raudio@Cosman's

march 20, 2006.

It had been raining a lot - snowing even (*) - in Amsterdam lately, and on tuesday the 14th it was cold. But otherwise it was a fine 'n' sunny day. Great day for an open air audio mix. In my bag a handful of reel-to-reel tapes from the 1980's and five or six vinyl disks from my pile of records found in the streets over the last year or so. All of them picked pretty much in a haphazard fashion.

(*) On saturday night much of town was covered by a nice thin white layer. It was freezing and the skies were clear, when I biked over to the occi to see Toecutter ... ("Toecutter ?!?") ... which, well ... it's another story ...

Nothing had been planned, really. We just went to the Waterlooplein, shook hands with mr. Okhuizen, and mounted our tapes on the machines (Revox, Akai) in his booth. I picked and connected a record player and put a vinyl on this. Then, about 11h, I pressed several 'play' buttons ... Each of the sources - as usual in Okhuizen's booth - was connected to its own amplifier with its own set of speakers, so the little 'mixing' that was done, boiled down to slightly adjusting the volumes of the different amplifiers.

Mr. Okhuizen, who has been selling audio equipment on the market for about forty years now - five days a week setting up his stuff early in the morning, and taking it all down again at the end of the afternoon - is a nice guy, though not very talkative. He seemed to be amused enough by our somewhat bizarre enterprise, and, hey!, we also bought some stuff (a Dual record player and an Akai tape machine), but most of the time he kept somewhat at a distance, drinking coffee, eating a 'hagelslag' sandwich and going about his business 'as usual' ... At some point though, he did comment aloud on the unusual sounds now emanating from within his booth, and one can hear him ask me in the recording - in Dutch - whether 'no one ever put a stone through our window, with them sounds' ... ? ("Gooien ze nooit er 's een steen bij jullie door 't ruit, met dat geluid?") ...

Our 'CosMix' ran for about an hour. I recorded it on MD, from inside the booth most of the time, but sometimes also while walking around; Peter recorded both image and sound on video, from which there's a couple of stills illustrating this entry. Several longish excerpts from the recordings together make up the (20th) Raudio podcast.
I will provide a detailed list of the sources used later. (I've got them in Amsterdam, and am writing this in France). Most were about as 'vintage' as the equipment they were being played back on.

The (microphone) recordings made on tuesday march 14th, though, are - of course - sort of '(staged) field' recordings, which together with the 'past sounds' preserved on the tapes and records playing in the booth also registered the 'sounding present'. Listen and observe how this 'present' continuously sneaks in, to layer itself upon the 'sounding past' ... ! ... In some of the short spoken comments, for instance (like that of Okhuizen cited above), and through other 'environment' sounds originating in and around the booth.
Along with our tapes and records, also some of the radio's in the booth continued to play. In the podcast you can hear a couple of short news bulletins broadcast while we were doing 'the mix', most notably one recounting the escape of a young detainee from a nearby prison. The boy succeeded in undoing a stool, and used that to smash the security glass and bend the bars of his cell. ["De jongen die vannacht ontsnapt is uit de jeugdgevangenis in Sassenheim heeft dat gedaan door met een kruk het beveiligde glas in te slaan. Vervolgens is het hem gelukt de tralies te verbuigen. Bewakers probeerden hem te pakken, maar hij ontsnapte via het dak. De politie is nog steeds op zoek."]

Also the sounds of sirens wailing that can be heard at several spots in the recording (and very prominently for example at around 9'40" through the podcast) were not part of the tapes or records that we played, but part of a present that relentlessly was ... We afterwards found out the reason for their sounding. During our 'CosMix' a house in the Valkenburgerstraat, not far from where we were, caught fire. The house owner, a news paper mentioned, was the same as that of the Sea Palace, an enormous chinese restaurant floating not far from the Central Station. Several of the people trapped by the fire that morning turned out to be chinese immigrants, remaining 'illegally' in the Netherlands. (The management of Sea Palace declared that - 'of course' - none of those concerned were being employed there ... )
One of them jumped out of the window, and later on died from his wounds in the hospital. We dedicate the 20th Raudio podcast to this man.

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[ Added very early 2011: I received an email on January 2nd, 2011, from a cousin of mr. Okhuizen, who informed me that his uncle Marcel passed away in the last week of December 2010 ... 😢 ]

[ To subscribe to the Raudio Podcasts, get the feed's URI by clicking the green podcast button in the sidebar. Alternatively, you may preview the podcast feed, or simply download the mp3-file (17 Mb).]

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[ Earlier related SB-entry: cosman's mix ]

tags: raudio, marcel okhuizen, waterlooplein, amsterdam

# .190.

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