Listen to b.ookoipera "Long live ookoi! (Leve ookoi!)" on the Dutch 'Concertzender' radio platform. ... 🎧 Headphones recommended 🎧 ...
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17 min read 🤓

Long live ookoi! (Leve ookoi!): a b.ookoipera / een tehoorspel

june 17, 2024

"Long live ookoi! (Leve ookoi!)" is a one-hour radio piece—a b.ookoipera, een tehoorspel—in five radiophonic movements composed & edited by Har$ (Hefferman) for the ookoi as a contribution to Lukas Simonis' Klangendum series of experimental radiophonic emissions on the Dutch Concertzender radio, in 2024.

• Part I: In the land of abstract sounds
• Part II: De toekomst tegemoet
• Part III:Oceanen en de Wereldzee
• Part IV: We moeten de diepte in
• Part V: Jouw Beethoven, mijn Bach

Credits:

The bookoipera ‘Long live ookoi’ (Leve ookoi!) was conceived, composed and realised in the first months of 2024 by Harold Schellinx.
All environmental and acoustic instrumental sounds (except for the violin) as well almost all vocal sounds were originally made and played by Peter Mertens and Harold Schellinx as part of their online conversations for the ookoi’s weekly oki doki podcast series in 2017.
The oki dokoor theme with variations was composed, scored and MIDI-recorded by Harold Schellinx in MuseScore 3.5.
Almost all other electronics and keyboard parts were played and recorded by Harold Schellinx in the WORM sound studio, Rotterdam, September 4-11 2023 (Arp synthesizer, Hammond Organ, Optigan, Enner).
The layers of permutations of sets of vocal samples and violin sounds were custom scripted in Ruby, the scripts ran in Sonic Pi. The violin samples were provided by ldk1609 @ freesound.org, and played on an E.H. Roth 1925 instrument with an unstamped french bow. The ‘stampende’ bass & drum beat at the end of part 3 (‘Oceanen en de Wereldzee’, 6’59”- 7’36”) is an edited mash of two loops that I downloaded on a free online hip-hop samples web site, I forgot which one it was.
The ‘Long live ookoi’ lyrics and music at the beginning of part one (‘In the land of abstract sounds …’, 1’13”- 1’26” and 1’57”-3’09”) were edited by Harold Schellinx, combining two ‘Ode to ookoi’ songs generated by the free version of the AI music application Suno.com, given the prompt ‘A weird, original and beat-less song celebrating the art of the ookoi: Long live ookoi !’
All recording and editing for the ‘Leve ookoi!’ piece were done in the digital audio editing softwares Sound Studio, Reaper and Audacity on MacOS.

[ This version finished on Friday May 17th 2024 ]

The Dutch post-ULTRA, new media and speculative music duo the ookoi (Peter Mertens & Harold Schellinx), in 2015, in the mid of a decades spanning and still flourishing creative career, announced that from there and that moment on they were to write the bookoi, a labyrinthian and encyclopaedic printed-on-paper book_work_2_b covering all of their acts, works and proceedings from the very early 1980's onwards, in 1024 numbered paragraphs. Not listed in the approximate chronological order corresponding to their enumeration upwards from 1, but distributed over 1024 pages divided into 4 volumes of 256 pages each, according to one, contingent, listing of the first 210 natural numbers.

A Tristram Shandyesque undertaking, friends, foes, colleagues and critics not unduly observed and continue to observe.
But that may just be the point.

As FPCM states at the very beginning of the bookoipera (in Dutch): “We vertellen alles over onszelf, een verhaal over de werkelijkheid. Op papier.” (We tell everything about ourselves, a story about reality. On paper.)

As part of this ongoing process (the method) of writing the bookoi, in 2017—a year brimming with private & public drama—the ookoi meticulously chronicled their lives' and world's events in a brilliant wavering, near to all-revealing sound poem: the oki doki, a series of 52 curiously crafted, near to un-edited weekly podcasts that were live recorded ('in één keer goed’, good at once) over glitchy VoIP connections spanning the globe, streaming from Peter (FPCM, Frans Petermans, Drusz Kharg), being ‘hier’—here—(Amsterdam), to Harold (Har$, J.K. Harsman, Hars Hefferman) who was ‘daar’—there—(Vincennes, Montreuil, Charles de Gaulle airport, Kaohsiung, Tokyo, Amsterdam).

And back again.

Each episode’s playing time was precisely ten minutes and 24 seconds (10’24”, 624 seconds: recall that throughout a substantial part of their career, to this very day, 1024 = 210 has been the ookoi’s numerical directive).
The oki doki made for a total archived recording time of 52 x 624 = 52 x 52 x 12 seconds, that is: 9.013 hours of glitchy and lo-fi bookoi online spoken words and a fascinating glimpse of parts of the o(o)k(o)iniversum.

The nine hours of archived mp3-recordings, in chronological order, make up the spine of the one hour ‘Long live ookoi!’ (radiophonic) composition. Like the original podcasts, the bookoipera spans the year 2017, from the 4th of January to the 31st of December. However, unlike the (Dutch) textual summary for each of the 52 oki doki podcasts, that can be found in the limited edition pocket book ‘Alles is Goed (oki doki)’, the central layer of the bookoipera evolves from the word-less parts of the recordings (or, to be more precise, almost word-less: the words that remain can be found in the ‘bookoipera libretto’ text that is printed below).

