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Awesome foursomes No. 506 and No. 507 were both drawn from the ookoi's latest album, ‘Home is my Rome‘, an imaginary cyber-postpunk soundtrack exclusively based on and derived from original audio materials performed, streamed and recorded by the ookoi in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (nl), on Sunday May 7th 2006, between 11h and 17h, as part of Max Kisman's ‘Roam is my Home’, an exhibition-cum-multimedia-event dealing with the question to what extent modern identity is shaped by novel means of communication such as the internet, mobile phones and digital photography.

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

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Home is my Rome
Awesome Foursomes (xix - No. 506, xxi - No. 507)

september 10th, 2024

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

[ Stduio Numbr pages' contents continue to evolve. Stories in, on, over and around the numbrs, part of the b.ookoi, over time will be added upon, adjusted, refined, retold, re-deconstructed, in a dynamic process, shaped whatever way memories may make them be. ]

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« ... nothing sounds like Rome, nothing sounds like home ... »

Sunday May 7th, 2006, was a memorable date in the ookoi's history. That day, the duo premiered their green ookoi tails: stage overalls, craft~fully designed and handmade by Bernadette Corstens and Mieke Dietvorst. The occasion: a six hour long performance, that via webstream and podcast pervaded cyberspace, as part of the final day of Max Kisman's ‘Roam is my Home’, an exhibition and multimedia event in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, in which Kisman searched for possible answers to questions like: to what extent modern identity is shaped by novel means of communication such as the internet, mobile phones and digital photography?

It was at the heydays of our Raudio netstreams and podcasts, long before such digi-things turned mainstream.

It is a shame that no detailed map was drawn of the ‘muziektafel’ that day at the Centraal Museum, or on some other of the early days of the ookoi's doing, documenting and explicating the predominantly analogue bric-à-brac that made up the collection of sound-makers and sound-keepers, used in the weaving of their no-beginning-no-end urban folk and future popp music, whose continuous signals got chopped up into the discrete bits that were fed to the net, to live on in the digital multiverse that then had just had begun to emerge. From their very birth onwards the duo embodied the two poles that seem the ultimate yin and the yang of our physical world, the continuous and the discrete, the analogue and digital. The ookoi always were ahead of their time. Hardcore and perpetually roaming the fringes. Cyber-postpunk warriors, navigating the quickly expanding matrix's labyrinthine mazes with a defiant resilience, and always somehow slipping through. Outsiders by choice, they thrive in the shadows of a digital underground, where chaos is the currency of survival

An interesting coincidence: on the same day in 2006 that the ookoi did the weaving of their sonic neural netstream tapistry in the Centraal Museum, in the same place as part of the same event, author and philosopher Dirk van Weelden, his brother artist Willem and Peter Peters discussed Mark Neale's movie ‘No maps for these territories’ (from 2000, shot in 1999; it is an 80 minutes interview with author William Gibson, driven around in the back of a limousine rigged with cameras and electronic communication tool), parts of which were screened while the ookoi were making their sounds, thus in a way providing an alternative soundtrack for Neale's images. Maybe. I can't remember how things went down. The ookoi performing wore headphones, jacked into their own universe, warped into space-times beyond the single and singular, pulsating moment, tethered to the here and now by the thrum of their music. They were then and still now are: explorers, indeed, mapping out new territories in emerging liminal zones.

A listing of smells in William Gibson's Neuromancer, interspersed with some of its references to music:
“...the smell of his own stale sweat;—(a voice that was the music)—the smell of her skin, the smell of cooked meat, of perfume and cigarettes, a rhythm in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat, smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill, of a century's dripping gasoline, it smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion—(piped koto music, music that pulsed constantly through the cluster, cooked from vast librairies of digitalised pop)—Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja—(the music, it played you)—he smelled burning meat, boiled vegetables, with a smell of ginger, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine, he smelled scorched wood, the smell of Cuban cigarettes, of frying food, of fresh raw seafood, the beer-smelling twilight, the smell of preserved ginger, of sweat and concrete, of dust, Cuban tobacco—(fragments of music from countless speakers)—it smelled of money, of some metallic aftershave, a smell of sweat and bored tension, of running water and flowers, of old magazines, straylight that smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed—(a music all horns and piano)— like church, like he wipe 'em wi' laser, the air smelled of resins, it smelled scorched wool—(he felt for the music, the pulse faded, returned, faded; it defined itself at the center of things).”

The archived netstream as recorded on that Sunday in the Utrecht Centraal Museum space as part of max Kisman's ‘Roam is my Home’ became the exclusive soundmaterial that now, eightteen years later, we used in the making of the imaginary soundtrack ‘Home is my Rome’.

«The year is 2147, and humanity has merged with its creations. Bio-engineered humans walk side by side with sentient AIs. The line between the organic and the synthetic has long been blurred. In the layered labyrinth of the New Vatican, where artificial candlelights ceaselessly flicker like rain ghosts and saintly statues pierce smog-choked streets and alleys, Frans Peterman and Hars Hefferman navigate an intricate web of digital and physical realities, haunted by the fragmented and nebulous memories of their pasts. Seasoned cyber-musicians with neural jacks and a penchant for the arcane arts of coding, we here find the intrepid duo embroiled in a script that threatens to upend the fragile equilibrium of the surrounding metropolis' underworld, as their no-compromise musical endeavours transfigure a complex and dark conspiracy that stretches from the cyber-slums of the lower city to the opulent heights of corporate arcology: home is not a place, it is a relentless pursuit of belonging.»

{{The pics above of the ookoi performing at ‘Roam is my Home’ at the Centraal Museum on Sunday May 7th 2006 are stills from a video shot that day by Ate von Hes.}}

{{Thank you Max Kisman for the coverpic of the ‘Home is my Rome’ album.}}

No. 506

No. 507

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

The b.ookoi are coming!

—wordt vervolgd—

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tags: ookoi

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