After Five Years ...

("So, what has become of DJ Harsman?")

Happy birthday, WMRecordings! Congratulations Marco Kalnenek!

Time flies now, doesn't it? I greatly admire what Marco has achieved in these 5 years. The extremely divers and eclectic collection of fine music that he has made available online, presented with a lot of care and much respect for the music and artists, is priceless in every possible sense of the word. Priceless as in 'treasure', as much as priceless as in 'free' ... 100 x downloads x free x albums ...

Respect!

Every reason therefore also for me to be proud: in the guise of DJ Harsman I contributed to the label's very first release, on november 7th 2004. That was Water, Wind, Sails, compiled by Splogman as part of his 52 Weeks project. On it you will find my Oerdvlieg, played with the 'Geluideiland': an interactive soundmap of the Dutch island of Ameland that DJ Harsman composed when he roamed the island in may 2003.

Much has happened since.

And these very days I have a fine 5 year celebration lined up myself! For on october 7th 2004, just a little before Marco kicked off WMRecordings, in front of the Amsterdam RAI building I launched Raudio, which over the years has become a collection of 24/7 soundart and experimental one pure sound thing audio webstreams, built form several hundreds of hours of pure sound.

To celebrate Raudio's lustrum, we made RAUDIO IIIII: a free iPhone and iPod Touch application that will bring all this streaming sound to the inside of your pocket or to the palm of your hand.
RAUDIO IIIII will allow you to tune into each one of Raudio's twenty 24/7 audio web streams. Do it whenever you feel like, and do it wherever you are (povided within the reach of a 3G network or a Wifi connexion.) The collection includes - just to name two - the amazing 9 Beet Stretch (a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony slowed down - with pitch correction! - to play for 24 hours ...), and Het GesPreK 1982-2005, based upon a cut-up of a series of life musical conservations between 12 musicians, originally recorded in the Amsterdam Paradiso in 1982.

It is at this very same spot, in Paradiso's "Kleine Zaal", that on friday november 13th we will officially present our application, with a little festive speech, and performances by the ookoi and special guest Peter Zegveld. (The party starts at 17h, please do come, grab the app and join the fun!)

Meanwhile, rather than roaming wadden islands, DJ Harsman these days is roaming our cities, picking up audio tape debris from the streets and from bushes for his Found Tapes Exhibition. He is also writing a book on the noble art of foundtaping, which should be printed and available for your reading pleasure as of very early 2010. It will be partly written in english, but its main language is dutch, like is its title: "Alle Geluid Van De Wereld" ... Other kettles on the cooker for the near future include a curatorial project around Penelope Audela's collection of a boggling 144.567 audio cassette tapes. (Read some first reports on this 'monstrosity' here and here.)

Last but not least: let me finally start making the album for WMRecordings that I always have wanted to make but for some reason never got round to ....

Harold Schellinx - Paris, november 10th 2009
[ harsmedia.com ]