[ "leve ookoi !" is the title of the 12th edition of Raudio's mainstream, currently evolving. It is built from the many hours of material that ookoi recorded between may 25th and may 28th 2007 in the Art Garage in Maastricht, during the 2007 Kunsttour ... Featuring certified reconditioned live-contributions from Xiamen, China by Yariv Alter Fin ( † ), by the Jan Smeets Groep live in Maastricht, by Wiel's Instruments & students of the Dutch Academy for Pop Culture live from the island of Ameland, by Jean-Jacques Duerinckx, Béla Janssen, and ... ! ... by the ookoi itself ...
Now listen to this ... ]

10 min read 🤓

" leve ookoi ! "

[ i. Certified Reconditioned ]
other episodes --> [ ii. OK. Let's Dance ] [ iii. ... under scare vogel crow vlucht score down ... ]

august 12, 2007.

" ...
Attention ! Ecoutez la nature !
... "

It was during the three days of this year's weekend of Pentecost that the little green men of ookoi descended upon Maastricht and set their controls for the very heart of the old fire brigade building in the Capucijnenstraat, which thus became the Art Garage. Every presentation is a premiere, but this special ookoi event also was a retrospective of sorts. During the three days of this year's Maastricht Kunsttour, the Art Garage non-stop resounded with music from the vast Raudio and ookoi archives, playing back through a small army's worth of sound devices. Somewhat special ones, as our Reciva wifi internet radio, playing the 'no beginning, no end' 24/7 Raudio web streams. Or ordinary ones, like a couple of home stereo sets discarded by their former owners and left in the streets, where I picked them up before the garbage collectors did; oldish but still functioning, and perfect for the non-stop playing back of our fine Tafelmuziek/Muziektafel (2004) CD, recorded at a time that the ookoi still was a 0 OK, 0:1 ...

It goes without saying that there were several DVD players set to tirelessly show all of ookoi's kibibyte ::: the 1024 ; there was the ongoing screening of the Killer TV emission featuring ookoi live, and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse performing Vicky's Mosquitos in Second Life ; and on yet another monitor one could watch and listen to the ookoi vodcasts, all of which - some in an abridged version, though - can also be found on the ookoi YouTube channel (including the so popular We need Rock'n'Roll Part 2) ... All certified reconditioned indeed, like the limited Limited Edition of a customized iPod Shuffle that we made, containing the complete collection of Raudio podcasts up until may 2007 (33 items, 7 hours, 429 MB). The Certified Reconditioned Raudio iPod Shuffle was ookoi's special Kunsttour release.

[ This special edition is no longer available ( * ), though of course its content still can be downloaded: it suffices to subscribe to the Raudio Podcasts: get the feed's URI by clicking the green podcast button down in the sidebar ... ]

In the Art Garage the Certified Reconditioned Raudio iPod Shuffles were connected to small, very short ranged, FM radio transmitters ('micro radio', a lot like the Broadcast_Your_Podcast boxes, designed and distributed by Lotte Meijer). As receivers of the Certified Reconditioned Raudio broadcasts we used a couple of cheap bathroom radio's, with on/off sensors that switch the radio on as soon as someone comes near it, and switches it off again after a while when no longer any movement is detected.

In the large and reverberating space of the former Maastricht fire brigade garage, all of this summed up to a low-volume, dense and continuous ookoi-ish soundscape, through which the Kunsttour visitors moved, and which formed the load-bearing part, upon which ookoi together with their near and distant (online) guests continued to build during many hours of live performance.
Certified reconditioned and very pop.
Yes, that's right!
Très ... pop ... très ... rök'n'röll ... ? ...
Always of course, but more now than ever... Did ookoi become prematurely haunted by some Phil Spector's ghost?
That might, at least partly, explain the curious recurring dream that I kept having over a stretch of days and in which I find myself invited to a Rolling Stones rehearsal, with Mick Jagger joining the band in a simple blues progression that he tries to hit with one finger on the small keyboard of a Korg MS10. But he keeps playing badly out of tempo and misses every third note.
Every third one.
Keith Richards after a while starts yelling at him:
-"Oh, come on, man! You should switch to them human voices, that choral sound ...," he shouts.
-"But you don't have that on a Korg," I tell them. "Maybe you mean the Casio. It's on the Casio SK-1 ..." The little Casio is one of the instruments that I brought along, but as that reverberating synthetic choral sound (you must know it, it's the one that goes like 'huh-huh-huh-huh') is one of the ugliest sounds that I know, I cannot bring myself to use it. I start humming the blues line instead, in a deep and rasping dark voice ... That's the part where I wake up, just before I getting a clear grasp of the words that Jagger starts singing ...

This is what I have been dreaming several nights in a stretch - in slight, but unimportant, variations - in the midst of the Sologne woods. I slept in a remote cabin with no streaming water, and without no electricity. With only candles, a wood fire, an axe as company, and a small sporting gun. Just in case. For one never knows. Shit happens, especially out in Sologne woods. The owner of the estate which had the cabin on it had lived to tell, and knew some great stories.
Certified reconditioned.
About swamp men, wild boars and domestic dogs gone sanguinary. And about a young village widow who knifed the middle aged parish priest that had long time been abusing her - in and around his confessional. And how ever since both had been roaming the woods and moors; both beyond redemption; and both living there in sin forever.

