to Germany.

Colin performed as Broken Sleep, but thanks to the participation of the Bilbo’ Boys (in the classification loudest countries in the world, Spain ranks third) his performance evolved into a Broken Concert. It started and ended with the chants of monks, and in between there were myriads of harmonic drones. Since Colin had done some trekking, an activity that requires solitude and silence, his performance must have brought him memories of the tourists he had met on his way. Spanish tourists. To my regret I had difficulties to penetrate the veil of drones and could hardly get a glimpse of the colorful world behind it. Colin had been there. His comment was a sigh and the notion that all those experiences were captured in twenty-five minutes, and that it was all over. Maybe the recording will become available. The ears of his razor/recording device were closer to the loudspeakers then mine. Once I have heard it, I can give a more accurate review.

Perri Lynch came second. And, praise and glory to the muses, our mini sponsors from Bilbao had decided to leave. She started with a weather forecast, a lady’s voice recorded from a radio broadcast. To it came a man’s voice from the radio, of course talking in a different key. Just when I started to wonder how she would go on, Perri amazed me with the introduction of a melody playing along to those voices in perfect harmony. Then I knew this was going to be a great concert. Voices came and went and with the same calm rhythm the melodies floated on or entwined with those voices. It was relaxing and fascinating at the same time, a soundtrack to some dear memories or a monument to the fragility of time. It was also entertaining to see her at work: a laptop, and two ipods, as if she was working from a control room. You can listen to the result for yourself; In my humble opinion Perri Lynch is a musician that could find an interested audience beyond the confines of phonography. She got involved in a series of dkfrf activities the days after, through which I managed to understand her work better. But first let me dedicate some words to the eastern molaires.

I had seen Cedric Anglaret in concert before, together with two of his friends, in a grey gallery close to Pigalle in Paris. Back then they looked like postmen solemnly at work in their office. They went through their sounds kind of leisurely. If I had seen this concert recently I would have had strong doubts to invite them. But there were some good reasons to have confidence. 1. They still existed, meaning they had grown. 2. The trio was now a quartet, meaning there had been a person who got inspired to join them. 3.They wanted to come and perform in Berlin, one of the global capitals for our kind of music, meaning they had balls.

Well, to say it right away: every one out there who sets up festivals or related events should invite the molaires: they are the most hilarious group that I have seen since the Marx Brothers. Not that they are just funny, the music makes great sense, but there is a touch of electrified humor to it that only the French can produce. It is a precise combination of intellectual discourse tackled by absurd statements, of narrative recordings put side by side to sonic acrobatics. Great comics like Sarkozy can combine all of these characteristics in one facial expression. Even if they were using the laptop, the four of them were as agile and jumpy as any pop group that plays more traditional instruments. There was a constant interaction between them through eye contact. There was constant movement as they leaned over to each other to say something. Every member of the audience was doing its best not to burst out laughing aloud, (let me repeat) not because they were ridiculous, but because their way of talking and joking through their sounds was spectacularly funny. Vraiment, a must for every festival.

One Day Later and One More Day Later, Too

Many millions of years ago fish walked out of the sea and some of them became human beings much later on, when history started to make sense. It is also true that eighty percent of our body is water, which makes us a bit similar to lettuce. On the mystical side of life, one can state that most part of our existence is made up of nothing but energy, because of the structure of the atoms. Talking about atoms: the elements liberated during the Big Bang are still among us. To state it even bolder, everything is still the same: nothing was lost and nothing was gained. Our sounds are made of the same particles that built up to the most orchestral crescendo God has ever heard.

Most of the talks by Perri Lynch on the evening at Udo Noll’s Studio Aporee were about navigation, either about finding fixed points in a landscape or installing them. The nominator for this activity is ‘cognitive mapping’, (= being in a landscape as we experience it, rather then GPS or road signs are telling us.) During the live presentation of her website Udo came up with a lot of footnotes, which made it more easy for Perri to proceed with her lecture.

Some sounds were played, among which the representation of a soliton struck me most. A soliton is a big tsunami like wave that travels over the surface of the ocean. Occasionally such a wave encounters another wave. Ms Lynch demonstrated this by moving her hands with wavelike speed towards each other, as if she was going to clap hands, or say an Ave Maria. But when those waves meet, they pass through each other, without loosing speed or energy: no collapse, no violence. And no handclap or prayer: her hands moved pass each other, as if in the moment of meeting they had become transparent.

The key to understanding it all came at the very end of the evening. When everybody had left the studio/living room I asked Udo the meaning of ‘velocity made good’, the name of Perri’s website. I heard it was an expression from sailing. With all the information I got that evening, something sparkled. When we (and Cedric Anglaret) met again the next day at Total, to prepare a radio show for Cedric’s La Pointe d’Iceberg, I asked her for how long she had been sailing. With her hand she indicated time: she had started when she was knee high. Then later in the program she told that she was always taking care of navigation; the radio voice telling the weather forecast and other news was always in the background. Now I only had to imagine the movements of the sea and listen again.

The first results of the 2008 edition of dkfrf

2008-03-11T18:45:00.002+01:00

This year has started with some encouraging recognition. In Regensburg an enthousiasmised Albert Plank set up his version of dkfrf. He got financial help by the Graz Kunstverein. I was invited to perform there myself, and thus met the people from pomodoro bolzano who back in 2007 were involved in the second life version of the festival, so thoroughly curated by Björn Eriksson.

Another recognition came from Australian angelic sounds explorer Jodi Rose, who, as an artist in residence to Gallery Program set up a two days meeting evolving around the theme sound constructions. The festival took up the second day.

On the first day of that symposium some fine sonic events got introduced, one of them being tuned city. The organisers are playing with the idea to give dkfrf a place in their 6 days programme this coming summer.

Meanwhile the 2008 edition of the festival started on the evening of 7 february when I did a recording on the Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam. This recording can be found on aporee/maps search for amsterdam.

It continued later that month with a performance by Jodi Rose and Maria Keski Korsu. It was a joint work on a bridge under construction in Bangkok. Jodi expressed the great idea that the tuning of a bridge could serve as the prove that the construction was done right. While the video works of Maria showed the workers and the wind on the bridge, Jodi's sounds came along. Unfortunately her computer started to hick-up just as I was about to flow with the sonic stream. A few last grumps and the computer crashed,(and died a few weeks later).

Jodi remained a file rouge. At Wendel she came with her fellow Aussies Somaya Langley and Rob Curgenven. But on that day I was close to dying, completely knocked out by the one day flu that is hoovering souls all over the globe. I think Somaya's performance was a very rafinated composition of swirling and spiraling sounds, but I am not sure. I only know the audience was completely absorbed and silenced. Jodi chose for a different presentation, introducing the singing bridges as old friends. But by that time I was to weak to get anything to me. (At the symposium I heard her fairytale like statement that I liked so much, about the earth transmitting sounds that only bridges could pick up. And there (at the symposium) she played a recording of a bridge actually picking up radiowaves and transmitting them.
By the time Rob played I was hallucinating on my bicycle wondering if I ever would get home. Rob played a legendaric set at the second edition of the festival in early 2007. This evening, it was different, since he had chosen to reconstruct an organ, using drinking glasses and their feedback. Our first hour fan and supporter Gerd Gebhard told me about Rob's performance, and the impressive impact it had on the body. He called it a unique experience.

The sound construction theme on march 9 on a sunday afternoon in Berlin Mitte gave me the opportinity to experiment with the presentation. I invited old and new friends, and made sure that not only the images but also the stage would disappear, only to come back as a postcard and an immediate historifisation of the afternoon.

It started with Momus presenting visual field recordings. Thanks to co-gallerist Carson Chan, his marketing strategies and a sponsorship he had managed to get twenty program friends to his gallery. Young people they were, most of them completely unknown of the fact that 'field recordings' existed. Momus showed the visual sonic results from a workshop he did with young people in Venice. Then he stepped aside from the laptop and read from his ipad (I think it was something imac) words and names, and turned the space into a class room. Now that was fun. The next filming showed poetic images from Japan, and a voice over battling with the wind. I couldn't follow his discourse (i heard the word "schizophonia"), but was amused by his presentation, and the almost tirannic influence on young people that were under the spell of an enthousiastic lecturer.

Udo showed his maps, and surprised some of the audience by the possibilities that google maps offered. Now Udo is a big programming wizzard. His telephone can be used as a microphone and a tool to upload recordings to his maps. Us mortals have to be satisfied by phoning in, and running home to give the exact coordinates. But the result is a kind of digital answering machine. You can subscribe to it, and listen to new messages out of the unknown, every morning.
His latest atribution to the maps is a mixing effect. He simulated a soundwalk from his home to the Invalidenstrasse, and in this way built the perfect bridge to the next performance.

Kim Cascone streamed in from somewhere on the coast of California. A very impressive wall of sounds that were taken from recordings by Leif Boman. The latter had taken the rocks and stones from a bombed house (this is Sarajevo 1998) to built a wall around a soldiers HQ with it. Through heating the stones he could learn from the frequencies the composition of the rocks. Frequencies can be translated into sounds, and this is what he did. A great piece by both of them.

Seiji Morimoto confused the audience when suddenly during Kim's fade out, other sounds came crackling in. In fact he was on the streets with a microphone, transmitting sounds he encountered to the gallery. By this time the gallery space was slowly disappearing from the concert context. And after the radio silence, there were only two postcards left: one form California, again to be seen on maps, and the other one showing a visual field recording of the audience waiting for the show to begin. They were watching it, knowing in their heart that the show was almost history.

The China Times informes

2008-01-27T21:23:00.000+01:00

Dear Listeners,

I have made a page
in the great central square of weblandia.
Find it here .

It is a bit more friendly then this blog.
You will find the links,
most of the former & upcoming performers in the friends list,
and indications on the next festival
which will start on the 8th of February,
and probably will go on for a year.

Greetings from Berlin,
Rinus van Alebeek
The China Times

Flying Chairs and other Roses

2007-09-03T13:30:00.000+02:00

At the end of the last performance on the very last day of the festival, I had to say some words of gratitude and farewell; a ceremonial moment, during which I threw a chair in somebody's face. Some of the audience might have wondered at this punkish behaviour. But those who knew the victim, know better. In fact it was Markus Schwill -who should work on his reflections- that got caught by this identifiable flying object. Markus has been a loyal visitor to all the evenings, and one of the thriving forces in the propaganda machine. (In fact Markus is one of the most accurate organisers I know in Berlin). He could take my action with grandeur.