The sonic spine of ‘Long live ookoi!’ revolves around the un-words, the things sounding between the words, including a few musical phrases (like the plucking of a toy guitar, some singing, and a single, solitary piano note). Musical fragments in the podcasts, as a matter of fact, were very, very rare. In playing time they add up to not much more than some three to five minutes. The ‘bookoipera’ however, deconstructs, re-composes and exploits them in quite some depth and length.
The two additional layers extracted from the podcast recordings are the oki doki’s name- & place-droppings: they are made up of all the names of people, persons (as well as of a couple of {art-}things) that were pronounced in the podcasts, as well as all the places that were mentioned, because they were/are part of our lives and hence entered thoughts and conversations.

The near to one hour triple helix of layers of (‘concrete’) sounds extracted from the archived podcast recordings is embedded in an electronic sound piece that presages, echoes and develops parts of the contingent sonic and temporal events caused by the intertwining of the strands of the oki doki helix. This ‘soundtrack’ is built mainly from recordings made during a one-week residency early September 2023 in the WORM sound studio in Rotterdam.

It all ads up to a dazzling speculative sonic & musical trip through the o(o)k(o)iniversum, a Tristram Shandyesque panorama indeed, that not only is part of the bookoi, but also forms one of the hatches of 624, a triptych fully built on the oki doki, and a companion to the ookoi’s earlier 1024, a work dated 2007 that presents sheer endless transformations of a different part of the ookoi’s vast archives of audio recordings documenting their interventions and performances over the years.

References:

(1) Harold Schellinx - Green-tainted Hyperbole, Quailish Quirks and Summerflies. The inscrutable genius of the ookoi. In: The Annual 2023. Korm Plastics, Nijmegen 2023
(2) Harold Schellinx - Towards an Unhearable Music. On conceptualism in the ookoi’s art. In: ‘Conceptual Approaches to Sound-Based Artistic Practices’, issue 21.2 of eContact!, the electronic journal of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), 2023

LIBreTTO

oki dokoor (thema & verdieping)

1.

      *{{
In the land of abstract sound
Where beats are nowhere to be found
There resides a peculiar crew
A sonic world only they knew

Stripping away the rhythmic norm
The ookoi’s create a sonic form
Words and whispers float in the air
Sounds blending without a care

Long live ookoi, the masters of sound
Their musique concrète truly profound
No drums or bass, just pure abstraction
In this beat-less world, they find satisfaction

Long live ookoi
Long live ookoi
Long live ookoi
      }}*


      1, 2, 7, 3, 2, 1, 9
De tune is een fade-up
—Hij ziet er goed uit, volgens mij,
ik kreeg hem, ik kreeg hem
ik kreeg hem, ik kreeg hem
op ’t […] kreeg ik ‘m binnen—
volgens mij al een paar jaar geleden
toen wij begonnen met het boek te schrijven
dat we zeiden: we vertellen alles over onszelf, een verhaal
—tijijijijd
de tijd gaat zo snel—
over de werkelijkheid
en papier
—Jezus! Het is verschrikkelijk, verschrikkelijk.
Zo, zo, zo, zo snel—

oki doki
ik weet niet hoe je oki doki schrijft
o - ki - do - ki
o - ki - do - do - do - do - ki
dollar $
—da’s mooi, zeg!—
o - ki - do - do - do - do - ki

the year of the coq
één, twéé … zááágen!

2.

—Funky fuck
Zullen we dan maar wat variëren?—
We are all Romans
We are all Romans
   are all Chinese

3.

—We vliegen de toekomst tegemoet

Gate 53!—

Applaus!
Applaus, applaus

Maar, maar, maar, maar, maar,
zingen wij,
zingen wij
plots,
over oceanen en de wereldzee
oceanen en de wereldzee

4.

en stampen, stampende beats
stampende beats
—always in the same key—

Reken maar, dat wij fout zijn
Streng

stampen, stampende beats
—do re mi fa sol la si do re mi fa sol la si do
do do
C
Tot mijn mijn de de de de de de de
paardenmensen, paardenmensen!—
Ja, ja, ja

—De methode, wat is de methode?
Denken denken denken denken—

Stampende beats
Natte kutjes

—De tijd loopt zo vreemd—
Precies.
De tijd loopt
De tijd loopt
de tijd draait
—De methode
stap stap stap stap—
::o ki do ki::
schrijdt voort
vliedt vliedt
tijd vliedt
vliegt
tijd vliegt vliegt
tijd vliegt
ruimte blijft
time flies
space stays stays stays stays stays
o k okee rich
3 2 1
driééé twééé ééén
honderd meter naar beneden
—en dan hoepla, hopla, hup
we moeten
de
de
de
de
diepte in
we moeten de diepte, we
moeten de diepte in

_in_vasie—

‘in ’t groene dal in ’t stille dal
waar kleine bloempjes bloeien
daar ruist een blanke waterval
en druppels spatten overal
om ieder bloempje te besproeien
ook het kleinste’

Natte kutjes
Paringstijd

zal die leven
zal die leven
zal die leven

Gloria
Gloria
Gloria

5.

Louie Louie

Applaus!
Applaus, —applaus—

...

Jouw Beethoven kan mijn Bach zijn
Jouw Beethoven
Mijn Bach

...

[ b.ookoi (i) | (ii) | 019 | 138 | 178 | 284 | 329 | 419 | 506 | 507 | 562 | 624 | 664 | 789 | 793 | 954 | b.ookoipera]

tags: ookoi, stduio, klangendum, WORM

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