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content 08

2008 - december

• 31st :: Thinking can be Fun! Donation's debut CD Nouveau chemin de guerre surprised me, and thus managed to become my favorite 2008 album.  Then LTM's re-issue of The Fruit of the Original Sin, a classis Crepuscule post-punk compilation from the early 1980's, takes us back all the way to the London of 1981 and the recording of Furtive Tears - my first ever (and most probably also last ever) Christmas song - in a St. John's Wood basement right next door to Paul McCartney's mansion. Here's to a genuine ghost of Chrismas past ... [sbpc 26 | 288]
• 23rd :: « das kleine, Intiem » (Tuned City, Berlin _v) About a Found Tapes Archiv, about the east German Funkhaus and its Laboratory for Acoustic Musical Obstacles; about the subharchord; about Ben Roberts' Sounds of the Flohmarkt, about Soinu Mapa, and about the general as well specific conditions relating to the toilets in art museums all over the world ... [287]
• 08th :: un-Tuned City (Tuned City, Berlin _iv) Instead of walking up and down to Mitte, I walked up and down Neukölln's Sonnenallee, and brought six found tapes home to Cake and Coffee's. There I finished writing my favorite found found tapes quote onto the gallery's freshly whitened walls. Letter by letter, word by word, all of it in tape ... [286]
• 04th :: Elderly artists, some of them sleeping In Brussels I performed with J.J. at the Festival des Sons Liberes, where we shared the stage with Charlotte Hug, british improv veteran Terry Day and Camusi from Bologna. The Italian duo performed again on sunday, during a great party at Marco and Patrizia's superb Brussels loft, where I met a belgian double bass player wearing a smashing neck-tie, who told me how, fifteen years ago, one very early friday morning he had performed for four hundred mooing belgian cows ... [sbpc 25 | 285]
• 01st :: Monkey business, etc. Our first set was for the zoo's community of Baboons. We then turned around for a second set, dedicated to Chimène the Gibbon, a very shy ape, but a fantastic singer. It was very special indeed to experience the mingling of the sounds from our dictaphones, the sound of Anthony's guitar, that of Jean's double bass, and the metallic percussion hit and bowed by Rébus and myself, with the sounds of the zoo around us. The garden and the animals were very much like a fifth musician, and the whole performance indeed spun itself into the intricate web of relations that we had intended, heralding in its own modest way the transition of contemporary art into a new altermodern era. [284]

2008 - november

• 26th :: Kings, Queens & Koons The Versailles palace until the january 4th, 2009, is home to a selection of seventeen kandy-colored sculptures by american postpop- and kitch-art star Jeff Koons. Riches to riches ... from surface to surface ... because of course that it is, and of course that it's not. [283]
• 19th :: Steal this for the love of god I stood skull-to-skull with for the love of god, a postart extravaganza signed Damien Hirst and bearing the London platinum hallmark of 2007. It stands solitarily exposed in a small dark room in the Amsterdam RIjksmuseum ... No, the weak won't inherit the world ... [282]
• 12th :: Neurosen der Präzision (Tuned City, Berlin _iii) At Staalplaat's we met a charming young japanese musician who 'knew about the festival since coming', and Rinus wrote a radio memory on Brandon Labelle's white tablecloth. We then embarked upon the long march back down to the Weserstrasse ... The first stage of that journey led us to food and the second one to music. With its third stage we came to knowledge, as we arrived at Udo Noll's place, who that evening was just about to test his upcoming presentation of the radio aporee soundmaps, played by means of a gps enabled cell phone ... We thus listened to the many sonic ghosts lurking in the neighborhood, while Udo shared with us his passion for maps and the history of surveying ... [281]
• 07th :: Cake & Coffee (Tuned City, Berlin _ii) In a night shop at the border of Kreuzberg we bought some drinks and sat down, next to two big but friendly germans. "Mok mok jaha!" one of them cheered in Klingonisch ... "Ruhm und ehre: mok mok jaha!," he said, "also you can learn it" ... The next day my feet hurt a lot ... Mok mok jaha! for das kleine in Berlin was still lying ahead. [280]

