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Awesome Foursomes (vi - No. 419)

february 20, 2022

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

No. 419

1. Know what to do [Signs & Symptoms​]

Know what to do is a re-mastered version of the second track of Signs & Symptoms' classic electric guitar + Korg MS20 live-looping extravaganza, recorded in original 'Frippertronic' style, with two Akai reel-to-reel machines, in the summer of 1980 in the Amsterdam Pijp, then cut & mixed at Studio Oktopus on the Keizersgracht. Read more in one of the previous editions of our Awesome Foursomes catalogue (019_3)!

2. ParisOK [Har$, feat. FPCM]

Towards the end of the tenth month of what-once-was-a-'the-Jetsons'-like-future year—MM, 2000—fpcm and daughter Maya hopped over to Paris on a fast train from Amsterdam for a short stay in Paris. Peter had brought a small digital video camera, and as always back in those days, when going out I had my Sony dictaphone in the inside pocket of my jacket, with a tiny little microphone clipped to its left-side lapel. October 27th 2000 was a Friday. We strolled through Paris, like tourists, together with the kids. In a little café somewhere between the Arc de Triomphe and the Trocadéro we had a sandwich and drank coffee. Alec, who was seven at the time, just a few months younger than Peter's daughter, had been suffering for some time from a baby tooth that started to come loose. At a table in the bar, under the watchful eye of Peter's film machine, he courageously opened his mouth, wide, and began to pull and pick at the tooth with two little fingers until he finally succeeded in pulling it out.

On the cassette tape that I recorded that day you hear the kids playing with an ashtray, and the loud hissing of steam that's escaping from an espresso machine.

Somewhat later that same day we took an elevator straight to the very top of Eiffel’s tower (not yet a security zone back then), where we made a lot of noise, shouting, stamping, singing and hitting the tower’s heavy metal frame with our keys.
And with a tiny metal souvenir tower, that we then let fallin' bump-stump down the steps of Eiffel stairs.
... Eiffeltoren! ...
Tingg on dingg.
Metal on metal.
Milling wormholes to our not-so-'the-Jetsons'-like future, from there then up to here now and after.

“Pom, pam, pom, pam, ie-ei-e … rrrrrratelen.”

Snippets of the recordings made that day survived as part of ParisOK, composed about a month later, between 21 and 25 November 2000 and released as the first track of Har$' Sound Chronicles album, in 2003.

3. Orgel & Gitaar, Stuk 3 [Hollandse Meesters]

"Hollandse meesters", Dutch masters... That is how friend & colleague ex-Young Lion Ronald Heiloo and myself, with just a little and variable amount of tongue-in-cheek-ness (exactly how much depending on time and the weather), presented and thought of ourselves in the months, then years, then decades that kept leaking and creeping, inexorably, away from the times we'd been busy musicking together in public.

The fiercest words remain unsaid, the greatest of music's never played, the best of art remains unmade...

[[ ... in the final paragraph of the short text that Ronald wrote for the booklet that accompanied the cassette release of Iörmungandur (the minimalistic piece that Ronald, me and Tim Benjamin, yet another friend and former ex-Young Lion toured with in 1984 and 1985) one reads (more or less): "You turn around to check where you came from. And you realise you came full circle. You sit down. Better wait than to walk beaten tracks. You pull a hair out of your head. Again and again it is blonde on blonde on blonde... Time heals all wounds." ]]

...

...

I vividly recall Ronald's Philicorda organ, covered in blue flamed plastic, our old tube amplifiers and my guitar amidst the eternal mess of cables in my Amsterdam apartment, during the days and days in 1985 in which we made up and recorded nineteen basic organ and guitar tracks, onto two tracks of my four-track TEAC tape machine. Ronald's organ sounded to the left, my guitar to the right ... Vulnerable, touching, and extremely bare. With two of the four tracks left empty for more to be added. Later. For we strongly agreed to continue and build on those tracks...

...soon. Very soon.

4. Mary & Jane Forever [ookoi, feat. The Young Lions​​]

'Mary and Jane' is, arguably, the one Young Lions' tune that might have made it to Top of the Pops. Or still might make it, say, to a today's equivalent. Given a decent makeover, that is. (Or so we think.) En tout cas, it is a track with great earworm potential, a tune that will play on and on and on, also long after its actual playback stopped...

Had that deal actually come about, 'Mary and Jane' would surely have been on top of Kim Fowley's to-do list. ( * )

The track is built on the ongoing repetition of an ascending perfect fifth (fa-do) and fourth (do-fa), followed by a descending perfect fourth (fa-do) and fifth (do-fa) interval, played in relentless robo-military úp tempo on the electric piano, backed in relaxed more or less half that time by deep single bass notes doing nothing but moving down and up a major second to and fro the piano's fa—sool, sol-faaa, fa-sool, sol-faaa, fa-sool, et cetera—punctured and crossed by fpcm's occasionally hitting the body of his electric guitar with his tuning fork at concert pitch, moving the vibrating metal points near and over the guitar's pick-ups to make its 440 Hz—láááá—frequency undulate in and out of auditory focus.

These three minimal key-ingredients are pretty much all that there is to Mary and Jane's poppy magic.

Ronald Heiloo did the lead vocals on the track, with all of the compact text's syllables bursting out, monotonically and staccato, in—with the exception of the comparison 'with that of Jane' and the end-of-phrases single semitone rise with immediate fall back to —the tuning fork's A: "If we compare two things in order," Ronald speak-sings, "to see the difference between them, we separate Mary and Jane from others. If we contrast Mary's behaviour with that of Jane, we see that Mary is much kinder. We got to draw the line somewhere."

The version recorded and released on No News, Strange Rumours, the Young Lions' 1980 Plurex vinyl album, though, clocks at just about one minute and nineteen seconds. The one that is now available as part of Stduio's No. 419—an intentionally crude and rough cut-up and paste of the song by the ookoi (realised on an iPad using 'Sector', but originally inspired by one of the amazing web-audio-apps that until about a decade ago were available online at the now defunct labs.echonest.com)—quadruples that duration. Not quite unending yet, but closing in on it: ...'Mary and Jane Forever'...!

To receive updates on the ookoi's b.ookoi's progress and all related events and activities, follow Stduio on Bandcamp!

Bandcamp is our preferred platform, but you can also listen to Stduio ookoi's No. 419 on streaming music platforms, like YouTube Music or Spotify ... :

The b.ookoi are coming!

—wordt achtervolgd—

---

notes __ ::
(*) Read more on the Young Lions' "deal" with hip American producer Kim Fowley in Harold Schellinx - ULTRA. Opkomst en ondergang van een unieke Nederlandse muziekstroming (1978-1983) (Lebowski Publishers. Amsterdam, 2012), page 181. [ ^ ]

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tags: ookoi, b.ookoi, young lions, hollandse meesters

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