There is so many people I have to say thank you to, to those invisibles out there who supported me with cash that I could hand over to the artists that came in from far away; to the artists themselves who were prepared to take the risk of loosing money on their trip; to the owners of the venues; to the individuals who helped me promoting; to those who contacted me through mail; Man, I should have prepared my speech, next time I will thank God and my parents.

It was not only about performances, but also about meeting new friends. It was particularly entertaining to have Patrick McGinley (Murmer) and Yannick Franck as a guest, or the two punks from Malmö. The short lived ritual of long breakfasts in Kurt's gallery/sousterrain/living room with Björn Eriksson was heavenly appreciated, as were the hilarious dialogues between Dr.Frank McCoy and Patrick. It was also great fun, almost like playing at a concert, to be interviewed by Wolfgang Dorninger and his wife Gaby, who are shooting a documantary on 'field recordings.'

As for the evenings itself, I missed most of the Glogauer evenings, so I cannot judge on that. If there should be a price for the best performance, it has to go to Gilles Aubrey' audiostory about Cairo. In fact that evening in Stralau68 was one that stood out, because of the light, the set up, and the very intimate atmosphere that slowly fell upon the evening.

Completely opposed was the evening with Wolfgang, Debashis Sinha and Yannick, more joyfull and not as introspective as the Swedish/Swiss coproduction in Stralau68, but a very coherent composition of three diverse approaches.

Everyone will have his own favourites. Udo Noll and his Radio Aporee are a complete eye and ear opener to me; Mattin's performance was one that should slowly become legendarious; I remember the intensily satisfied face of Lucciano Maggiore and the ovational applause his performance got; the guy who took a walk along the Landwehrkanal listening to Kate Donovan's tape; I could mention every single one, but hey, some of you I will meet again, and hopefully we can continue doing things together.

Last but not least I would like to mention Tore Honoré Boe. To be nominated for the Nobel price for Peace.

Please check this blop, or bookmark it, because here you will find the announcements of field recording related events that I will set up in Berlin. See you next time, and thanks for your ears and your support!

29. August Kunsthaus Glogauer, Berlin Kreuzberg

2007-08-26T14:40:00.000+02:00

On the last day of the festival we will be again in the garden. And I hope this time the haunting clouds won't chase us to the second floor. The guests of this evening are here to my pleasant surprise. Kate Donovan is here because she has to. At the last festival she presented the suite for three walkman: "post porn movie for 1". It is sunday and I still haven't heard from her. But I am sure she is on her way.

Carsten Stabenow I had spotted at the two premieres of the first two editions. As one of the creative forces behind the Staalplaat Sound System, he travels around the world. He who travels has many tales to tell, and lots of occasions to record new sounds.

On a compilation CD from gruenrekorder there is one track by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. I approached him to ask if he was interested to join the long internetradio day. His answer was that he was coming to Germany in August. My reaction was to invite him to the festival. My pleasure and an honour to have him with us!

Peter Prautzsch came out of the blue. A good proof that the noble art of field recording is practiced by more people then we usually see in the fine venues here in Berlin. After Yehlin Lee, another artist to look forward to.

Carsten will bring his 8 speaker surround system. All the artists are kindly allowed to use this system. A big thanks to Carsten!

Here is what they say in their own words:

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay presents:

1.Benaras:
a soundscape design based on field recordings
collected from Varanasi, India. (7 mins)

2.Landscape in metamorphoses:
an audio essay designed according to
the sound actuality of a site called
'tumbani'. ( 28 mins)

3. On the move:
a soundscape design based on
my phonographic exploration
of suburban rail in Kolkata.
(5 mins)

Carsten Stabenow presents:

pure, unprocessed fieldrecordings from taipei, one take of a nightwalk

Peter Prautzsch presents:

Live recordings directly on location
mixed with recordings from Japan, Ireland and other places.

Kate is cooking.

Kunsthaus Glogauer
Glogauerstrasse 16
Berlin Kreuzberg

doors open 20.00
shows start approx 21.15

in case of rain,
we will suffer a delay,
because of logistic problems.

entrance fee 5 euro

Extra! Extra! Extra!

2007-08-23T19:56:00.000+02:00

Ben Roberts has arrived in Berlin, just yesterday.
All was uncertain up to the last moment.
Ben came in from Madrid:

"I have:
1x large radio-twin tape (modified with hand magneto-reader)
2x small radio-cassettes (modified with hand magneto-reader)
3x dictaphones
1x childs sing long cass player +mic
1x mini radio-cassette
1x portable reel to reel deck
1x mono cassette recorder."

he writes.

Ben TV

He will set up his installation in the Bürknerstrasse in Neukölln,
just off Maybachufer adn Kottbusser Dam.

"As concerns the event, I am not 100% certain yet of what i intend to do, but will definitely do something with the magnetic cards and metro tickets and possibly mount some on a background board or canvas, in an 'aesthetic way' so they can be hung on a wall and 'played' by people walking by. Also some kind of live event would be good."

It will all happen, in some way or another!
Be there either today, or on saturday afternoon,
and listen what the metro tickets from Paris or Madrid sound like!!!

gallery/living room radio aporee
bürkner str.9
U-bahn Schönleinstrasse
Berlin Neukölln

25. august, Wendel, Berlin Kreuzberg

2007-08-19T16:06:00.001+02:00

(Deutschsprachige Information weiter nach unter)

Saturday we return to Wendel in Kreuzberg. Non German languageneers might encounter a hard time, because there will be two performers who will use German lyrics for their stories.

Stefan Thielke, A German writer will read his short story that is situated in Berlin and India, against a sonic background made from original recordings of both the German capital and India.

Udo Noll will present his Radio Aporee. It is full of recordings with spoken word, or background noises, that were transmitted using a telephone, be it public, mobile or stabile. Perhaps slightly delayed real time interventions will take place.

The evening will be presented by Tore Honoré Boe, who some of the festival visitors have seen in action at Stralau 68. He will round off his Berlin stay with a dream concert that will start approximately at 02.30 and will last untill approx. 04.00 in the morning.

The whole programme, including Origami Boe and Origami Tacet's dream concert, will be held in Wendel. Entrance fee of 5 euro will be collected untill the last moment, in order to preserve the intimacy of the night, and to avoid disturbance of audience and performers by casual onlookers.

Erzählungen, Gedichten, Traumen, in Klang und Wort
mit
Philips N2234
Stefan Thielke
Udo Noll und Radio Aporee
Origami Boe & Origami Tacet

Es begann an einem Montagmorgen – Eine Geschichte aus Berlin und Indien

Ein Mann Mitte 50, der sich eigentlich für glücklich hält,
erleidet einen Herzinfarkt und beginnt im Krankenhaus,
über sein Leben, Leben an sich und Überleben nach zu denken.
Parallel dazu verarbeitet ein Junge in Indien seine Geschichte
und muss zusehen,dass er überlebt.
Fünf Jahre zuvor,
er war 10 Jahre alt,
verlor er seine gesamte Familie bei einem Erdbeben.

Stefan W. Thielke schreibt seit mehr als 20 Jahren
Schwerpunkt Erzählungen, Kurzgeschichten.
Zahlreiche öffentliche Lesungen
und Gemeinschaftsprojekte mit Künstlern aus anderen Bereichen.

Udo Noll entwickelte die maps auf seinem Radio Aporee.
Von jeden Telefon kann angerufen werden.
Die Botschaften, Beschreibungen, Hintergrundgeräusche
stehen nach abschliessen des Gesprächs ins Netz.
Udo stellt Radio Aporee und die Anrufer vor, und bringt davon Klangbeispielen.

Mitten in der Nacht Träumen die Origami's
ein anderes Atlantis.

Wendel
Schlesische Strasse 40
U-Bahn Schlesisches Tor

Anfang 21.00
Ende 04.00

Finanzielle Beitrage von 5 Euro
wird bis zum Sendeschluss gefragt
um die Intimität der Abend/Nacht
zu respektieren!!

Glamour Trivia

2007-08-16T17:37:00.000+02:00

Hello Visitors of 15. august evening at Glogauer.

I have lost my sunglasses on that evening.
Did any one find them?

They are slim black shades
of Versus by Versace,

bought some ten years ago
by my girlfriend.

They are totally out of fashion,
even out of retro fashion,

and they might even not look good on your,
or on your friend's face.

please get in touch with me
in case you found them
or saw them walk off with a nose.

thanks,
rinus at zeromoon dot com

18. August - Stralau 68 - Berlin Friedrichshain

2007-08-14T13:31:00.001+02:00

The fish can speak and the insects can dance. Bamboo is a great teacher. Michael Peters has it all with him. His guitar will also be there, because Michael was in Köln when krautrock was growing out of everyone's ears. How his years of experience have lead to underwater recordings from Sardegna and bamboo recordings from Indonesia to become a part of a sonic composition will be proved on this saturday.

The Origami's come from a huge networkframe that has brought them recognition in some Berlin cold war zones. While steal was being bended, and secret hide-outs were searched for with steam engines, (much to the delight of a leatherfetished public with a srcreaming hairdo), Boe was booed at because he played his acoustic laptop. What to expect from one of the key figures of the ground breaking collaboration world?

Tore Honoré Boe puts it this way:
Origami Boe: Woodwork is a meeting between wood, action and subtropical field recordings

Origami Tacet: An acoustic post-jazz duo that have been said to play live cut-ups in diverse rooms. Michael Duch and Boe (with guests?)

I am not going to introduce mattin. The Berlin public should know him by now. And those who do not know him, will not forget him after they have seen him. Expect to be scandalised, provoked, pleased and entertained. But above all, expect it loud... very loud.

Stralau 68
Alt-Stralau 68
Berlin Friedrichshain
S-Bahn Treptower park
map

entrance fee 5 euro

read about proletarian vs eletarian popular people's culture in The China Times

Wednesday 15. August , Kunsthaus Glogauer, Berlin kreuzberg

2007-08-12T13:59:00.000+02:00

This Wednesday the festival goes ambient. Two young guests from Italy will show how their existential situation in Bologna Italy can be transformed into a work of art. Both Francesco Cavaliere and Luciano Maggiore will use sounds from their working environment.

Come early, O all of you who want to see novi_sad, because he will play at none o'clock!!! He has just released a CD. And those who know about music in Berlin are looking forward to catch him live.
Read what those who catched his cd told:
"Beautiful, cryptic and spartan", a connaisseur from The Wire wrote.
"Rather poetically" and "strong stuff", the encrypter of earlabs managed to puff out.
"an exceptionally strong debut" and "stunning" sighed an admirer in rare frequency.
Three listeners can't be wrong.

