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Awesome Foursomes (viii - No. 664)

April 25, 2022

« Milling wormholes to our not-so-'the-Jetsons'-like future, from there then up to here now and after. »

No. 664

1. Re_Koer [fpcm​]

De Zelfkant van de Cassette (in English that would be: the Cassette's Selfedge, or the Cassette's Fringe Side) was the title of a series of evenings, on the first and on the last Thursday of each month, in Eddy de Clerq's legendary early 1980's post-punk and New Romantics' DIY-glamour nightclub, hidden in the very heart of Amsterdam (Nieuwe Zijdsvoorburgwal 165). Visitors were invited to bring their home-made cassette recordings of poetry, soundscapes ('geluidsdecors') and performances. ("An experimental evening where everyone can play one full side of a self-made cassette" ... Een experimentele avond waarop iedereen een eigengemaakte cassette één kant-lang kan draaien, the club's ads in Vinyl Magazine read.)

For FPCM, De Koer's appeal was reason to one evening sneak into the rehearsal space that back then was shared by Pressepapier, Young Lions and Minny Pops, a tiny cellar dressed in red velvet on the Amsterdam Marnixstraat (323), to record and perform his relentless struggle to synchronise no less than 3 electronic rhythm machines, pushed forwards, ever forwards, encouraged by the idea that, as he wrote in those years, "the Human Spirit is a beautiful thing, especially mine. I can heartily recommend, you don't know what you're experiencing, just ..."

This first track of the eight Awesome Foursome is a slightly edited extract of the cassette tape's side that he recorded for De Koer's Zelfkant. The violin was played by Pressepapier's Wijnand De Groot. Probably.

2. Subsidie Aanvrage​(​N) [fpcm (​+​mjdim​)​]

In the history of mankind there are but few—nay! no!—technologies that have been ageing to become totally obsolete as lightning fast as did the so deviously baptised 'new' media unleashed over the past forty, fifty years or so in an avalanche of ever changing formats that were developed for and offered to (or rather: imposed upon) us by many a mogul of digital capitalism, in the name of (mainly its own, corporate) growth.

In the wake of this, our world's digital unfolding and awakening, Peter Mertens and Louis Stiller initiated Album, the first exclusively electronic publisher in the Netherlands. In the midst and heat of many an early adaptor's heyday, Album published 'electric tales' on all sorts of 'new media' supports, from 1995 to 1997, a time when all things computer and online still were exhilaratingly slow and cumbersome to use. But also a time when each next click with your mouse held many a promise: of intellectual and of artistic novelty; of newness, tout court; of experiment; of adventure; of freedom.

Subsidie Aanvrage(N) is the soundtrack of FPCM’s contribution to one of Album's releases: the 1997 Park 4DTV CDROM, a 'new media' masterpiece designed and edited under the direction of PARK 4DTV artists Jasper van den Brink and Yariv Alter Fin ( * ) on CDrom ( ** ), that in its original form nowadays will only be accessible to and viewable by the handful (if any) of specialists with access to working hardware originals or software emulators of the now vintage computing machinery used to create it: twelve hours of 'television art', pure image and sound, including a number of 'Easter eggs' that at the time could only be found if you disposed of a (then) 'fast machine'.

The Park 4DTV CDROM is one of many early digi-artworks that rose, and then within but years of their creation again fell, through the mazes of our global techno-(hi)story. (It is a matter of taste and philosophy or of the temperature and time of the year, whether you'll think of this as a 'goodness' or a 'badness'.)

On Subsidie Aanvrage(N) we hear FPCM skilfully play-programming a Yamaha Keytar while his then 4 year old daughter Maya (aka Vieze Meisje, a full-grown artist now herself) repeats words that he picked for her at random from the stack of administrative paperwork that was part of the creation of such a piece of ‘new media’ art. Given the probabilities involved, it is little wonder that a such random choice lead to specifically this phrase, a mantra stuck in the back of (almost) every Dutch artist, back in the 1990s, but also now. Unlike its original format, the message has not aged a bit: "Subsidie aanvragen!"——Yeah, let's apply for some of them grants. (The creation and production of the Park 4DTV CDROM was made possible by subsidies from the 'Thuiskopie Fonds', the 'Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst' and the 'Mondriaan Stichting'.)

Is it the undeniable touch of perversion and obscenity of the 'public exposure' ('het potloodventen') and the masochism involved in artists doing such paperwork that lead Spotify to mark Subsidie Aanvrage(N)? With the 'E' of 'explicit' ...? 😎 Now, lieve lezertjes, that's a premiere! 😂

notes __ ::
(*) For more on Yariv Alter Fin, hear and see Rare Vogels, No. 138.4. [ ^ ]
(**) CDrom, CDROM or CD-ROM is the abbreviation of compact disc read-only memory: computer memory in the form of a compact disc, read by optical means. Its use needs a dedicated drive, with a low-power laser beam to read digitised (binary) data that has been encoded in the form of tiny pits on the disk. The drive then feeds the data to a computer for processing. [ ^ ]

3. It could be you [BHMS]

« Heehee weeoh aweem away,
don't fear, my darling,
the Lions sleep tonight »

In March 2008, fourteen years ago, the Young Lions had not met for twenty-five years. In all of that quarter of a century they did not spent one single minute making sounds together. The band's now presumed to be final performance was on Wednesday March 2nd 1983, at the opening of an exhibition at the ABK art academy in Arnhem [ * ]. That event, by the way, was recorded. But the recording has never been made public. Yet.

