placard : la générale

august 14, 2006.

The - by now we may call it 'traditional' - 72 hours non-stop parisian 'grand placard', part of this year's, the ninth, international headphone festival, took place from friday afternoon august 4th till monday afternoon august 7th, at La Générale, in the rue du général Lasalle, in Belleville. An absolutely unique, highly eclectic, event, both socially and musically. As I had to take care of G. these days, unfortunately I could attend only few of the many, many live contributions in the fine Belleville 'art squat', though I did manage to catch much of it on the 24/24 live ogg vorbis stream ...

Noisy, exciting, nice, drony, fascinating, clumsy ... at some times only one of such labels applied; at other times all of them ensemble; or maybe other adjectives would be more appropriate to describe the sounds emitted ... but most of it was at the very least fun to hear, though often when listening to the stream it was not easy to actually know who it was_or_were, that were_or_was making those particular sounds at that particular moment. Of course there was the online schedule, but there were - as always - quite some last-minute changes ... and delays ... But for who really wanted to know, usually - but not always - the correct information was to be had on the placard irc chat channel (which, btw, was continuously being projected on the wall behind the placard performers).

Extra this year: an impressive 'vinyl cutting corner', where Jan Zimmermann sat cutting large portions of the placard's sessions directly onto solid 7 inch vinyl platters. And thanks to Jan's efforts I now indeed possess a heavy black vinyl 'single' with a craft fully mastered recording of part of the 'Prime Time' session I did with FlexRex and Rébus on saturday evening, under the flag of ana-R, between 20h30 and 21h30.

Bridging an intro and an outro featuring Rébus's Star Academy Dancing Carpet, and with me on my end of the table using nothing but an electric guitar passing through a cheap digital fuzz-box and with a mechanical metronome placed over the strings on the down end of its fretboard, swinging and beating at its lowest possible tempo, we did a nicely balanced and evolving set, which I enjoyed a lot.

The next day, on sunday afternoon, each of us three did a second placard intervention. After half an hour of FlexRex, and half an hour of Rébus, I started at around 15h30, again working with minimal 'material'. I had an old monophonic cassette player playing back one of the Cosmodrone drone-loop 're-cycle' cassettes made earlier this year by Flex and Cosmo, and (using the reverse knob of my SONY TCM 500DV) on top of this I looped 'by hand' at lowest possible speed notes and short phrases from Wagner opera overtures on a cassette that I found in the gutter of the avenue Galieni in Bagnolet earlier this year (found tape #279).

The result was a pretty solemn lo-fi, yeah indeed, but I found it just the thing for the sunny-outside/twilight-inside quiet of this "48 done, another 24 to go" - placard afternoon ... After about twenty five minutes I was joined by fpcm, who was streaming live from his flat in Amsterdam, then picked up by me in Paris on wifi, and fed from a laptop into the placard stream. The two streams together thus merged into one, e-merging as an ookoi space stretched set.

The following two YouTube clips each give you a 10 minute extract from the ookoi Placard stream...

{ added august 19th, 2006 : There is was a nice 20 minute documentary video of the La Générale placard on Bastien's public-access.org site [ added august 2009 : but site and files are no longer ,] available for viewing and download. The film is built around an interview with the Placard festival's initiator Erik Minkkinen, who is talking at length about Placard's history and philosophy; there's great footage of Jan Zimmermann's vinyl cutting installation, and among the fragments of performances you'll encounter parts of the ana-R Prime Time show, prominently featuring, of course :-) , the Star Academy Dancing Carpet ... You may also view it at YouTube's :]

{ added april 12th, 2018 : Video no longer available. }

{ added august 10th, 2019 : Happy to find that the full original 'public-access.org' page including the video was saved and kept by the WayBackMachine. It has some very nice footage of our —Rébus, FlexRex, myself— playing on Sunday ... }

The following are a few of stills from the ana-R footage in Bastien's video, which, as far as I am aware, is the very best document/account made on what was 'Le Placard' ...