SoundBlog ♫ Fecit Venetiis 1754 (Muzzix #10, Lille)

Fecit Venetiis 1754 (Muzzix #10, Lille)

april 18, 2010.

For the weekend of April 3 & 4th, I took the antique violin of my father-in-law's to the Muzzix Festival in Lille. ( * )



Elements of urban decoration offered to Lille by the city of Shanghai, in 2004


Inside the 'Hotel Europe', Lille 3000

Bringing it turned out to be an excellent idea, indeed.
In the picture (below, right) you see Antoine KiK's belly. He is showing off his 'Brigade Neurale Mixtape Belt'. Antoine and Louis Fournier were the two [brand] new [blood] Ana-R recruits that accompanied Rébus and myself to the tenth edition of the Muzzix festival for a full weekend of sonic demonstrations and installations at the Gare Saint Sauveur.
Recently Antoine had made a small hand held magnetic tape reader out of an old walkman. It was the reason that, as soon as we had set up our Ana-R corner inside the Hall of the former railway station, I found myself covering cassettes with their own tape, so as to obtain 'tape surfaces' to play with Antoine's reader.
As the old bare violin came with but one spare string in its wooden case, instead of going out buying strings, I used pieces of tape. The resulting 'tape violin' has tapes as (some of its) strings and the bow is replaced by a tape head. That's the inverse of Laurie Anderson's tape bow violin, where the tape's on the bow and instead of strings there's a tape head.

It was an interesting experiment, but admittedly the outcome was pretty fragile in its 'beta-ish' state. (The tape violin actually can be played also in a more traditional fashion: the tapes produce a mean squeaking when bowed.)

I played my brand new tape instrument already that same evening, during the two short performances we did with A Table! at the festival, on saturday evening. It did not survive our performances un-harmed, though. In the heat of the play, at some point I lost control again, as you may witness in Rébus' complete and unabridged visual proof of A Table!'s shameless Stradivarius bashing @ the Muzzix bar below ...

A Table! @ Muzzix #10: 2x REC TIME, signing off in blood

...

Saturday's "double booking" enabled Jean-Jacques and me to spend some of our time in Lillie working on the electronic parts of the reconstruction of Daniel Spoerri's 1961 Carcassonne table, that we started some weeks ago at the Ateliers Claus in Brussels (Belgium).
(Our Spoerri demon-table will premiere in Brussels, on friday May 7th. spoerri electric I have just finished writing "Re: table. Rezzing Daniel Spoerri's 1961 Carcassonne table", the ultimate guide to our morphing of Spoerri's 1961 kitchen table, with 2 essays, a screenplay in 4 acts and many pictures. The guide will be available early May as well, in a limited printed edition, produced by and at Extrapool/Knust in Nijmegen (the Netherlands).)
The picture shows the downside of the Spoerri tabletop, that we were working at on saturday at Muzzix. You see the wiring and the five spots that are being fitted with 'tuneable' contact microphones.

At the Gare des Sauveurs we were installed in the big hall, next to the entrance of the Hotel Europe, and opposite Thierry Madiot's 'monumental installation': a couple of very long cones sonified by means of compressed air-powered vibrations. For an impression of Thierry's work, best watch Rébus' uTube.


	Thierry Madiot

Ana-R: "Water Muzzix"	Sonic Massage

Toys, Springs and Cassettes is the title of the Rébus' clip that will take you on a tour of two days Ana-R at Muzzix #10. You'll encounter the toys that were being bent sur place by Antoine and Louis, Rebus' wondrous Red Hatter and his awesome Laser Gun Springs; there's me using Antoine's hand-held reader to play the tape-violin and tape-covered cassettes, and Audrey Chen, who, late at night, urges a little blinking plastic duck to reveal what the future will have in store for us ...

The Red Hatter is a big, blind, orange helmet, onto which Rébus fixed part of a barbecue's metal grating. Helmet and grating together can be played, for example by hitting or plucking the metal wires. Most notably, though, by bowing them, which produces deep resonating tones inside the helmet. For the sole pleasure and enjoyment of its bearer: a solipsist-musician's wet dream ...

Along with the amazing sounds produced by the Laser Gun Springs, the Red Hatter was a crowd-puller: it proved to be very difficult indeed to simply walk past that vivid orange plastic helmet topped by a shiny curved metal antenna without stopping still and trying it on ...

Bow and be bowed.
That was our Muzzix motto.