Come early. Derek Holzer will provide you with recordings from his soundtransit site. Murmer will play found sounds and found objects. They will play the garden and its sounds. Come and marvel and get entangled in an environment where the real and the surreal twine.

Come early, because we will start at 20.00 sharp, and end at midnight. We do not want police voices in the back yard. Though I trust them to be friendly and polite, once they enter the garden of sounds, will they recognize what is coming from loudspeakers, what is coming from the streets, what is falling from the trees, what is crackling in the bushes?

A bird visited me this morning.

More information to come soon.

Glogauer is in the Glogauerstrasse 16, near Maybachufer in Berlin Kreuzberg.

You pay 5 euro to get in. Is that okay with you?

Complete programme of the festival.

Youth, sport, cultural education,
read it in The China Times

DKFRF in SecondLife

2007-08-09T19:37:00.000+02:00

poster designed by Annie Spinster

10. August, Staalplaat - Berlin Mitte

2007-08-04T13:16:00.000+02:00

August 10 starts early at 14.30 o'clock in Staalplaat Record Store in the Torstrasse in Berlin Mitte. Outerberlineesh sound artists will be heard through streaming. Tobias Luther from radioincorrect.org will publish the programme on his website. Expect participants form different time zones.

Tobias Luther is a dedicated radiomaker who covered the complete second edition of the dkfrf. Edited versions of his recordings were transmitted by radio's around the world and were praised by all who had ears.
In Harold Schellinx words: "Did I already mention Tobias Luther? ( **** ) Tireless Tobias lugged along a huge suitcase crammed with equipment, all over Berlin, up and down from Schöneweide to the ever changing locations where the das kleine evenings were taking place. Tobias recorded everything, and aired it on his radioINCORRECT. He moreover made the recordings available to other radio stations, and produced a fine two hour summary of the festival for ResonanceFM's Framework, giving an interesting overview of all that went on at das kleine."
I am glad he will come to Berlin for this long radio day.

Breaking News: Tobias has cancelled his trip to Berlin, because of domestic reasons. Tobias will coordinate everything from Leipzig. Take a look at the programme. Ruben Patino will give a helping hand from Berlin, directly from Staalplaat.

From 17.30 onwards Berlin based artists will play live. You can hear dkfrf-veterans Stephane Leonard and rauschpartikel and newcomer Marta Zapp(aka xpenelopex).

Stephane Leonard surprised me on both of the former editions with his raw punky approach, offering in this way an audio impression of a molochial metropole hard to dominate, but ever so inviting to explore for whatever adventure. In Staalplaat Stephane will bring his unedited recordings from Berlin, that will lead up to an acoustic story about wandering and wondering.

rauschpartikel made his debut with tropical typewriter sounds, that made me think of Graham Greene working in a far away colonial world. On his (rauschpartikel's it is) next debute he changed the domestic sounds of a refrigerator into a mesmerising drone that impressed everyone. Little did Martin know, but I saw it, that Wendy, his collegue at Wendel's, was doing her barwork in a swift and gentle way. Her movements were like a summer's breeze (though it was midwinterly February), and the sounds she produced interacted as by magic with Martin's work. This Friday he will use the sounds that Staalplaat record store will produce, and recompose them in real time.

Marta Zapp(aka xpenelopex) comes from a town in Italy where people drink grappa for breakfast, and where tourists look for the remains of a Shakespearian play. Marta came to Berlin to live and play, because she neither wants to drink grappa in the morning or poison in the night. And what else is there to do in Italy?

So far she has succeeded to present herself in various locations all around town. Gifted with a very impressive stage presence, she succeeds in leading .. let's talk for myself.. she succeeded to transmit those first moments of audible bliss when trance sets in. Field recordings and urban witchcraft? In Staalplaat she will present broken melodies.

Last minute extra act: dis playce, highly recommended by Stephane Leonard.

STAALPLAAT
Torstr. 68
10119 Berlin
Metro U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
start 11.00
live performances from 17.30 to 19.00 sharp!!

on the internet: radioincorrect.org
from 14.30 Berlin time onwards

Complete programme of the festival.

More readings about the ongoing people's revolution
you will find in The China Times

10. August , Raum - Berlin Wedding

2007-08-04T13:05:00.000+02:00

At Raum we start at 17.30 with the SecondLife version of the festival, organised and curated by Björn Eriksson. Almost five hours of virtual concerts can be seen and heard untill far after midnight.

Over the last weeks networking wizzard Björn Eriksson has contacted his sonic friends and managed to organise a festival parallel to the one taking place in the real world. His work consisted in finding the place in SecondLife: (the concerts will take place in a green house, but maybe not, because designing works are still in progress). In this way all sound collegues spread around the globe can come and visit and enjoy. Björn will de present in 3D lifeform at Raum to coordinate the virtual concerts. Some beamers will be set up to give a cinematographic impression of the concerts in the other world.

And then the lights will go out:

Three live acts will play from 22.30 onwards. Andreas Bick will present his radiophonic work Frost Pattern that he made for Deutschlandradio Kultur. I was lucky to hear the final mix of this composition in one of the studio's of Funkhaus Berlin over a five speaker surround system. Very impressive. And I am glad Andreas accepted my invitation. One can hear among others sounds from icebergs and gletschers, captured with an underwater microphone. All mixed together in a slowly evolving work of sound that has all the characteristics of an orchestral symphony.

I really don't understand why I have never seen Yehlin Lee perform in Berlin. It is thanks to Magnus Schaefer that I found him. I invited him and he said yes; it's that simple. And I am glad he did so. When he came to the second day of the festival and heard Debashis' happy tambouring, Wolfgang's tribute to Mozartian melancholy, and Yannick's singing Tibetat bowl, I mean after hearing sounds that in the FMradio world is actually called 'music', he was a bit surprised. He expected 'field recordings'. So i guess that is what we are going to hear on thursday in his soundwork TSU - L'Objet Sonore Trouvé.

In his own words:
"Tapei Sound Unit - TSU focuses on the audition, collection, analysis, reflection, deconstruction, and re-contextualization of humanistic soundscape of Taiwan. With the total respect of sound object / soundscape, TSU tries to capture the spontaneous (extra)ordinary moments of real life."

Soichiro Mitsuya is one of my favourite noise artists in Berlin. Capable of scandalising the purist field recorders ear, he is one of the sonic artists that is 100% loyal to the original definition of field recordings. For his performances he always uses his little sony cassette walkman, that he carries around with him everywhere. He also had it with him when he visited Teheran earlier this year. It is sounds from that city that come to us in RAUM.

How to get to RAUM in Berlin:look at the map first

How to get to festival deck in Second Life: start from here
In case you are new to SecondLife,
download the free client of Second Life
create an avatar
come and visit the festival.

11.August - Stralau68, Berlin Friedrichshain

2007-08-04T12:51:00.001+02:00

This saturday will be a day of geographic contrasts. Björn Eriksson will bring sounds from his hometown near the polar circle. There is a clarinet in his luggage, that he might use. Please don't throw your glasses or bottles on the floor, because Björn will play barefoot.

Gilles Aubry left his audience breathless at the second edition of th efestival, when he performed his recordings from Berlin backyards. As rain came to Berlin, Gilles was lucky to leave for Egypt, where he stayed for two months working on sounds. The recordings he made in that period will be presented in a new composition specially made for the festival.

Hwem /Namenlos Soundsystem are two young guys Tobias Åström and Peter Henning from Malmö. In their own words: "HNSS play plunderphonic improvisations largely based on cassette players, found sounds and feedbacking equipment. Whether the result is relentless walls of thick droning or abstract electro-accoustic scraping the music always attempts to express the conflicting facets of everyday life."

Stralau 68
Alt-Stralau 68
Berlin Friedrichshain
S-Bahn Treptower park
map

The Mini Sponsor List

2007-07-26T18:57:00.000+02:00

The mini sponsors so far are:

Hervé Birolini
David Papapostolou
Martin Clarke
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
binauralmedia
Hans W. Koch
Anders Ostberg
Aaron Ximm

Barbara Gessner
Zeromoon
Meri von Kleinsmid

Steven Burnett
Nicolas from Absurd

for a total amount of approximately* 500 euro. With this money a part of the financial pain of the participating artists can be cured. You can find their names and hometowns at the bottom of this entry.

Some more donations are on their way. The names of the supporters will arrive here as confirmation comes in.

Mini sponsors are still welcome and can pay through paypal on
sjefahoy at home dot nl.
Please mention your link and das kleine field recordings festival.
Those who prefer to pay in my bankaccount can contact me at
rinus at zeromoon dot com to get the Iban Swift codes.

Big sponsors wear ties. They can make an appointment in the lounge of the Hotel Adlon.
Just give me a call 0049 (0) 152 05 345 905

The artists that got benefit so far were Madame P (50 Euro, eurolines from Amsterdam), Yannick Franck (30 Euro, shared car ride from Liège), Hwem/Namenlos soundsystem (100 euro 2 returntickets eurolines Malmö-Berlin), Gilles Aubry (20 euro, taxi for mackiespeakers), Ruben Patino (50 euro unconditioned collaboration on all the evenings to get the concerts on internetradio), Björn Eriksson (25 Euro for taxi Wedding-Neukölln), Francesco Cavaliere & Luciano Maggiore ( 20 Euro each, contribution plane ticket), Murmer (50 Euro, carshare Paris-Köln + carshare Köln-Berlin), Michael Peters (50 Euro for carride Köln-Berlin-Köln), Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (60 Euro, contribution train ticket)

On behalf of the participating artists a big thank you!!!

Rinus

* Dollar versus Euro value has still to be established.

4. August Wendel, Berlin Kreuzberg

2007-07-25T21:20:00.001+02:00

Debashis Sinha, Yannick Franck, Wolfgang Dorninger

The festival continues with three musicians that each come from a different musical background. Wolfgang Dorninger I first heard of through his nick name bike mike . When I saw the post on the phonographers list from this alias, I deleted it immediately, thinking of some weird spam. But the poster insisted. He didn`t get banned, so maybe there was a real person behind it. In fact there is. His bike mike blog shows his passion for field recordings, while the personal site shows how diverse Wolfgang`s activities are, even reaching the very borders of techno. In his own words:

< "dorninger aka bikemike" : the set starts with musical interpretations of Dorninger granulating field recordings by Dorninger's alter ego bikemike. At a certain point Dorninger's musical treatment looses its importance and the acoustic scenery ends with raw binaural recordings by bikemike. The concert consits of three scenes: church, car, nature. >

Yannick Franck will take us back to last years world championships of football when Italian supporters celebrated the victory of their country's team. Yannick lives in Liège, in Belgium, and the recording he will use for his performance was made directly from his window. It is an everyday life approach that I like very much. It connects to some moment lost in time, that can only be completed by your own fantasy. Yannick will use a tibetan bowl and radiowaves to fullfill his composition.