2008 - october

• 29th :: Light Budget, Heavy Thinking (Tuned City, Berlin _i) In this first of several reports on Tuned City, an exhibition and conference project in Berlin, Germany, which took place between july 1st and 5th of this year, read about sirens in Berlin, about Ryijo Ikeda's spectra/matrix installation next to the parisian Tour Montparnasse, and about the two old ladies that rode with me on the bus from Hauptbahnhof to Neukölln ... "Wherever you go, there you are" ... [279]
• 12th :: Hanna's Sirens (Tuned City, Berlin _o) Hanna Buhl came from Berlin to Paris, on a summer-sound-sabbatical, and re-discovered there a sound by her unheard since early youth: the testing of the sirens ... to capture that sound and its feeling, on the first wednesday of october, she sent out a team of 'siren hunters' to set up their microphones along the Seine ... [278]
• 02nd :: The right to be slow With the ookoi, we were embedded artists at PICNIC, the annual amsterdam new-media-mega fest ... [277]

2008 - september

• 22nd :: Souvenirs de vacances_("Hear what you think !") I talked with rod summers about his career and work, but most about the VEC audio exchange program, an audio mail art project run by him between 1978 and 1983. the 16 1/2 hour collection of (mostly) 'home'-recordings nicely feature and illustrate several of the hang-ups and peculiarities of those years, as well as bringing to the fore the great overlap and intricate entanglement of the world of 'young and avantgarde art' with that of post-punk experimental pop in its bloom time, the late 1970s / early 1980s ... [276]
• 18th :: The Speed of Things "It was only after a while that it dawned upon me that she really thought that I was putting the tapes out there ... But isn't that wonderful? Imagine me roaming city streets, carefully watching ... looking for suitable spots to drape strands of magnetic tape that I carry along in my bag ... around flowers, in fences, in gutters ... Oh, it would be so much better ..." [275]
• 14th :: Psycho/Geo/Conflux in Brooklyn, NY _i "Something is going on here ... This is w-e-i-r-d ...," I heard one woman whisper into her cell phone, while looking suspiciously at the people surrounding her ... [274]

2008 - august

• 31st :: " Le chasseur " (foundtaping in brussels_ii) About the tape i stole last year in Brussels, from a parked red Toyota, and an audio cassette guide for christian pilgrims, found in the Rue Blaes ... [273]
• 29th :: Rags 'n' riches Watch me in a fine pair of sekppku pants, hand-tailored from formerly owned trousers drawn from a huge pile of rags provided by the Salvation Army. On the pile there was a sign: "Do not climb the mountain" ... [272]
• 27th :: Spiegeltje, spiegeltje About a black box, called RT.220 ME, that someone found in a dustbin on the parking-lot of a shopping mall in Marne-la-Vallée. [sbpc 24 | 271]
• 23rd :: Trashing, un)un)un)educated Noise ... sometimes it is white, sometimes it is pink; it may be brown, speckled, crackled or thermal ... even chaos is noise! Or should that be the other way round? ... [270]

2008 - july

• 28th :: Michel's Song of Praise On the evening of this year's Bastille Day, in the small basement studio of the parisian Radio AligreFM, a ten (wo)men strong 'Cracklebox Orchestra' gathered to perform a Kraakdoos Sinfonietta: a tribute to Michel Waisvisz, the inventor of the cracklebox (and much more besides), who recently passed away ... [sbpc 23 | 269]
• 23rd :: Mind: the gap (Hommage à Nam Jun Paik) "As ephemeral as the nightly view of a city from within an airplane flying overhead. As ephemeral as the view of Paris from within a car that is speeding along its ring way ..." Such was Daily's Sound Cityscape, 'Hommage to Nam Jun Paik' ... [sbpc 22 | 268]

