PITCH - MUTATING TURNTABLES
CONCERT - EXHIBITION
The’pitch’ concerts take place on three locations: Matrix Art Project, Recyclart and Ancienne Belgique. In MAP the sound installations of’pitch - mutating turntables’ will be introduced concertante by the German-Dutch collective Staalplaat Soundsystem (18 October) and by the French bricoleur Alain de Filippis. On weekdays (23 -26 October) concert perfo-rmances will be held by night at Recyclart, the restored station of Brussels-Chapelle.’pitch - mutating turntables’ will finish off on 26 October with an event in the club of Ancienne Belgique.
Exhibition
Staalplaat Soundsystem
Since 2000, the loosely-fixed collective Staalplaat Soundsystem (SSS) has carried out ‘musique korrekt’ elaborations at varying locations, performances with implements and home-made appliances that hold the middle somewhere between orchestra and installation. Formally, SSS reinterprets the modernist tradition of sound installations: this collective combines the mechanistic, constructive elements skimmed from ‘sound art’ with the dynamism of techno and DJ culture. With their four-armed record players, dot-matrix printers, ‘vinyl killers’ (red plastic toy cars functioning as autonomous turntables), radios and modified kitchen gear, to name just a few, SSS works out eclectic audio collages which tend to sound like a toppling record cabinet. Prior to this the group brought us a composition for 104 washing machines, a ballet for 12 electric floor polishers and the ‘great earitainment road show’, where pogo-ing spin dryers, flute-playing vacuum cleaners, drumming jigsaws and a choir of mixers are co-ordinated by a four-armed turntable.
For ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, SSS members Geert-Jan Hobijn and Carsten Stabenow have created ‘Speel Goed’ (2002), an on-site Matrix Art Project inculcated variant on the work ‘Yokomono’ (carried out for the first time in Vienna’s Künstlerhaus, in the framework of the exhibition ‘Sounds & Files’, March 10 – April 16 2000). ‘Speel Goed’ is constructed of amongst other things ‘vinyl killers’, portable radios, children’s records in three languages, and toy trains. On top of leaving behind a sonic fire-curtain, the work throws light on playful reflections about childhood.
Select performances Staalplaat Soundsystem:
‘Yokomono’ (Vienna, March 10 – April 16 2000)
‘A Composition for Eight Refrigerators’ (Stralsund, August 12 2000)
‘A Composition for 104 Washing Machines’ (Berlin, September 8 2000)
‘A Lullaby in Kitchenland’ (Berlin, November 14 2000)
‘Earitainment in Stereo’ Transmediale.01 (Berlin, February 7-18 2001)
‘Sweet Sissy and the Ballroom Hiss’ (Gent, March 26-30 2002)
The French autodidact Alain De Filippis, active for more than twenty years as a sound artist, describes his sonorous work as ‘cinema for the ear’. Operating out of Nantes, he works within four territories: writing compositions in his own studio, in concert situations (comprised partly of improvising a play on variables like space), in relation to other disciplines like theatre and dance, and in an exhibition context using sound installations. De Filippis continues to depart from his starting conviction that for the listener, every sound possesses a suggestive power that reaches the unconscious, there to stimulate one’s subjective imagination. The Frenchman’s compositions are worked out as scenarios: these are mental representations — figurative or abstract — gleaned from organised electro-acoustic sounds. ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ delivers De Filippis’ ‘Phono Parade’ (June 13 2002 on display earlier in Blockhaus DY 10, Nantes). His auditory and visual installation consists of vinyl and turntable as a basis. The two apparently irretrievably-connected elements are pulled apart by the artist, he relieves them of their original functions; now vinyl and turntable act as autonomous entities to create new sounds and images. What’s more ‘Phono Parade’ plays on our collective memory: in his improvisation De Filippis encloses chunks of debris from bygone hits and loops from long-forgotten voices. On the opening night of ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, the artist inaugurates in concert his second, specially on-location designed for Matrix Art Project, version of ‘Phono Parade’.