Debashis Sinha (in the picture)can very well introduce himself, and I feel very lucky to have `found` him at the last moment.

In his own words:

"Debashis Sinha is a percussionist who specializes in the instruments of the Arab world, Greece, Turkey and Persia. After 10 years of music performance and multiple juno nominations as a member of various world music projects, Sinha is shifting his creative focus to new media, audio installation, and audio art. He has been selected for residencies at the prestigious deep wireless festival of radio art (2006) and sound travels festival of sound art (2006). He has received funding from the Canada council for the arts, the Chalmers foundation, the Ontario arts council, and the Toronto arts council for his various projects. He is pleased to be making his European debut as a solo artist at the das kleine field recordings festival.

Wendel,* Schlesische Strasse 42, U-bahn Schlesisches Tor, Berlin Kreuzberg,

Starts 21.30

entrance fee: 5 euro

* Some words to Wendel. Visitors to the first two editions may very well remember this bar in one of the most frequented area's of Berlin Kreuzberg. Since then Wendel has changed its make-up. Most of the tables and chairs have been replaced by couches and easy chairs. A wifi connection allows visitors to check their mails in the shadow of the trees outside. The scenery is perfect for an evening of armchair travelling.

1. August, Kunsthaus Glogauer, Berlin Kreuzberg

2007-07-24T13:31:00.000+02:00

Metuo, Venta Protesix, Madame P, Jeff Gburek.

The 3rd edition of the festival opens with a surprise, and in open air! I have invited two young women from Italy, that in their sonic career have succeeded to find a cross-over between pop and experimentals. Their approach to music might offer a different view on the use of field recordings.

Metuo, the youngest of the two, is slowly rising to fame in Italy, where she plays on big festivals, and makes people dance. On the first day of the festival she will collaborate with a young man from the south of Italy, Italo Belladonna, who operates under the moniker
Venta Protesix.
The audience can expect a movie in sound, or just dreamscapes that mingle with the kreuzberger street sounds. It depends on how far you are from the loudspeakers.

Madame P, in real life Pati Oliva, has played numerous concerts over the last years, on an exhausting tour in the USA, and on two tours in the UK. Some of you might remember her overwhelming concert in Festsaal in Kreuzberg, last year. This time it will be different, because...
Pati has moved to Amsterdam recently, and has fallen in love with this town. The result of this love affair is recorded with a cassette walkman. These recordings and others will be used in her solo set.

Pati Oliva (madame p) in the port of Amsterdam

Jeff Gburek surprised the audience last festival, when he achieved to mingle story telling with magnetic field recordings and turned his performance into one of the highlights. Also this time he will do his best to provide the audience with an authentic experience.

At the end of the evening Pati and Jeff will get together and perform in a duet. For this occasion Jeff's gear as by magic will turn into a grand piano to accompany Madame P. and her sounds: field recordings and jazz?

On the evening Pati will cook as well. She has in mind to prepare sweet cakes: Celebral Jelly with Wallnuts

See you there!

Rinus

Venue: Glogauer, Garden of Glogauerstrasse 16, Berlin-Kreuzberg.

city map

Doors open at 21.00.

First concert start at 22.00.

Entrance Fee 5 Euro.

How to arrive:

by underground train:
U1- Görlitzer Bahnhof
(then walking on wienerstrasse in direction of Görlitzerpark, Glogauer Strasse appears on your right)

U8- Schönleinstrasse
(then walking towards Bürknerstrasse, follow Maybachufer untill the next bridge - Pannierstrasse- cross bridge: you are on the Glogauerstrasse; it is the big white house on your left.)

by bus:
M29 - bus stop Glogauerstrasse
You can take the bus at Görlitzer Bahnhof (U1) and Moritzplatz (U8)

by bicycle:
from Neukölln: Sonnenallee, the Pannierstrasse changes its name in Glogauerstrasse once you cross the Maybachufer. It is the big white house on the left, with the garden.

from Kreuzberg and rest of Germany: The Falckensteinstrasse, off the Schlesische Strasse crosses the Görlitzer Park, at the other side left and right is the Wiener Strasse, in front of you is the Glogauerstrasse. Go towards Maybachufer. It is in the garden of the big white house on the right.

Programme 1.-29. August

2007-07-21T16:44:00.000+02:00

1. August, Glogauer Berlin Kreuzberg:
Metuo, Venta Protesix, Madame P, Jeff Gburek

4. August, Wendel Berlin Kreuzberg:
Yannick Franck, Debashis Sinha, Wolfgang Dorninger

*10. August, 11.00 - 19.00 hr Staalplaat Record Store, Berlin Mitte*
Rauschpartikel, Stephane Leonard, Marta Zapp (xpenelopex)
and others via streaming connection

**10. August 21.00hr: Raum Berlin Wedding**:
Yehlin Lee, Soichiro Mitsuya, Andreas Bick

11. August, Stralau 68 Berlin Friedrichshain:
Björn Eriksson, Hwem/Namenlos Soundsystem, Gilles Aubry

15. August, Glogauer Berlin Kreuzberg:
Murmer, Francesco Cavaliere, Novi_Sad, Derek Holzer,
introducing: Luciano Maggiore

18. August, Stralau 68 Berlin Friedrichshain:
Mattin, Origami Boe and Origami Tacet, Michael Peters

25. August, Wendel , Berlin Kreuzberg:
Udo Noll & Radio Aporee, Balz Isler, Stefan Thielke (spoken words)

29. August, Glogauer, Berlin Kreuzberg:
Carsten Stabenow, Kate Donovan, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Peter Prautzsch

22-25. August, Total Artspace, Berlin Neukölln:
Tapemosphere ( sound installation)

special notice
*10. August will be a special radio day (participants to be announced soon)
** a Second Life part to be curated by Björn Eriksson with
Robert Gilks (UK) /*/*/*
Transponderfish (Germany) /*/*/*
Jeff Gburek (Germany) /*/*/*
Jerome Joy (France) /*/*/*
Brett Ian Balogh (USA) /*/*/*
Locus Sonus (France and world wide)

For more inside information read The China Times

Introduction to the 3rd Edition/Request for (mini)sponsorship

2007-07-10T16:21:00.000+02:00

It all started during my spring tour. Artists had to be contacted and locations to be found. I owe a lot to the help of Gilles Aubrey and Magnus Schaefer; they found the missing locations. Also the artists who willingly accepted the invitation, knowing that it is going to be a no budget festival are a big treasure to me.

Maybe some of you wonder, why I set this up. It is because I like to organise this festival. There is too much positive response to stop now.

Okay, some names still have to be filled in. I hope to publish the complete programme in some days.

Of course, on my way home I will remember the names of those I forgot to mention here, like Martin from Wendel, Jürg from Stralau 68 or Björn from the North Pole. They were all of great help while I was on the road.

Back in Berlin I had to do some cycling, avoiding rain that came pouring down at set times. I quickly found glogauer, again thanks to Magnus. There Katty got convinced that having a festival in the garden would be a good idea for the summer. I will return to Glogauerstrasse by the end of the month to clean the garden.

Markus Schwill, one of the noise phantoms of noisekölln, directed me to Martin Kuentz. Martin and I agreed pretty fast on having the Radio and Second Life part in Raum in Wedding. Miga will take part of the technical details.

My big thank you goes out to all of them, as it goes to Hanna Hartmann for leading me to Andreas Bick, and to Carsten Stabenow for getting me in contact with Thanasis Kaproulias (Novi_Sad).

Now some words about the money part. I never applied for fundings because of some reasons, one of them being that I would like to maintain the spontaneous character. The festival happens when it happens: it is, when I feel like organising a new one. All other reasons are political, and politics are boring.

This doesn't mean that I wouldn't accept financial help. In fact it would be very welcome, because it could help those artists that are willing to fly in from Athens, Barcelona or Bologna, or come travelling from Paris, Amsterdam or other remote places in Germany.

If you like to send 1 or 5 or 10 Dollars or Euro's or whatever currency left over from your holidays, please contact me at
rinus at zeromoon dot com.

You can also become a personal sponsor:
Just take your pick:

Wolfgang Dorninger (Kassel)
Yannick Franck (Belgium)
Patrizia Oliva (Amsterdam)
Bela, Balz and Block Barley from Tapemosphere.org (Köln/Hamburg)
Patrick Mcginley (Murmer)(Reims)
Thanasis Kaproulias ( Novi_Sad)(Athens)
Björn Eriksson (North pole, Sweden)
Hwem/Namenlos Soundsystem (Malmö)
Francesco Cavaliere (Bologna)
Metuo/ventaprotesix (Florence)
Michael Peters (Köln)

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (Munich)

Origami Boe and Origami Tacet (Norway)

Got it?

Berlin based artists in the festival:

Jeff Gburek, Yehlin Lee, Andreas Bick, Soichiro Mitsuya, Gilles Aubry, Derek Holzer, Mattin, Stefan Thielke, Kate Donovan, Carsten Stabenow, Udo Noll.

The August Edition

2007-06-12T13:14:00.000+02:00

It is some weeks now that I am busy contacting artists and venues a like. Everything is proceeding nicely and swift. I will be able to publish the first dates soon. To those who will not be in Berlin in August, but would like to join in via the net, a call for participation will go out soon. Those who will be in Berlin and would like to play, can contact me via the address in the side bar.

Greetings from Lisbon

Harold Schellinx reports more

2007-04-12T17:02:00.000+02:00

Harold Schellinx is writing a serial on his soundblog.
This latest entry deals with views and opinions, but gives you also a good impression of the concerts. And it has usefull links.

"Let less become more ...
An example springing to mind is rauschpartikel's set
on the second evening of Imaginary Homecoming, in Wendel,
on wednesday february 7th, built using (nothing but)
many different recordings of the sounds of his refrigerator ...
It kept me on the tip of my chair, listening.
I cannot swear to you that Martin did not use any effects or other alterations.
The fact that I can't pretty much says it all ..."

Harold Schellinx on Chris Hearns preformance

2007-04-08T19:25:00.000+02:00

Chris is a young guy from Australia doing - in his own words - "experimental pop/noise sort of stuff". When he arrived in Berlin, in the course of a year Chris had been performing already far over a hundred times, on a long non-stop tour taking him through the United States, New Zealand and Europe. On this trip Chris has been recording his 'moving', in a spirit pretty similar to the one I describe above. With handheld cassette recording devices, onto old cassettes.