Well, it's not the worst of fates, I guess ... that's what crossed my mind when I sat out there in the dark after sunset, before my cabin, listening to the sounds of the wood. Surround. The night skies were bright, with a thousand stars a-shining, and I was drinking red wine.

Spoo-dee-o-dee ...

Two enormous geese came tottering by, the biggest one honking and hissing at me contemptuously, with its beak wide open and its fat tongue sticking out, ferociously quivering.
And there were loads of crickets around of course.
Then far away, on the other side of the moors a sheep started bleating. Its crying resounded on the sheets of water, terrified, so very frightened.

Poor thing.

Right in front of the cabin there was a decoy crammed with ducks. All of them doomed, for soon to be shot, as the hunting starts again, except for maybe a very lucky or agile one.
It might have been that or else some other reason that caused the ducks to - every ten, fifteen minutes or so - kick up a hell of a row.

Spoo-dee-o-dee ...

The sound of me sniffing and sneezing because of me stuffed nose.
And a soft wind that made the leaves of the trees rustle in a thousand different ways.
And the crickets stridulating.
Stridulating.
"Hoog Harsman, kijk omhoog Harsman, want daarboven ..."
Look! Would that be a star there falling?
But no, it's an airliner passing high overhead ...
And all of them crickets that continue their stridulating. The sound of wood cracking and a sudden splash of water. Maybe because a fish jumpied up to catch a left-over fly? As it's getting darker, all around I see the glimmering of glow-worms and fire-flies that with their little lights seem to mirror the starry skies above.

Then suddenly almost all of the sounding ceased, and the wood had gone to sleep. No more stridulations. No longer the far-away bleatin' of a sheep, no more brawling ducks, nor honking geese. All that was left to hear were the rustling of leaves, the occasional cracking of wood, my sniffs and my sneezes and the airliners passing high overhead.

...

I ate blackberries and mushrooms. There were enough of both around to feed a small army. One had just to reach out and pick them. I was warned though to put on rubber boots when stamping around looking for fruits and mushrooms, so that no harm would be done were I to tread on an adder. The hot but relatively wet weather of the past months had brought out a lot of vipères. Also I was told not to eat the blackberries that were growing close to the ground, as a fox might have peed on them. Eating blackberries that have been drenched in fox pee can get you ill. Very ill ... It's one of those stories that I've heard repeating for many years now, and it always made me smile ... Fox pee! ... But then I did see one the other day. It lay lazing in the sun, right in the middle of an open track, not far indeed from where I had been picking blackberries the other day. As soon as it saw me, it quickly jumped over a hedge to disappear in the shrubbery. But the sight brought a sour taste to my mouth realizing that the beast might have been peeing on the blackberries that I had for breakfast ...

Ah, but the mushrooms! See the   b i g   coulemelle (Lepiota procera) that Alec is holding, much looking like a Frodo Baggins setting out on a quest (the photo was taken some five years ago in the french Pyrenees) ...? I stumbled upon several of those. Other tasty fungi growing in walking distance of my cabin were the pied de mouton (Hydnum repandum), the russule charbonnière (Russula cyanoxantha), and (my favorite) the delicious girolles (Cantharellus cibarius).

I found a short open track that was litterally covered with girolles. Shortly after I started picking them, it quite suddenly began raining cats and dogs. At first I continued collecting my yellow treasure, but after a while I had to run for cover into the woods, where I slid over wet leaves and stumbled. I landed right next to the couple of mushrooms that you see in the lower right one of the four photos above.

These are death caps. Amanita phalloide is deadly, the most dangerous among poisonous mushrooms, commonly found in europe, and the cause of some famous toadstool deaths in history. The roman emperor Claudius is among those said to have been poisoned with death caps ... As little as 20g will do the trick, and some say that even touching a death cap may be fatal. Despite many years of research there still is no known antidote to the death cap's principal toxic constituent.

Aminate phalloïde [Amanita phalloide]
"Mortel. C'est le plus dangereux des champignons connus. [ ... ] En cas d'empoisonnement, les symptômes se manifestent de 6 à 24 heures après l'ingestion. Les toxines de A. phalloides détruissent les cellules du foie et des reins. Au stade suivant, l'intoxiqué est victime de violents vomissements, de diarrhées, accompagnées de cruelles douleurs abdominales. Suit souvent une rémission, voie une apparente guérison, mais le fois et les reins sont définitivement edommagés, et le patient succombe quelques jours plus tard."

[ Roger Phillips - Les champignons (1981) ]

That is what it said in my french mushroom book, when I looked the death cap up. And do you know what? For the first time in many years I felt that I had actually learned something - something that might be useful.

- next: ok. let's dance ... -

[ earlier related SB-entry : Sonofakunsttour ]

...

...;

notes __ ::
(*) Apart from ookoi themselves, these are the lucky owners of an original Certified Reconditioned Raudio iPod Shuffle: Timo Mank (gallery owner, hotelier, artist, curator - Hollum, the Netherlands), Bert Lemmens (artist, curator, art manager - Maastricht, the Netherlands), Martin Bril (writer - Amsterdam, the Netherlands). [ ^ ]