DAAR & HIER! On Saturday May 10th, 2014, Stduio ookoi lectured/performed at the Symposium Locative Media and Sound Art in the Budafabriek in Kortrijk, Belgium, on the day of the opening of Sounding City, Klinkende Stad. On the occasion of the symposium, the space-time warping duo presented their latest release: an iAlbum of localized Future Popp, entitled HIER (though it is very likely that you are not... :). Now available on an appstore near you! More information below...
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You are NOT Hier!

9 may, 2014.

In these days of data clouds and information overload it has become almost unimaginable that a physical effort is required of a listener in order to access recorded music. Not so, though, if that music is the Future Popp made by the ookoi, for more than a decade now among the world’s most adventurous as well as most unpopular explorers of the sonic arts.

The ookoi's latest work, HIER, is a four track EP released as a GPS empowered iPhone application, which limits playback of each of the four tracks to a specific European city. The first track can only be heard in Amsterdam (nl), the second one only in Heerlen (nl), the third one only in Kortrijk (be) and the final one only in Paris (fr).

Here is a map showing the EP's very basic geo-metrics.

A listener who wants to get to know all of HIER, will have to make a city tour. From hier to hier to hier to hier... You may, obviously, start in any of the four vertices, then do the HIER-tour in any of the 24 possible ways, over any period of time that will suit you. (This is a very patient work...)

The current version of the app, HIER 1.0, is limited to this track-by-track, city-by-city, playback of the EP. The update to HIER 2.0, later this year, will allow owners of the app to store the tracks that they accessed locally, in a playlist for subsequent playback. But that playback will only be possible when they are not in one of the four playback locations.

It has to be that way.

For almost everybody, almost almost always, is NOT hier...

...

As one among a myriad examples: almost all of you were NOT hier, in kunstencentrum Signe in the Dutch city of Heerlen on Saturday April 6th 2013, the evening/night of the first cultuurnacht (culture night).

Mike Kramer (on the left in the picture - by René Bradwolff - below) curated a fine program of sound/art/music performances for that evening, and invited me to hop over to Heerlen from Paris for a day. Not to perform, but to do kind of a 'culture night radio show' in KuS, dj-ing and live interviewing the artists (most of them residing in Heerlen) and visitors, including blogger Nicole de Vries, Lucas Kramer, Roger Kengen & Frans Roovers, Hugo Bindels, Raadsel (Peter Moolenaar), Charles Krutzen and Mike Kramer (who that night performed as Core Shift).

It was still early in the year of the cassette's 50th anniversary, which accounts for the Lang Leve Lou Ottens banner that you see behind my head in the picture and the fact that I had planned the Dutch inventor of the audio cassette as the red threat for my radio act, only to be second by counting, numbers and some other personal focal points around that time.

This was the setting and context in which I proposed FPCM to also have the ookoi make one of their very rare public appearances. But not by him hopping on a train from Amsterdam with a bag full from instruments to join me in Heerlen. When the ookoi performed, at the very early beginning of the Cultuurnacht event in KuS on April 6th 2013, FPCM was not hier. As on some earlier occasions, most notably eight years ago on the occasion of the 2006 grand Parisian placard, we opted for a virtual space warp: the ookoi played as a duo while being 211 kms apart, via a Skype connection.

Here is the transcript of the minimalistic communication that accompanied the ookoi's action, the way it was kept in my Skype's history.

And this is the one shot I made of the Skype visuals that appeared on my MacBook's screen. It shows FPCM in Amsterdam hitting his electric guitar.

Except of course for myself, nobody in KuS actually heard or saw anything of what was going on. No Hear, No See... While the ookoi were live cooking their very own and pretty special brand of Future Popp, everyone that could have been an audience was busy with his or her own last minute preparations for the evening's program. Like Roger Kengen & Frans Roovers, who were soundchecking full blast at a table right next to mine for most of the 20+ minutes that the ookoi space warped their soundings.

Nevertheless: straight from cyber space, FPCM's Amsterdam generated sounds mixed with mine, as I sat manipulating dictaphones and iThings behind my KuS table. It all went into my small mixing desk, and from there on to my digital Zoom.

Thus, when it was all over and done, there was 'nothing hier now but the recordings'.

It is these recordings that, shortly after the Cultuurnacht, I edited into the four tracks, obviously closely related each one to the others, that now together are available as the ookoi's iAlbum HIER, with a total playing time of about eleven minutes.

We solemnly & unpublicly christened HIER in Amsterdam on Wednesday May 7th, with celebratory drinks & speeches & the handing over of the envelope & the unveiling of a HIER sticker on the sunny back deck of the house boat of Donald Beekman, the graphic designer who only recently gave RAUDIO its new blue, in the presence of almost the full board of the Stichting Wim, our β-testers, as well as Ruth and Oscar of Gonzo (Circus) magazine. The picture below (shot by Oscar Smit) shows Donald holding the beautiful silkscreen that he made of his RAUDIO design (still in good old green), signed copies of which are reserved for Stduio sponsors.

When we launched HIER on Donald's deck, we could listen (only) to the Amsterdam track (2'37"), which is enabled in a circular region with a radius of 10 kilometers around the around the Paradiso. It will not need any explanation why Amsterdam is one of HIER's four locations, and why we chose Paradiso as this location's center.

The Heerlen track (2'23") has Kunstencentrum Signe as its center, because that was where in April 2013 the recordings were made. This track is enabled in a circular region with a radius of 5 kilometers around KuS.

Paris is our third obvious location, as well as the biggest of the four HIER cities. It also comes with the track that has the longest duration of the four (4'16"). This track can be heard in a circular region with a radius of 10 kilometers around La Générale Nord-Est, which, as far as the ookoi and myself are concerned, for the past five years has been the real center of the French capital.

The one location left then is Kortrijk which, with its population of about 75000, is the smallest of the four HIER cities. The Kortrijk track then is the shortest of the four. It is enabled in a circular region with a radius of 5 kilometers around the Budascoop, where on Saturday May 10th the ookoi will lecture/perform about the locative aspects of their work and their history, as part of the Locative Media and Sound Art symposium.

The ookoi's lecture/performance in Kortrijk will include the official public presentation of HIER as well as the public distribution/give-away of the new sticker.

...

tags: stduio, ookoi, locative media, HIER

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