It was with these and a set of old cassette players that he performed on the Day of the Sound Story Telling, in Monty in the Lenbacherstraße, just around the corner from Takt. And so, yes, Chris' sound story was a travelogue, a floating mix built up from lo-fi recordings made at different airports and train stations, in different countries, in different cities. And in Paris, together with the sonic peculiarities of its metro tunes and metro door openings and closings, the street organs playing the 'usual suspects' in tourist areas, all easy to pick out of the mix, as it sounded so much like that what's on many of the items in my own cassette archive ...

The equipment together with the sound material used made the 'piece' that Chris performed at Monty feel very familiar to me, and I regularly found me nodding me head in a fully affirmative 'yes! ... yes!' and whispering 'right on!', all by myself. Yeah, this was the music of my streets and my cities, of my stations and underground's.
Chris, he had been there.

His was a story that felt like home.

Also Beethoven was born yesterday

2007-03-17T21:50:00.000+01:00

The good thing about the festival is the storm of images I got from it. Yesterday I was in the Electronic Church. One of the persons who runs it is Nicolas Weiser. Every encounter with him reminds me of young priests lost in a ' 50-ties black and white world somewhere in Italy, some of them on a bicycle.

I spoke to Lasse and got transported to the very heart of Finland where he will stay with wife and newly born son, I saw Costa Gröhn looking at the ceiling, which is indeed the right thing to do when you are in a church. Nobody but him heard the angels sing.

I met Rob and watched his tea ceremony. He is on a green tea trail, and whatever you would like to have him talk about, be sure to make tea one of the subjects. There was also Marek, whose dream it is to compose a symphony for all the animals in the Zoo; he must have had a happy childhood full of Disneycartoons. And while Marek was dancing with African mice, I saw images of Patrick bringing those same mice back to the desert, because Patrick has really good recording equipment, that can catch the shuffles of the feet of these mice while they move them in their sleep.

Derek and Sara were there, for ever united in this Holderdeboldercompany name of theirs: Holzer&Kolster. I am sure they are incredible at clough dancing contests. But Derek brings waves of New Zealand, and Sara made me travel around the world, from the very west of Noord Brabant to the east: Gilze Rijen, Uden, Lieshout, Budel, Beek en Donk, Tilburg, Roosendaal.

But much more images are there. Gilles is in Egypt. Bernhard is in Brasil. Marcel was in Greece, Stephane is forever on Coney Island, Jeff is in Kreuzberg, New Mexico. Don't we love poetry?

Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight;
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

I am sure it sounds better with the original recording.

I had to go away yesterday, before every one had played. I am somewhere else. It was even difficult to talk about a next edition of the festival.

Rob who saw my last concert in Festsaal said it was very loud. He said, there is loud. And there is very loud. And you were v_e_r_y loud.

Yes. Like Beethoven. We were born on the same day, you must know.
I will continue to be loud for some time, I think.

And you may lay on one ear, and listen to all the footsteps of the earth.

Shadows

2007-03-11T23:10:00.000+01:00

Shadows is a beautiful movie, it dances away from the prisoners, and underlines that in other caves the women spoke french and the music was called jazz. You need a lot of spiral reasoning to discover that a smile is a shadow casted over the face of your true self. The truth of the true self got buried in moralism. Try to put that on tape when you are out there recording.

On the day that my face got digitally damaged by anger and lack of sleep I had an appointment at Tiergarten. I called C. at twenty past noon. My telephone never sounded more clear, and so was the day. I stood right under the Alex, the needletower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and I was in an extremely good mood, as if I had just left the barber shop with a freshly shaved face.

In fact it was the lightheartedness I had encountered at the Dutch Embassy when applying for my passport. All the take this and take that-scheinen, which makes life sometimes so dustfully bureaucratic, the fact that I was way overtime with the request for a new passport, encountered an enchanting 'no problem' attitude, that made me remember my friends Pati Oliva's words, when she said she couldn't understand why I didn't live in The Netherlands. Well, maybe it is because I had left the Netherlands and my moral self behind somewhere in the early nineties.

I walked towards the museuminsel form where echoes of a concert by the Einstürzende Neubauten arrived. The destruction of the Palast der Republic produces those sounds. I walked with my dictaphone on record and met playing children at a dried out fountain. Don't leave a philosopher or a dried out poet with that image. Then I slowly walked back, resisting the smell of grilled würstel. Back at the station I got my pictures for my passport.

And got transferred to a cave.

It took a long way to cycle to Tiergarten. And after some twenty minutes of walking under still naked trees, but amidst a green wealth of plants and surrounded by the constant calling of birds, she insisted on seeing my picture. And I said no, I didn't want to show her the moralistic twofacedness of someone who intellectually grew up in the eighties, caught in a battle between ridicule and judgement. It was in those years that I started to reach for the smiles and rainbows and tried to leave opinion makers behind.

She reached for the picture and some birds fell stone dead from their trees, a cloud obscured her heart. We walked and I heard echoes of footsteps. Yes, if this was one of my concerts it would have taken you in a warm world of long lost welcomes. She had heard the radio. I asked what it was like, wondered how Tobias had cut my words. “Very down to earth” she said. It was short.

Then we went on to discuss other things. But I also told her that it took some time to realise that the initial inspiration to organise this festival came from her. She had told me one day that having a bar where people could listen to field recordings could be a good idea. She would go there. But we were in Tiergarten. You could listen to birds and people passing by, distant voices and cars. I told her of a colleague who recorded birds. A bit boring, was her comment.

Maybe. But also very understandable. The birds carry your thoughts away.

In Holland they kiss bicycles.

2007-03-08T21:19:00.000+01:00

The winter is so long ago, that I even can't remember the first flowers that announced springtime. Still those days that shone like freshly polished soviet metal feel like yesterday.Maybe it was because of the sun or because of my first encounter with the Sonnenallee, a prolonged back entrance to the city, that ends in the Mediterranean part of Berlin, Neukoeln. Apartment blocks colored like children's toys, all facing the bleeding sun on the horizon; never ending grasslands, the communal gardens of the poor, that you also find near Alexander Platz (or in the very centre of Warsaw), and to me is the real heritage of socialistic city planning. (Mind you, their capitalistic cousins in the west employed the same architects.)

Writing about Berlin is looking with an inward eye at the scenery's I pass on my bicycle, like the Rummelsburger See, the lake you see from one of the labyrintic platforms of Ostkreuz, looking east. It must have offered a different view in those cold war years, old factories made of bricks, some hidden Wilhelminian house between the trees; few of them are still there. Most of the land is sand, and not because of beach life. New life is built on the shores, like an artists village in what once was a jailhouse complex. Other buildings – spacious and full of windows – are ready, and make me think of Amsterdam, same architecture, probably same supermarket. The light is different.You can't wipe that away. This is the east.

I should write about the last festival. Maybe I will do one day. As for now Harold and Tobias, who shared my living space while they were here, now take care of business. For those who would like to listen and read, there is enough links on this blop. Just have a look at the recent entries.

I am already thinking about the next festival.

And what it is that I think about will be posted here.

Soon.

Or one of these days.

Back to Berlin, part two - by Harold Schellinx

2007-03-08T14:16:00.000+01:00

'The risk of some random sleazebag
serendipitously profiting from
found tapes on the side of the highway
is extremely remote ...'
(John Oltsik, senior analyst)

Found Tapes in Berlin,
and how many unthreaded cassettes would it
take to cover up the earth?

read the second part
of Harold Schellinx's report here

Das Kleine... on Framework ( ResonanceFM)

2007-03-08T14:03:00.000+01:00

c/p from a post by partrick mcginley (aka murmer)

framework broadcasts wednesdays
on resonance104.4fm in london (uk)
or worldwide on resonanceFM from 1-2pm gmt

next broadcast: 14.03.07 time zone converter

This edition of framework:afield was produced in Berlin by radioincorrect's Tobias Luther radioINCORRECT.org. This was the second in a special two-part afield featuring Rinus van Alebeek's recent 'das kleine field recordings festival', which took place in Berlin in the middle of February. It features live performances by Paulo Raposo, Gilles Aubry and Rob Curgeven.

The current edition
will remain available online
for streaming and podcast
until 14.03.07.

general info, playlists, podcast, or to stream the latest edition
framework is supported by soundtransit

if we only would make some money....

2007-03-07T13:38:00.000+01:00

Lost Tapes, Found Sounds 丢失的磁带，找回的声音

Tags:sound, street二月 24th, 2007

磁带和录音机在Bruce Sterling的死掉的媒体项目（Dead Media Project）中是虚拟墓地的绝佳候选。

不过还是有人认为这些见证了20世纪声音文化的东西将会存活下来。Harold Schellinx就是其中之一，他还带来了“找回磁带展览（Found Tapes Exhibition）”。

几年前，这位荷兰音乐家、声音艺术家兼研究人员开始了一项搜集磁带的行动，他们在城市、郊区的街道上寻找那些残余的磁带，将这些被人们丢弃的东西收起来以免被风吹日晒完全报废。

他收藏品的照片为无法保存在图片上的损失做了描绘：人类经常沉溺于迷恋材料的文化中，但磁带是与声音有关的——我们很多重要的情感也是如此。

因此，Schellinx的作品不仅是简单地获取另外一种消逝的浪漫回忆。哪怕是最小的片断也都被小心收藏、整理并尽可能恢复磁带上的声音，让我们能够听到那些被人遗忘的过去。

在找回磁带展览的网站上，人们不仅可以浏览到这些弗兰肯斯坦式复生的拼贴磁带，还能够在线收听并下载。这位艺术家还很多次邀请听众们观看他根据这些声音宝藏所做的现场演出。

上周，Schellinx受Rinus van Alebeek组织的\\\”Kleines Field Recordings Festival“之邀到柏林的街上转了转，并在两个画廊展出了他的部分收藏：在Transitlounge（以FTE为主）以及在takt kunstprojektraum（艺术作品展厅），他还参加了2月18日开幕的“声音激浪（Acoustic Flux）”展览。

上周日Schellinx参加了专注于“柏林音景”的“Kleines Field Recordings Festival”系列音乐会。错过了这个？radioINCORRECT有保存录音并会在中部欧洲时间今晚8点播出。

[图片来自找回磁带展览的网站，特别感谢Harold Schellinx！]

source:we need money not art
mit dank an tobias luther von radioINCORRECT.org

Meanwhile,sounds of space in Lissabon by Paulo Raposo

2007-03-04T20:29:00.000+01:00

In his (Paulo's) words and codes:

"Sound of Space - Radio Zero, Lisbon

20.30 - 21.00 pm Friday nights (GMT +0) and Mondays 11.00- 11.30 am (bis)

listen online

podcast

Interview with Rob Curgenven

This week, in colaboration with radioINCORRECT.org and Tobias,
we start the presentation of a series of shows
about the kleine field recordings festival
which was held last month in berlin at several locations.
(skip)
So to start with, you can listen to the interview
conducted by Tobias, with the australian sound artist Rob Curgenven.

