[ "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 ... ]

5 min read 🤓

" leve ookoi ! " ...

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

september 04, 2007.

[ podcast :: rpc 37 ... ]

One highlight of our residency with the ookoi in the Maastricht Art Garage came to be at its very end, late afternoon of the monday of Pentecost, when Béla Janssen cut off a long strand from a cassette tape containing a recording of Vicky's Mosquitos and spliced that into a Moebiusloop which he then led along the playback heads of the four customized cassetteplayers that he brought with him from Cologne.
A tape loop becomes a Moebiusloop when you twist it - once - before splicing its ends. One end thus will have the magnetic emulsion side upwards, the other the plastic carrier (the back-)side. You glue the upside to the backside: the loop will be 'twisted'. When playing a Moebiusloop you hear the sound from the tape forwards-backwards, as the tape head will pass along both sides of the tape's surface. In theory there is one passage all 'forward', followed by one passage all 'backward', then 'forward' again, et cetera ... In practice, because of the complicated mechanics, if you do not have somewhat sophisticated means to 'lead' the tape around, the precise result will be rather difficult to predict ...

It was on that same monday may 28th, that Jean-Jacques Duerinckx came over from Brussels to play his sopranino sax in the Art Garage. After an hour or so of setting up and adjusting tape and players, the Vicky loop started running along the heads of Béla's four cassette players. And Jean-Jacques played along to Vicky, which became part of the 14th Vickys Mosquitos, which also is the 13th Tapemosphere ... In the short YouTube video to the right you may watch and listen to one and a half of the about 40 (?) minutes that the "Tapemosphere #13 = Vicky #14" installation played. One clearly hears the mix of back- and forward played fragments from Vicky's Mosquitos recitation ... as well as J.J.'s sopranino ... [ More Vicky outtakes, as well as more of Jean-Jacques' fine contributions - with and without Vicky - can be heard as part of "leve ookoi !" ... ] After 40 minutes of playing, the loop broke, and Vicky #14 did self-distruct, thus putting a worthy end to our 'Urban Myths New Media' Kunsttour laboratory in the Art Garage.

Béla had arrived already in Maastricht on sunday. He came walking into the Art Garage sometime in the middle of our five hour Vogelvlucht/Downunder live webcast ... But after that had ended - with an hour long ookoi Art Garage ritual - he somehow got lost in Landbouwbelang.
For much of the night and most of the day after.

In sunday's Vogelvlucht ('bird's flight') event we web connected the Art Garage in Maastricht, which as you may know is in the deep south of the Netherlands, with the Archipel Medialab on the island of Ameland at the lowlands' far north end, in a placard-like event that formed the conclusion of Archipel's Downunder project.

On the island, in the medialab housed in a barn (originally a horse stable) at the back of gallery Dit Eiland in Hollum, PARK4DTV staff member Wiel Seuskens installed a small streaming audio studio with an impressive collection of retro electronica. In the barn he was joined by five students from the dutch Academy for Pop Culture (Jort Landman, Adriaan Groffen, Michiel de Koning, Mirthe Bolhuis and Nienke Bodewes), who had come up to Ameland from Leeuwarden, most of them with their (usual) instrument (bass, percussion, keyboards, vocal, vocal), but instructed to - for the duration of the 'session' (which was not supposed to be a 'band rehearsal' and also should not be a jam session) - use them differently.

The sounds emanating from the island, and those originating in the Art Garage, were available as separate audio webstreams. In Maastricht the ookoi most of the time played along to the sounds that were streaming in from the island, and diffused that mixed stream. It was only the mixed stream that in end was recorded for future documentation (not intentional, but it happened to be that way).

We started the five hours of 'Vogelvlucht' with a one hour live connection to Xiamen, China, where our Amsterdam colleague Yariv Alter Fin spent a month as a guest lecturer at the University Art College. From our conversations before the emission, we knew that this sunday may 27th wasn't the happiest of days for Yariv, but he did seem to enjoy contributing. Yariv played some classic pop music (... Across the universe, Heartbreak Hotel, and songs from one of my personal all-time favorite (pop) albums, the (only) one by Joseph Byrd's United Stated of America ...) that because of the laggy and curiously distorting connection ("It must be the firewall of China," he told us) at our end of the bird's flight became a rather weird and noisy sound-stream (as you will be able to hear for yourself in "leve ookoi !").

While listening to his streaming contribution from Xiamen, China, in the Art Garage we projected some of the videos that Yariv shot during his stay there, and that he had put up at his website, with a dated greeting for us viewers (but - curiously - dated as sunday may 28th, instead of may 27th).

It was precisely three months later that Yariv choose to end his life in Tel Aviv, the city where he was born in 1968.

There will be a getting together in memory of and to honour Yariv, wednesday september 5th, at De Waag in Amsterdam, starting at 16h.

'Urban Myst Vogelvlucht' is the title of the 37th raudio podcast. It consists in the final 20 minutes of the Vogelvlucht / Downunder event at the Maastricht Kunsttour. It is taken from an MD stereo recording of ookoi performing while ritually roaming the large empty space of the Art Garage, between 21h and 22h precisely, on sunday may 27th, 2007.

The slow stillness and ritual tragedy of the recording - unintentional - suits the sadness of this postscript. [ ... click to download or listen ... ]

[ Watch Yariv's work for PARK4DTV. ]

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