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6 min read 🤓

Awesome Foursomes (iii - No. 562)

july 18, 2021

« Because the sounds evoke words, and the words do the sounds, round and round and round and rounds... »

No. 562

1. Tafel Dubbelnul [ookoi​]

Tafel 00 is the second track of the ookoi's Tafelmuziek / Muziektafel (2004) CD. It—notably and prominently—features FPCM on clarinet, and starts as an impromptu 'happy birthday' cantate, with him confidently blowing the first two phrases of the Dutch Lang zal ze leven. This particular birthday party, however, comes to an untimely end when, a mere five seconds into the track, the clarinet hicks up and rewinds. In the rebound it diverges into a lamento lento, a two minutes deep and slow melodic complaint, accompanied only by a very sparse guitar line. In the very last few seconds, a final light and airy 'hop' shakes off that sadness, as if it were a fly landing on your cheek to briefly pause from its erratic buzzin' flight:

2. Oefening Nummer Drie [Har$]

This curiously named and speedy up-tempo instrumental is one of many short pieces that I recorded in London over the years 1981 and 1982. It was multi-tracked late 1981 in a basement on Cavendish Avenue, St John's Wood (haha, and yes, in case some of you connoisseurs of pop history's faits divers wonder: indeed, that was/is right next to Paul McCartney's London mansion), using Tom Astor's four track TEAC and his Roland Space (tape) echo machine. I am playing pretty much all of the instruments: the acoustic piano, the electric bass and the electric guitar. The only guest player appearing is the trumpet player, of whom I remember no more than that his first name was Toby and that at the time he played with Stimulin, a then upcoming 'Britfunk' band. Toby blew the two extended trumpet interspersions, and the trumpet may very well have been the principal reason that in 1982 I picked Oefening Nummer Drie as my contribution to 'Colonial Vipers', a C90 cassette compilation with tracks by the crème-de-la-crème of very early 1980's Dutch ULTRA-ish home-taping experimental pop creators, released as TRUM 0008 by Brian Dommisse on his... TRUMPETT label.

3. Green Dress and Door Swinging [323​​]

323 was the Amsterdam Marnixstraat house number where in the ULTRA days the Minny Pops and the Young Lions shared a souterrain rehearsal space with my new wave / pop band Presse Papier. We rented it from a yoga practicing, herbal tea drinking and incense burning young woman. Her first name was—if I remember rightly—Hilda. The Brussels based record label Les Disques du Crépuscule had shown interest in a couple of demos of songs that I had recorded with Presse Papier in that small, low and dark basement space, lined with dark red coloured velours curtains, using the little four track studio set-up, installed there by Wijnand de Groot. One of those demo's, called 'Affectionate Silence' was included on Crépuscule's classic double vinyl compilation album The Fruit of the Original Sin, released in November 1981. As a sort of the band's new start, I proposed to no longer call us Presse Papier, but have the band named by our rehearsing space's house number: 323
I met quite a few times with the Crépuscule guy 'n' girl in Brussels. We talked about many things, including—a lot—about getting us studio time in Brussels to record an EP or even a full album, to be subsequently released by Crépuscule. But neither the one nor the other eventually happened.
There's still most of the lyrics, though (all of them pretty 'literary', and all centring on the doings of an alienated 'she'-protagonist in (those) 'modern' days). And quite a bit of the music intended for that album did survive in the form of approximate recordings, made back then, most of them early 1981, in the Marnixstraat souterrain, like this 'Green Dress & Door Swinging'.
It is of course merely a coincidence that many, many years later also the ookoi became green dressed door swingers. Or is it?

4. Is the Future of Popp [ookoi​​]

"drie minuten elektronische gelukzaligheid"

Generations to come will rightly count this three minutes long 'Is the Future of Popp' among the 'ultimate ookoi', the ookoi's greatest...: « ookoi is the Future of Popp ! » ...
Re-phrased in more compact German: « ookoi ist Fop ! »
Think of this fully electronic ookoi piece, composed round about 2011, as the soundtrack generated by a worn-out and dripping wet future music box, soaked in the yet to occur flooding of one of your progeny's dwellings and brought back from there home here to you by an intrepid time traveller.
It is both a warning and a witness.
In the first twenty seconds you hear twice the rattling metal creak of tensioning the wind-up spring of a (is it real or is it fake?) mechanical playback mechanism—at 0'09" and again at 0'19"—amidst digital glitch, percussive hits and bubble-poppy synthesizer beeps.
The track then leads you along a vertiginous musical path of devious rhythmic complexity, a complexity that contradicts and counteracts the triviality of the duck-like quackings and the banality of the dominant cartoonish synthodies that persist and push on and on and on, accompanied though by cheerful lines and chords of a masterfully played electronic home organ, an as irrefutable symbol of false post-WWII optim- and future-ism as are Tupperware and the Jetsons, or the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium, and the Philips Evoluon in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Starting around 2'30", one senses that an apotheosis is imminent. But also the symphonic ending announced by a majestic piano intro (wall-to-wall, kamerbreed) is nipped in the bud by a comic-synth tune, marking the track's premature end at 2'51", just seconds before all evaporates and eludes us in the aftermath, as if it were a gas.
Yes, « ookoi ist Fop » is indeed much like the re-build of something that somehow, somewhere made a great fall, and scattered into a myriad of colourful pieces.
None of the king's horses and none of his men could put it together again.
Haha, but the ookoi did!
Disclaimers: ookoi's Future Popp is totally unrelated to the existing electronic pop music pseudo-genre named 'futurepop', which is merely steady beat electronic dance dipped in a creamy cyber-goth sauce, i.e. whipped up eighties synth pop. Take it if you like it. We do not.
Our use of 'Popp' on the other hand indeed does refer to composer, arranger and conductor André Popp (1924-2014), born in France into a Dutch family of German origin, and an unrivalled master of serious unseriousness in mainstream music.

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The b.ookoi are coming!

—next up on b.ookoi:—Awesome Foursomes (iv)

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tags: ookoi, b.ookoi

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