SoS is a program by Paulo Raposo.
For radio.ist.utl.pt"

note (by me, rinus):

I bought a radio today at the mauerpark. Negotiations was done with a grand Turk
who stood on the loading platform of a truck overlooking his merchandise.
His left ear was connected to some other part of the world.
I showed him little REGINA, that was the name of the radiocassette player.
He held up five fingers.
I made the peace sign. He liked this and left me standing like that for five minutes.
Then he held up four fingers.
We both had faith in trinity's.
Three euro we agreed on.

Back home:

The radio is silent; the wheels of the cassette go round and round,
but there is no sound.
I will listen to my dictaphone again,
with recordings of that day on one side
and carnival in the streets of maastricht
on the other side..

to put it right: podcast!

2007-03-03T13:08:00.000+01:00

das kleine field recordings festival on radio --

During das kleine fieldrecordings festival in Berlin, early february,
Tobias Luther from radioINCORRECT did a fantastic job
recording all that went on, interviewing the artists,
and putting it all together in fine radio productions.
Tobias also produced a two part summary of the festival for ResonanceFM's Framework.
The first part was broadcast on wednesday february 28th.
You can still listen to and download this first part of Tobias summary until march 7th,
on which day the second part will go on air and web ...

thanks to harold schellinx for making it possible to copy/paste this text.

eye wittness report

2007-03-02T00:23:00.000+01:00

you are leaving the american sector

And then read on.
Harold Schellinx was in Berlin:
he played, he cycled, he restored, he listened, he watched, he remembered.
Now he is back,
to comfort your nostalgicisms.

I will give a round up soon, soon.

promised.

Different Tracks

2007-02-21T17:19:00.000+01:00

I just returned from the Netherlands.

Next week in Berlin I will do two performances,

and then it is preparation time again,

not for the third edition of the festival, but for own future tours.

Meanwhile Tobias of radioINCORRECT.org is doing a wonderfull job.

The festival is put on air every day.

He will continue transmitting untill coming sunday 25th of february.

Furthermore his festival cuts will be broadcasted by radio`s around the world.

Best is to go to radioINCORRECT.org to follow the latest news and to tune in.

The coming days I will do a round up,

and when I am back in Berlin,

I want to discover what can be done on the next edition.

Happy listenings to you all,

put on repeat

2007-02-15T13:00:00.000+01:00

Hello and sorry for delay in reports.
I am in The Hague right now, on a little tour.

The festival will go on air again from saturday onwards.
tune in to radioincorrect.org

greetings from the sunny side of the Netherlands,

Rinus

and thanks to you all.

vulgus vs. bombast

2007-02-11T15:42:00.000+01:00

Bombast needs brassbands and uniforms. World war one was once considered the fresh and joyfull war. Marching soldiers caused much enthusiasm on their farewell parade. Young girls threw flowers, the masses cheered; Nietszche got a hard-on when he saw the young guys in uniform. It was such a nice world. The war got lost by both sides. Next folkloristic festivities resulted in the same behaviour, from which you can draw a straight line to the kids queing up at the door of MTV's studios, or waiting at a redcarpetted entrance to a cinema. Yesterday's bombast is on sale as a postcard.

Words are like paper ships sailing off for a sure shipwreck. All the words you choose for a critical interpretation of today's society will disappear in a Ruther Hauers quote, used in Blade Runner - yes the one with the tears. Bombast, Potemkin's village, vulgairity will be swallowed by the ocean of information. Bye-bye.

But sometimes there are eyewittnesses, like yesterday at the Gallery Takt. And when someone likes to expose himself, he is bound to go under in conceptualism. Jeff Gburek at sunday's performance must have known, or intuited that his performance would go beyond. He grew into a situation that as a whole could have served as a field recording, if only somebody would have pointed his microphone to him.

The evening of the archived sound set off as an installation. Somebody pretended he was participating at the festival. But the lights were for his video camera; light and video both on insectlike tripods. Lightning and situation way too big, and thus too intimidating. No intimacy was possible. I was witnessing someone who pretended to talk to an audience, but was in fact acting in front of a camera.

Lasse Marc Riek changed the situation with one elegant gesture. He made me turn off all the lights, because he had seen there was enough light from outside coming in through the windows. He sat down on the floor, and in a very modest way brought everyone back to the place I had intended for this festival: the no-budget side of life, far away from the vulgarity of sponsorships.

Lasse's action, that was followed by his sobre presentation of church recordings, was an initiation into wonder and marvel. Nicolas, also in the dark, guided the listener into the fascinating world of a jesuit priest and his recordings from 1975, compositions based on field recordings made by reel-to-reel manipulations. Nicolas explained that his ex-jesuit neighbour never wanted to publish this compositions: he used them as "acoustic furniture." He could have continued for hours, and probably I will ask him to do so on an other occasion.

Rob Curgenven finished the evening. Also he was seated on the floor. And luckily he felt like talking about his adventures in Australia, especcially in the Northren Territory. In the best tradition of storytelling he visualised a world of dust storms and heavy rainfall, broke tension with a recording of an asthmatic dog, and made everybody loose their sense of time. His set ended at 2.40.

To be continued in the Electronic Church this evening with Berlin Soundscapes,
see you there.

The performces of the Day of the Archived Sounds will be transmitted by radioINCORRECT.org this sunday evening.

delay, lay, lay, lay, lay

2007-02-09T19:40:00.000+01:00

I discover every day the limitations of the georgian calendar.
Too many saints have brought us these 24 hour restriction.

Jersey Moon,
Yellow car,
Purple skin

Kentucky Twi - light.

All I can do is sing when I am on my bicycle.
Tomorrow - saturday - three guests for an hour each of live radio
at Le Petit Mignon in the Sanderstrasse in Berlin, Neukoeln.
It will start at 14.00
with Momus, Kate Donovan and Marco Lampis

Another live radio will be made at Gallery Takt,
some time in the afternoon, probably 16.00 at monday.

Meanwhile I hope to write some reviews of the evenings.

It is 19.46 now; I will jump on my bike and cycle to
club der Polnischen Versager in the Torstrasse,
and crash a while in an easy chair,
dreaming of Bessarabian wedding parties,
in Luxemburg, the capital of Australia.

Wishing I was here,
yours, in Betweendays.

Audience at Gallery Takt (detail)

2007-02-08T14:32:00.000+01:00

Paulo Raposo, our guest from Lissabon

2007-02-08T14:25:00.000+01:00

feedbacksociety + tobias, our radioman

2007-02-08T14:18:00.000+01:00

Radio and more Radio

2007-02-08T12:47:00.000+01:00

radioINCORRECT.org will continue their transmissions. If live stream from Monty this evening is possible we have to see on the spot.

New features of the festival are scheduled for friday and saturday afternoon in le petit mignon from 14.00 onwards, Berlin time. On friday Rob Curgenven and I (Rinus van Alebeek) will combine words and sounds and impressions. On saturday from 14.00 onwards Momus, Kate Donovan and maybe Jeff Gburek will do an hour of radio each.

The sound material will not be necessarily field recordings; Guillaume's shop is full of music. And so will be your radio.

Also these shows will be transmitted by radioINCORRECT.org

Found Tapes and Found Recorders

2007-02-08T12:25:00.000+01:00

Yesterday Harold Schellinx arived from Paris via Amsterdam. No, he arived the day before yesterday; the snow arived yesterday evening, and covered all the trees that we encountered on our deepnight ride home along Puschkin Allee and Alt Treptow. That yester yesterday (Stevie Wonder singing in the background) was a splendorous day, blu sky, no clouds, beautifull winterllght over a mideuropean town in the early weeks of 2007.

We were going on bicycle to Gallery Takt. In ten minutes of cycling Harold had to stop two times to collect some found tapes, at the other side of the road. Not to frustrate his art of tapehunting, but still to get away from this stop and go rhythm, I took the road along the Rummelsburger See, a scenic path, rather for joggers and grandparents without their grandchild as for a fanatic tapehunter and collector like Harold.

Galleries are not exciting, so I won't say a word about the exhibitions. Maybe I'll put some pictures up on the various blops. This doesn't mean that gallery Takt, or the Transitlounge are closed. I, for my part, discourage people to come. I am actually recording a new cassette there. I won't chase visitors away. But I will give them my dictaphone and send them outside for some time, to catch some sounds.

Yesterday Magnus came walking in. I gave him my dictaphone and he returned after some five minutes. Then we spent 35 minutes to find the piece he had recorded. At the end we had to conclude that he had recorded a very minimalistic piece of silence with the pause button put on hold. Then he disappeared some longer time. And came back with a very quiet piece. "Streets are deserted at this time of the day." Lucky him. He wanted to stay twenty minutes, just to bring some pieces of tape he had collected over the years, but stayed untill closing time, also because his recording was running on low pitch.

in the meantime I had finished my first seven minutes, had made a 16.47 minutes live interview with a radio in Halle (every day around 18.00 Radio Corax in Halle calls one of the artists of the festival to have a talk), had welcomed Charles, who had come from Paris to visit the festival; and this all turned the gallery into a living room somewhere in Friedrichshain.

The doors will be open every day from 12.00 onwards, and will close at monday, maybe around midnight.

Bombasticism

2007-02-07T02:06:00.000+01:00

Her first question was if I had some information. There was non left, because we had used it to pack the Cdr, and what information could there be, if our webpages are already filling up slowly. Then she asked – during the introduction - if I could explain a bit what field recordings were. And also this question found me totally unprepaired. There I was in front of the audience, just saying a word of welcome, no tie, no suit, no speech prepaired, no filosofy that I would like to promote, and no cultural/political manifesto that I would like to shout out loud. In this age of information and commentarism, everyone is educated enough to be master of his or her own thoughts. Why should I invade that area? I used my megaphone to play Beethoven's “Für Elise.” So I left the questions unanswered.