2008 - june

• 29th :: _Twice Twice_: Diktat went double Swiss Last autumn Diktat met Bug in La Comète 347. Then one saturday evening mid june, it was Jeudi, at l'Ogresse, where we mistook an egg box for a hat. [sbpc21 | 267]
• 20th :: Michel Waisvisz (1949-2008) [266]
• 18th :: "Sing Laping, Sing ! I stood on the Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels, and watched a man pick up a cardboard box. When the man turned the box upside down, out there came tumbling a lot of 16 cassette tapes. He took the box. I picked up the tapes ... [sbpc20 | 265]
• 09th :: d_Revolution #2 Dutch writer Dirk van Weelden started to typecast his blogpostings. "Fold 'm and fly 'm!", or how to get trans-digital. [264]
• 06th :: Raudio Graffiti: almost live ! All about ookoi doing Radio Raudio at the 2008 Kunsttour from may 23rd till 25th in Maastricht, the Netherlands ... [rpc40 | 263]

2008 - may

• 14th :: free lodgings, free food In Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's From here to ear some thirty small, but loud and boisterous, sing birds are kept in a wide and light room of a parisian gallery, thus turned aviary. Flitting around and perching on a number of horizontally supported electric guitars, each connected, via a 'big muff' distortion unit, to a stage amplifier, the guitar-birds make 'sweet, sweet music'. They get their free lodgings, drink and food in return. It's the way of the world. Elegant and simple ... [262]
• 11th :: a new kind of water On time-reversing moving agents, how all falls into place, and how to make bridges sing ... [261]
• 04th :: i-tag-u | u-tag-me Portrait of the author as a musical tagcloud ... [260]

2008 - april

• 22nd :: Saskatoon : à demain (tot morgen!) "... a thousand demons from below and from above a thousand gods ..." Seven soundfiles for seven consecutive nights Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. [259]
• 18th :: Mythical Beasts, Corsets and Kites "Where are you, Wolf?" is the title of the soundtrack that I made for Yvonne Oerlemans' Mythical Beasts installation in the Visitor's Center of the Amsterdamse Bos. On the occasion of the opening of the show we went out to discover and record the sounds of the 'Amsterdam Forest'... [sbpc19|258]
• 14th :: Dung, dung, dung, beetle, bone, bone, dung, dung In the Louvre's 39 galleries dedicated to paintings from the northern schools, Jan Fabre traced a meandering monodic path marked by many large but often transient and fragile looking objects built from thousands of iridescent dung beetle elytra, slices of bone and angel hair. A flamboyant, repetitive and obsessive mix of body fluids, angels, warriors and carnivorous insects, that is cartoonish, jubilant and profoundly optimistic ... [257]

2008 - march

• 30th :: Au clair de la lune "... if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air and ocean are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done." (Charles Babbage, in: Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), ch.9) ___ Listen to the sound that was inscribed on a phonautogram made in France, in april 1860, and recently dug up from a parisian archive. Then read about ancient pottery recordings, and sound inscribed in paint stroked along an artist's canvas ... [256]
• 16th :: "I did not need that string anyway ..." Reverberations Paris-New York : everybody having an awful lot of art/rock/FUN with Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio at Studio Campus in Paris, and - not lightly to forget - David Watson's bagpipes ... [255]

2008 - february

• 24th :: The Great Washing In search of a music that does not make sound ... about ookoi's l'Ecoute, "Live Beyond the Paradiso", and the end of art ... about Oliver Vadrot's 'kiosque electronique' (a mobile placard), and the Brocante Sonore and Har$ performing chez Fukiko, a japanese hairdresser in Vincennes, France ... [254]
• 12th :: Karlheinz' Song of Praise For a special tribute edition of Aligre FM's "Songs of Praise" I dug up the original audio cassette recording of our 1982 interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen; on the process of composing the thirteenth piano piece (Lucifer's Dream), on the nature of time, on pop music, on what's wrong with collage, and on the 'terrible decadence' of western culture, and western music in particular ... [sbpc18|253]
• 08th :: Dead composers and a hairdresser (japanese) How I found a trace of that mysterious long lost pre-futurist Symphonie des Forces Mécaniques, written by the french composer Carol-Bérard in 1908 (or 1910)... [252]

2008 - january

• 06th :: restmuell Tapes found on a german Restmuell bin and elsewhere in Cologne, a pretty poetic inversion, crown of thorns, a cassette cemetery, fast-forward-ing granny, and restauring found cassettes while zipping champagne at december's Dorkbot ... [251]