RAUDIO directs ookoi@E@rport, in Amsterdam on January 31st, 2009 :: A live streaming audio & video extravaganza, from 12 - 17h (GMT + 1), in the Theaterzaal of the Amsterdam Conservatory ... with live contributions by the ookoi, Cécile Zylberajch, Tim Benjamin, Aris Baymzter, and more; live streaming contributions from around the world; video projections include the premiere of 'Icarus', part of Dick Tuinder's upcoming road movie 'Winterland' (read more in the previous post), with live sound by the ookoi ... Expect l'Ecoute, 2525, 1024 ... Watch out for Heesbeen !...
_useful links :_
Watch the ookoi@E@rport YouTube promo clip ... Follow the live text and image Twitters at twitter.com/ookoi ... Live audio stream url will be announced at raudio.nl, during the time of the event ...

A Glimpse of Heesbeen

january 31, 2009.

Yesterday fPcM and Jan Dietvorst drove from here to there, to the Nationaal Museum van Speelklok tot Pierement in Utrecht, to get Heesbeen, the street-organ that we are going to use in ookoi@E@rport, and bring her back over to the Amsterdam Conservatory ...
Here's a first glimpse ...

tags: Heesbeen, street organ, E@rport

# .292.

A Tingel Tangle Tape Machine
"? Footage or Fetish" @ Käämer 12, Brussels (i)

january 30, 2009.

When I arrived at Käämer 12 precisely two weeks ago, in the late afternoon of friday january 16th, it was still smelling of fresh paint. A band worth of beer-zipping polish workers were about to almost finish the make-over of the sort-of duplex gallery space at number 12 in the rue Crickxstraat, in the Saint-Gilles neighborhood in Brussels. Frans Claus had driven his small van up to Amsterdam earlier that day, to pick me up in Amsterdam, and transport the stuff to Brussels that I wanted to use for "? Footage or Fetish", my found tapes exhibition and installation, that was to open there on monday january 19th.

True to the Ateliers Claus's motto ("Between art and rock 'n' roll"), Gaia Carabillo intends to run Käämer 12 as a pole and partner of Les Ateliers - located just on the other side of the street - by opening up the space to expositions and events that often will be closely related to the music and performances happening there.
On the street-side the Käämer 12's ground and first floor have been merged into a single, about six meter high, space.

When Gaia and Frans first showed me the place (some time end of november last year), it was still filled up with quite a bit of bric-à-brac, and there were a couple of fragile looking but pretty large objects lying and hanging around. Flying creatures, sort of like chinese dragons. These 'mobiles' were works of the artist that used to have his studio there at the ground floor of rue Crickxstraat 12, and who is still living in one of the upper floor apartments in the building. His names is Martin Jauniaux. Small, thin, shabby appearance, and with no teeth left, Martin looks like one of the little gnomes that surely inhabit worlds similar to that of his flying dragons. But though being somewhat peculiar and unworldly, he seemed a nice enough person. (During the opening we found out, btw, that Martin is the brother of Tom Cora's widow, Catherine Jauniaux.)

I did not bring flying dragons, but took the rim of a bicycle wheel and three old record players with me to Brussels, to use in a variation on the hanging cassette cemetery wind chimes that I installed at the door of the Raum für Kunst und Musik in Cologne, during the Tapemosphere event, in april 2007 (here is a direct link to the chimes' YouTube).
A bicycle wheel of course, like the hub caps (which I used in Takt in Berlin), is one among objects pretty likely to 'catch' and 'tangle' up free roaming tape ... Especially in the Netherlands, where so many people use bicycles, which sometimes are 'parked' outside for prolonged periods of time. (Found tape #316 is an example of tape found entangled in a bicycle wheel.)
It was the rim which during set-up found its place hanging from the high ceiling in the gallery's front space.

It has 36 spokes. To each, using a stretch of cassette tape, I attached parts of the broken plastic bodies of my collection of 'dead cassettes'; that is, the plastics that came with (some of) my found tapes ... Under the bungling bodies, I placed a square table. And on that table I put the three old record players.

Onto each of the record players' turntables I glued a cassette-box.
In the middle of it all I put a plastic doll, that I found in Käämer 12's cellar and which reminded me of the doll's head that I had used in 2006 in the Klankwerkplaats in Maastricht, during the Sound Souvenirs event there. It was part of the stuff that Martin Jauniaux had left there, who was so kind as to allow me to use it.

When the record players are set into motion, the cassette boxes start to rhythmically hit the dangling cadavers, which in turn start hitting each other, and making their plastic 'clink-clanky' sounds ...

What I had not foreseen, but - in hindsight - is only logical, is that the periodic 'swooping' of the dangling cassette plastics leads to a 'tangling up' of the stretches of tape and the bits of plastics they are suspending. And over time, they wind up together, in groups of four, five or six ...

In the YouTube clip below you see the 'Tingel-Tangle Tape Machine' in action. It was shot in the afternoon of friday january 23rd, while Jean-Jacques Duerinckx was warming up his sopranino saxophone.

That evening we did the first of three successive quartet performances (with Jonas Kocher on accordion and Raed Yassin on double bass). I had performed before with Jonas (though never as an accordionist), I performed before with Jean-Jacques; and Raed 'did it' before with Jonas ... But it was to be the first time the four of us we would play together.

Jean-Jacques took Raed and the double bass (which Frans had managed to borrow for him for use over the weekend, from one of the musicians rehearsing in the Ateliers' cellar spaces) in his car. I went with Jonas by tube, first walking from the rue Crickxstraat to the Porte de Hal. Brussels was wet and cold, like it had been pretty much all of the week. We took the metro to Botanique, and then walked again in the rain, to the rue Thiéfrystraat.

The evening had been proposed to us and was organized by Zahava Seewald, who cooked and served us a wonderful meal and had invited her friends to come over to listen to us perform in her living room. That was, of course, a very nice thing to do. It also come with the fait divers that this was the second time that Zahava organized a concert in her living room. The first time was a little over three years ago in november 2005, when it was Michel Doneda that played. I was one of the guests back then, completely by chance.
It was there that I first met Jean-Jacques.

...

As said, in the YouTube clip you hear Jean-Jacques warming up his sopranino. He also recorded the second layer of the clip's soundtrack. That was on the evening of the opening, monday january 19th.

Of course I had to regularly disentangle the 36 cassette cadavers in Käämer 12, in order to allow for my Tingel-Tangle Tape Machine to make a brand new start ...

- next: Time and the weather -

[ related: More Tingel Tangle (feb. 04, 2009 - written for the Les Ateliers Claus Blog) ; A Tingel Tangle Found Tapes Machine (jan. 28, 2009 - written for the Les Ateliers Claus Blog) ]

tags: Brussels, found tapes, Zahava Seewald, Les Ateliers Claus

# .291.