Then Bernhard Gal played. Rob (Curgenven, our first Australian guest) leaned back against the wall, and smiled with heartful satisfaction, and so did I, when we heard Bernhard's technorecordings stumstumming the place. From my position I could look outside, and saw some kids peering through the window, investigative looks, showing that they were ready to conquer another hot spot in town. When Bernhard was ready, I had finished my reflection on field recordings, and explained that it was about a virtual space created by sound and by the person who had made the recordings. What remained was a memory of somebody else's future experience, that we can call fantasy or reflection. I put it different on that evening. And I will put it different again everytime I try to look for definitions.

One of the guests was Nick, in artist life Momus, musician, but also a very disciplined writer/ opinionist/friendly neighbour leaving a note for you when he is abroad. His day to day approach to writing explains why sunday's evening entered his lifejournal. He used a bombastic word to describe two of the performances he had seen. He had gone home when Gilles Aubry played his set of dreamy backyard recordings. The bombastic word he used was 'bombastic'. I like the idea that I would like nineteenth century French novels. Maybe I do. I recently bought two by Victor Hugo, for 50 cent each. Stendhal has been a long time favourite. Every performance by Chirac makes me laugh out loud.

Talking about someone through this medium, which is the internet, is very complicated. Words and arguments get an instant tenton weight. So let me put this clear. I felt a great sympathy for Nick from the first moment on, that I met him. I had never heard about the artist called Momus in my whole life. Now that he is part of the festival, I started to read his lifejournal. I prefer his words to almost most of the words I could buy as printed matter.

Okay. From my position I had a good view on almost everyone's back. But Nick I saw, ever more comfortably leaning into his thoughts, while listening. The result of these thoughts evolves around the word bombastic. In his view two of the performances were bombastic, it is pretentious, pompoueuoues. It is two days now that he uses this description.

There is another thing about field recordings. You can hardly dance to it. Sometimes I try, but it makes me sway like a lazy kite in a cloudless sky. (I mean rteally lazy; I also know them kites who think they are Ray Charles singing:”Baby one more time,” before setting of, head down, to earth like a Japanese kamikaze.) Back to that summer's day, and the kite hanging in the sky, and voices coming form a far. You know, the recordings can be used like postcards, as a little sound message from the other part of the world. They can be used as a diary or as a fun thing to do, while running around Berlin for three days. They can be used to compose a memory, to change it in a moment of bliss, rather then to cultivate its nostalgifying effect, like Stephan Leonard did. They can be used to undermine a theoretical approach, as Jeff Gburek did in his magnifying magnificent magnetic performance.

Maybe Jeff and Stephan will tell me that it was about something else, and yes it was about something else, because it was also considered bombastic. But if you go to the well, you will find all the pretty girls of the village. And each of the girls will be somebody's favourite. Except for the most beautifull one, because she will give you a true sense of homecoming. Imaginary homecoming of course; a home built by her love and your own fantasy, and all the words and dreams and images that fit into it.

Momus will play on friday. I look forward to visit Japan. Jeff Gburek will play again on thursday; I am most curious. I don't have to go through airports, or visit museums for that matter. It all happens outside the potemkinist depliant world of the institutions. Except for this last sentence, there is nothing bombastic about that.

Wij, Beatrix, Koningin der Nederlanden, etcetera, etcetera

2007-02-06T01:40:00.000+01:00

's Gravenhage, or Den Haag as it is called on those rare occasions you find a Dutchman speak his own language, to everybody else, who is expected to speak “somekindofenglish,” The Netherland's second language (it is not Arab, as many worried neighbours and other assorted shopkeepers would like to believe), to those foreigners, Den Haag will be pronounced The Hague. The more exotic the Dutch accent, the more the somekindofanglicised version of the name of not our capital will sound like a kind of fish. On another occasion I will explain you more about psycho-onomatopoeia and Dutchmen looking at their breakfast in a funny way, when you find yourself in a North Sea resort where they serve hake. Drop me a mail, in case of emergency.

Which brings us to the court of our Queen. She resides in 's Gravenhage, as does Jan Pieter, the prime minister, but don't count on him in this little story. The Queen, however, is not like any other queen. Ours is known to like the modern arts; she once curated a show in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, and that was only a few weeks after – in the same museum - you could find Ursala Andress's dresses on display, also the one she wore in 8 1/2, Fellini's movie, when she stepped into the Fontana dei Trevi, and called out for 'Marcello.' You remember her?

And this brings me to the extraordinary collection of hats, of Wij Beatrix, Koningin der Nederlanden etcetera, etcetera. One day we will all die, except for Beatrix, of course, who as a head of state will directly ascend to heaven, as the after-life lounge of the illuminati is called. There she won't need her earthly hats, because those divine ones will be divine. Then the year is 2048, and to commemorate 400 years of Kingdom of the Netherlands etcetera, etcetera, a new museum will be opened, the museum of Beatrix Regina's hats.

That's only 41 years from now.

Only to tell you that it was her, excuse me, Her pleasure to send three messengers to the German capital. They presented themselves as Feedbacksociety, and they pronounced this name in such a joyfull manner that I understood field bag society. And in these days of project being the first word on every second citizin's lips, I thought that these young guys were on an everlasting mission. So I handed them my dictaphones and told them where to find the Treptow Flee Market. And this was Friday. And on Saturday they were back with more dictaphones and cassette recorders, and a cassette with Turkish music, total costs: 12 euro. I almost ate my hand.

But they had also enough minutes of freshly recorded sounds. Were you there last saturday? It was their first appearance in Berlin.

One of the girlfriends was called Wilhelmina. Not quite Wilhelmina, because she, Queen Wilhelmina, Beatrix grandmother, was a WinstonChurchill kind of woman, shorter, with two legs, and always wearing wintercoats of her husband who was twice her size. You don't want your daughter to look like that. That's why she opened the second opening of the foundtapesfoundsoundsfoundrecordersexhibition. Were you there when that happened? It was her first postpacketopening in Berlin.

Now they are back in the Hague, writing a postcard in a North Sea resort. Probably it will arive in some days. Probably it will have a funny smell.

Saturday's failed webstream

2007-02-04T15:48:00.000+01:00

Hello listeners and visitors,

Yesterday's stream got cancelled because of unapplicable internet connection.
The performances by Feedbacksociety and Paulo Raposo got recorded,
and will be transmitted later.

check radioINKORREKT.org
for the latest information on transmision schedule.

festival to go

2007-02-04T13:31:00.000+01:00

Submitted recordings are now on line.
Download and enjoy.

If you are a recorder yourself you can submit untill the 10th of february.

you can find the festival to go at st37.de
go to projekte
click on second image from the left.

sorry for not putting a direct link,
This blopthing says control+shift+a for putting up a link.
I don't get it.
next time I will make life more easy for you.
but first I have to find out how I can make it more easy for me.

Radio

2007-02-04T13:30:00.001+01:00

The festival will be covered by radioINCORRECT.org
Programmes will include live streams, interviews, reports.
Several radiostations from around the world will transmit
a one hour selection of the festival.
I don't know if all of them will receive the same hour of selection,
because radioINCORRECT.org will transmit a lot of sound during these festivaldays.

An extra feature will be presented on location chez 'le petit mignon',
a record/cassette/cdr store, art gallery,
meeting place for Berlin Neukoelnisch inhabitants.

You will find loads of releases by independent labels there.
Musicians from the festival will choose their favourites and make radio.

more information radioinCORRECT.org

a visitor from Australia

2007-01-27T21:53:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-21T11:59:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-14T13:04:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-14T12:08:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-13T12:29:00.000+01:00

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)

2007-01-13T12:09:00.000+01:00

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)

2007-01-09T11:35:00.000+01:00

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.

LINKS to the artists and venues of the 2nd edition of the festival

2006-12-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

The artists:

Kate Donovan
Jeff Gburek
Nicolas Weiser
Harold Schellinx
Roland Etzin
Marcel Türkowsky
Wolfram DER Spyra
Momus
Lasse Marc Riek
Stephane Leonard
rauschpartikel
Derek Holzer
Bernhard Gal
Udo P.Leis
Rob Curgenven
Gilles Aubry
Paulo Raposo
Chris Hearn

The Venues:

Wendel - Berlin Kreuzberg
Monty - Berlin Friedrichshain
Club der Polnischen Versager - Berlin Mitte
Gallery Takt - Berlin Friedrichshain
Electronic Church - Berlin Prenzlauer Berg

The Galleries:

Transitlounge/culturia - Berlin Mitte
Gallery Takt - Berlin Friedrichshain

live radio by radio incorrect

Day Three, Four and Five

2006-11-27T20:49:00.000+01:00

Day Three: Wendel - Das kleine field recordings café.

It turned out to be our day off, sitting together and exchanging experiences, listening to our adventures, and find out that we have been some places and played some shows. I met Nick and his friend, asked him some whats and hows, and he turned out to be a musician, in fact with quite a lot of Japanese recordings. And then he looked up, and he said why do I hear a clarinet?

And that is where the music changed. And pure field recordings got played and a sense of spaciousness took over. Some of the topics we discussed concerned the next festival and how to organise it. Different views came out, that got repeated again after the show on saturday at about 3.30 in the morning, which is, as we all know, the best time to get to conclusions.

Day Four: Monty - Berlin soundscapes

A very cosy bar with sofa and lazy chairs and Ute who was happily curious and Thea who was happily surprised and Steffan who never knew anything about field recordings and got carried away completely, and Gerd who shone with joy that he got the chance to hear this, and with a guy and his girlfriend to whom I had to explain what FR. in fact were, with Nick and his friends who kept their promise and came and found out that also these kind of things are what it is all about when living in Berlin, and the friends of Lasse, and the friends of Derek and Derek and Lasse and Patrick and Martin (rauschpartikel) all responsible for the best evening of the week.

review+pix

Day Five: Karmanoia - Dreams and Travelogues and Haunted Houses.

Lights out: Marcel to bring us to an empty house with a singing room in Buenos Aires, Patrick who turned his backyard into a little world full of miniatures, Stephane who took us on a trip around the world, Tim, the guy from Karmanoia popping out of the blue, asking if he could play sounds from Letland, a funny Klabum featuring his son who was born some days before.
Lasse very confidently took us into his sonoramic centrifugal soundscape, Marek made us travel from Poland to Portugal and back again, and Martin brought us all safely back home with a Hinterhof symfonie recorded in his backyard in Friedrichshain.
All performances got introduced by the recorders, telling where we were going to, and what had happened on the place where the recording was made.

Then the festival finished.

The first two days

2006-11-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

First Day: Wendel.