Looking back, it was the duration of a mere finger's snap that all of a sudden grew them old. A finger's snap of near to four decades. That's half of a lifetime that zapped by, counting from that final 1983 performance onwards up to this writing today. Between then 2008 and now 2022 the five-some did meet up a couple times (there's a short videoclip from more recent days in which singer Rob (Scholte) still held strong in his Den Helder museum and the five can be briefly heard and seen choir-ing together). Little doubt now that the ABK performance back in 1983 is to remain the Lions's last roar. Forever.

But in 2008, also near to a decade and a half back in time, there was scheming and talking and thinking and eating and drinking. And, be it but for a short while, a jointly fantasised day seemed nigh on which the Lions as a band would record anew. And perform.

"We had a ball," a memo written early February 2008 reads. "Whiskey & liverwurst in the Arti, mixed grill at Nam Kee on the Zeedijk. We were looking forward. Tim (Benjamin) seemed pretty eager. He will be there. Harold (Schellinx) will meet up with Ronald (Heiloo), and try to convince him to put aside moral, ethical and other objections, and at least give it a try. Fails not so far as he who never dares!"

They booked rehearsal space and time, for two days, March 4 and 5, in Melodyline in the Amsterdam Bijlmer ( ** ). Two days meant to provide the five-some with an idea of feasibility and possible directions for the further development of a renewed cooperation. A follow-up had been planned as well: the week of 19 to 25 May they'd start spending a number of days in one of Rob's spaces, somewhere in the dunes, and then possibly continue from there to a recording studio in the vicinity. Yes, the Lions were thinking big. A thinking that included engineers, equipment, technicians, transport. On top of it all, there even was a time and a place for the band to appear and perform live, un- or just vaguely announced, in the context of the ookoi's residency at the 2008 Maastricht Kunsttour, on the 24th or 25th of May. All of it was on everyone's agenda. For a while.

But when came the time of reckoning in the morning of March 4th, and the Melodyline sessions kicked of, it was with no Rob (Scholte). His throat was hurting, or his head was aching, or in any case, he could not make it that day. Neither the next one. He sent Edzard Dideric as his messenger, who brought the small electronic keyboard Rob had been planning to use.

Maybe it was Edzard who shot the two pictures that are accompanying these words. Or maybe it was not. The Lions-minus did not let Edzard join in their playing, though. (And I cannot remember whether they used Rob's keyboard.)

It could be you, the third track in this awesome foursome, got its name from a chorus-like line that Tim Benjamin sang. It is a short montage built from the recordings that Benjamin, Heiloo, Mertens and Schellinx made on that Tuesday and Wednesday in 2008, recordings that all together add up to over two hours of improvised song snippets. Snippets played that once and then never again.

Not, mind you, that anyone should care about any of this. Or that anyone would. Or that anyone will. The significance of it all indeed resides in its utter insignificance. Eventually nothing really matters: thát is the triumph of time.

notes __ ::
(*) See Harold Schellinx. ULTRA - Opkomst en ondergang van de Ultramodernen, een unieke Nederlandse muziekstroming (178-1983). Lebowski, Amsterdam 2012, page 387. [ ^ ]
(**) Melodyline, on the Willem Fenengastraat, was a space housing a number of rehearsal and recording studios for bands. It was destroyed by fire in May 2015. [ ^ ]

4. Re_2525 [ookoi​​]

The picture below is a visual abstract that FPCM made of the ookoi's classic 2525, an HD-videoclip lasting precisely 50 seconds, produced by the spacetime mangling duo on the wonderful beach north of Hollum on the Dutch island of Ameland, in May 2008, as a present for their friend and co-ex-Young Lion Rob (Scholte)'s 50th birthday. ( * )

2525 consists and was shot in precisely fifty 'takes', 50 scenes. If you study the images carefully, lying in the sand between the two of them, next to an M-Audio digital dictaphone, you will see a hotel bell. Also, you will become aware of all these little pieces of paper that seem to be twirling around; they show the numbers 1 to 50. Each was meant to remind the ookoi of the number defining each next scene. A hit of the bell then provided the audio cue for each of the fifty scenes.

For the first scene, Har$ and FPCM each hit one random chord. For the second one, they hit two. For the third scene, they hit three ... and so on and so further, until the fiftieth scene, where they both hit 50 random chords on their electric guitars, one after the other.

Each of the fifty filmed scenes then was time-compressed, in order to make it last precisely one second; making for a total playing time of 50 seconds ... [ From a certain point onwards the number of 'hits per second' become audible bass frequencies: 50 hits in a second corresponds to a 50 Hz tone .... And here's a little calculation: in 2525 FPCM and Har$ each hit 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 50 = 1275 guitar chords. That makes for a total of 2 x 1275 = 2550 hits ... ]

The fourth and final track in this eight awesome foursome is a precise re-make of the audio part of 2525, not using digital time-compression, but a meticulously timed cut-up of the 2 x 1275 hits.

notes __ ::
(*) Observe how through this date, May 2008, the inquisitive reader will be able to guess herself the multiple threads that link this story to the previous one... [ ^ ]

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tags: ookoi, young lions, park4dtv

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