Without massive publicity and only with the help of dense-mailing list, waiting for visitors to the first day of the festival was something like a lottery. The festival got mentioned in the TAZ by chance and through a chance meeting of Derek with Meike Jansen, the woman who took interest and mentioned us; TAZ is a newspaper as marginal as the almost secret world of field recorders.
But at the end people came, be it sound collegues or ear collegues. Wendel bar was cosy enough. The space was filled. Our first five performers brought sounds from different places of the world. And I hope that it brought fantasies to each one among the listeners.
For example, rauschpartikel brought sounds from Sao Paolo, and had a sound included that reminded of an old typewriter. The tropical heat came very near, pearly sweatdrops, palmtrees, a bird singing, the silence of days: I had to think very hard of Graham Greene, somewhere in the fifties, working on a novel.

review+pictures+download

Day Two: KuLe

That was fun. It lasted only half an hour. I found Jörg ( O shame, I keep on forgetting his last name) from Kule, who had just finished an exhibition on his travels from Dakar to Benin in West Africa. I invited him to join the half an hour of festival with his sounds.
Stephane Leonard, Patrick Franke, Lasse Marc Riek and Jörn all introduced their recording with a little story that brought the listener to the place where it was made. That's how we visited the sea and some schoolgirls in Brighton, migrating birds that took a rest in a garden in Leipzig, the remains of the bridge in Mostar during the call for prayers, and a very loud hotel somewhere in Ghana. It was very much like a life recording of a radio programme.

Meanwhile in Weblandia friends are made, and sounds arive from all over the globe.

Just keep on listening.

The complete programme 22-26 november

2006-11-17T13:51:00.000+01:00

Hello listeners,

For those who are not able to visit the festival
there will be an online edition
in festival-to-go

with contributions (update 27 november)
by Lynne Andonian, Scott Sherk, Kate Donovan,
Meri von Kleinsmid, Phill Harding, Anders Östberg,
Olivier Nijs, Antonio Mainenti, Roland Etzin,
John Tenney, Adriano Zanni, Kristen Roos,
Harold Schellinx, Amy Denio, Lasse-Marc Riek and Michael Peters.

The recordings will remain on line for some more days

In Berlin:

Das kleine field recordings festival with,

marek brandt co-founder of privatelektro

patrick franke initiator of the alula ton series in Leipzig

totstellen

marcel türkowsky

lasse marc riek co -founder of gruenrekorder

derek holzer co-initiator of sound transit

rauschpartikel

stephane leonard

each evening will be introduced by me

wednesday 22nd of November

Wendel,
Schlesische Strasse 42, Kreuzberg, Berlin
U-bahnhof Schlesisches Tor
performing soundscapes
Totstellen, Marcel Türkowsky, rauschpartikel, Lasse-Marc Riek, Derek Holzer
evening starts at 21.00
entrance fee 5 euro

review+pictures

Thursday 23rd of November
Kule,
Auguststrasse 10, Mitte, Berlin
U and S-Bahnhof Oranienburger Strasse
performing a short story in word and sound
Marcel Türkowsky, Lasse Marc Riek, Patrick Franke, Stephane Leonard
evening starts at 21.00
entrance fee 1 euro

Friday 24th of November
Wendel,
Schlesische Strasse 42, Kreuzberg, Berlin
U-Bahnhof Schlesisches Tor
chatting and drinking coffee in the field recordings cafe,
All
evening starts at 17.30,
entrance fee none

Saturday 25th of November
Monty,
Lenbacher Strasse 10, Friedrichshain, Berlin
U and S-Bahnhof Ostkreuz
Berlin soundscapes with
Derek Holzer, Patrick Franke, rauschpartikel, Lasse-Marc Riek
evening starts at 21.00
entrance fee 3 euro

Sunday 26th of November
Karmanoia Theater
Mainzerstrasse 5, Neuköln, Berlin
U Bahnhof Hermannsplatz/Rathaus Neuköln or Bodainstrasse
Between nostalgia and leaving
Marcel Türkowsky, Marek Brandt, Patrick Franke, Lasse Marc Riek, Stephane Leonard
evening starts at 21.00
entrance fee 4 euro

city map

greetings to you all,

concept

2006-11-17T13:25:00.000+01:00

When I got the idea to organise this festival, there was as ever the challenge to realise it as fast as possible. Thanks to the quick response of the performers this part was set fast enough. Then I thought to have it on various locations, with no other reason then the pleasure to see it happen in different parts of Berlin. If you follow intuition, there is no time for reflection. Only when stepping back from it, something becomes clear.

1. Without having the intention I had copied part of the set-up of the LeM-festival I had encountered in Barcelona in the year 2000: during a period of three months, concerts were given in different venues, thus giving me the possibility to explore different parts of Gracia.

2. Das kleine field recordings festival copies in a way the movements of the field recordist. He goes out to find new sounds, even if this voyage will take him to the other side of the globe. Visitors of this festival won't have to go that far, but they have to move to different neighbourhoods that all have their own special characteristics and their very own sounds.

2a. Each day the festival presents a different aspect, be it the individual approach, the finest moment( a short story in sound and word), the exchange of experiences and the possibility to listen to adventures in sonic wanderland, berlin soundscapes or sounds between nostalgia and the longing, with the intention to introduce field recordings and the recordists in a kaleidoscopical way.

3. The recordists are all part of a big network. This offers the possibility to have an on-line version of the festival as well. The computer will become a kind of bar. Instead of a coffee-to-go, you can find a festival-to-go. Each day of the festival there will be a different choice. At least this is what I hope, because I depend on the co-operation of recordists at the other side of this computer.
Once the mp3-s are on line, festival life becomes simple: Plug in, download, leave the bar (or not) and enjoy wherever you are, whatever you do.

waiting for a reply + poster

2006-11-16T11:09:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening I made some cycle tour through Friedrichshain and Mitte to ask two people if they would like to host the festival. For saturday I need an alternative to factory-berlin, because things are getting to hectic over here with diverse works in progress concerning festivals organised by other members of the artist comunity.

Saturday evening we might be welcomed in a very cosy bar in the Ostkreuz area, a very lively part of Friedrichshain. Definitive yes or a very disappointing no will arive after a phonecall later this afternoon.

Less hope there is for a bar in Mitte, but I will certainly consider this place for a next festival, or maybe a field recordings evening in january. A no won't be a disaster, because we could do the cafe again at Wendel in Kreuzberg.

Also this afternoon I will get the first propagandamaterial to spread around town.

opening day - the programme

2006-11-15T14:51:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 22 November
Wendel
Schlesische strasse 42, Kreuzberg
U-bhn Schlesisches Tor

shows start at 21.30
entrance fee 5 euro

On the opening day of the festival
the artists will introduce themselves through their soundscapes.
Expect recordings from all over the world,
be it animal, vegetal or mineral.

performing artists:

totstellen

marcel türkowsky

lasse marc riek co -founder of gruenrekorder

derek holzer co-initiator of sound transit

rauschpartikel

the evening will be introduced by me

I would like to thank all at wendel,
the ministery of propaganda at factory-berlin,
and all of you who supported this festival
and regretted to be out of town.

new artists + festival-to-go

2006-11-14T14:28:00.000+01:00

Patrick Franke has confirmed his arival on thursday and will stay with us untill sunday. Marek Brandt (aka) triPhaze will come to the field recordings cafe on friday, and play on sunday in Karmanoia theatre in Neuköln. The cafe has still to be found. And a hurricane of activities has arived at factory-berlin, so maybe also the saturday should be held at another place.

Meanwhile the idea to involve recordists and phonographers from all over the world has set upon us, as you can read in Derek's comment in the entry down here.
The festival version is a bit different to Derek's proposal, and would be a festival-to-go, as in coffee-to-go, or a take-away-festval, as in take-away-pizza.
The field recording submissions will be on line for just one day: a different menu every day, easy to download on your mp3player or on your ipod. Then go out and listen and participate at the festival wherever you are.
Now I have to study if the www.factory-berlin.de website can host the field recordings festival-to-go.

Be back soon.

just back from Leipzig + new artist + future plans

2006-11-12T16:34:00.000+01:00

Yesterday -saturday the 11th I performed in Leipzig, in the Alula Ton Serie, organised by Patrick Franke. He is one of the key figures for field recordings and experimantral music in Leipzig and Saxonia. We spoke about a second edition of the festival, and the possibilities to include Leipzig. Certainly this item will come up again during the five days of festival. And probably Patrick will join the list of artists. Now.

I also received some posts from field recordists who are over the hills and far away, who would have loved to participate. Thanks to you for your trust; it gives me - and comes the second edition, I am quite sure I will be part of an organising team - therefore, us, good hope. and spirit.

The third day when the field recordings café will open its doors won't be at the kastanienallee. The coming days I will try to find a new location.

Greetings from Berlin,

new location and new artist

2006-11-10T14:05:00.000+01:00

Two phonecalls today:

One with Marcel Türkowsky to ask him if he would like to come with the found sounds of Asa Stahl. He told me he had loads of field recordings and would be happy to compete. He will be there for sure on wednesday.

The other one was with Tim from Karmanoia theatre in Neuköln. The venue will be available on sunday. This means that the closing day will be in Neuköln, and that here the finishing soundstories will be told: maybe some travelogue, maybe something that Germans call Fernweh (as opposed to homesick, "awaysick"), maybe some farewellsymphony der Grossstadt.

The saturday edition will be at factory-berlin and is dedicated to the Berlin soundscapes.

Some felt really sorry to be abroad in that period. But to those and all the others I can tell, that I think of a next edition in february.

some ideas on the programme

2006-11-09T15:02:00.000+01:00

Hello listeners,

Wednesday 22nd:Lasse Marc Rieck, Totstellen, Derek Holzer and Rauschpartikel are sure as performing artists on the opening day in Wendel, in Schlesische strasse 42 in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Thursday Tape Only will host the festival. The performers will present one favourite or special or precious piece of their recordings in word and sound. Each performer will have a maximum of ten minutes.

On Friday I would like to do a field recordings cafe in the late afternoon. I asked for the bar in Kastanienallee 77, Prenzlauer Berg today, and I am waiting for an answer.
Should I get the space, here is where visitors and performers can meet and receive further insight in the noble art of field recording. Of course with loads of sonic information and recordings from all over the world.

Also for saturday I wait for an answer to get a place. Here I would like to present Berlin soundscapes, because by now our recordists are in Berlin for a few days, and the freshly made recordings can be used for a new composition.

Finishing day is in factory-berlin in Schöneweide, shortly after sunset. I trust that four days of activities and meetings have brought up a new idea. I don't want to set everything on forehand.

more in the next entry