Select discography Alain De Filippis:
‘Ton dieu ne s’appelle-t-il pas Ego ?’ (Metamkine, 1994, 3 inch CD)
‘Bynocchio de Mergerac le Dics’ (Bouffou Théâtre, 1995, CD)
‘Petites Musiques de Bruits’ (Ground Fault Recordings, 2001, CD
Pierrick Sorin
‘Titre Variable N°1’
(1999)
In this small installation we see the artist walking backwards on a record player, like a guinea pig running in his exercise wheel. The accompanying ditty is that of an LP playing backwards: repetitive and incomprehensible, but the artist tries to tease the spectator into distilling some kind of notion or sense out of this sound-soup (from whence the title of the work proceeds as well). Sorin’s operative technique in ‘Titre Variable N°1’’ (1999) might well be called ingenious: a holographic projection of the artist shines upon a wall behind the pick-up. ‘Titre Variable’ (1999) exists in different versions — for instance with a mother, father, son and daughter playing the lead role — each time acted by Sorin. The work is, in keeping with the French artist’s oeuvre, a humorous installation which takes the daily grind of everyday life as its subject. Another reading of the work suggests irony concerning the star status of the DJ.
With its ironic view of artistic production, the film-, video- and installation work created by the Nantes-based Pierrick Sorin (1960) couples bittersweet humour together with a moderated feeling of desertion and despair. Since 1987, in his ‘autofilmages’ (the short videos of snapshot-moments from his own life filmed on Super8) and his ‘mini-sorins’ (holographic projections), the artist has played the leading role himself. There he evokes the ‘everyman’, referring to slapstick and the spirit of the comic silent film. In the first instance the terribly direct work of the Frenchman comes across as quite hilarious to the spectator, but there is no escaping its tragic aftertaste: Sorin battles against the trials and tribulations of everyday life, with work that seeks a compromise between the absurd and the naïve. Insofar as the artist chooses to work with simple means, the audio-visual achievements of the young Frenchman are astonishing on a technical level. Besides this is the fact that Sorin’s installations often offer us a glimpse into the kitchen: behind the scenes an exposed web of projectors, mirrors, and the whole circuitry of illusion is dismantled.
‘Titre Variable N°1’, 1999, DVD, monitor, mirror, turntable, 88 x110 x50 cm, Collection of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris.Fatimah Tuggar
‘Turntable’
(1996)
‘Turntable’ consists of a pick-up and LPs imprinted with colourful faifai (African raffia). From the turning record issues the music of a popular Nigerian singer. The work poses questions concerning the friction between Western and African cultures, elaborated upon from out of the personal history of this Nigerian-American artist, and possibly serving as a paradigm for a renewal of culture.
In her work Fatimah Tuggar (1967) researches the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, in particular the notions of the feminine and of the home. With this she poses questions about the social and cultural implications for both industrialised and developing countries of the impact of technology — means which are allocated to persons and regions via political and financial ways or via information channels. Taking as her departure point things like her personal background along with its traditions (Tuggar was born in Northern Nigeria, grew up for a part in England and resides for the moment in New York) and stereotypical image-formations drawn from popular culture, Tuggar worked in the first phase with implements (like ventilators, pots and a turntable as well). These serve as metaphorical associations for traditionally female materials and spaces within African culture. In a second phase Tuggar utilises ‘found images’. Her digitally constructed works are on the one hand forced assemblages of collages which favour strongly-laden images: frames taken from family albums, brochures and advertising and out of populist media sources. Tuggar’s installations and computer montages reach for Western and African iconography to expose the irony of stereotypes stemming from materialistic cultures and the power structures that exist between the ‘first’ and the ‘third’ worlds. Adding to this is that they test the limits of the artist’s own cultural multiplicity, forming its negation.
‘Turntable’ 1996, turntable, faifai (raffia disks with digital imprint), entertainment centre 48 x 24 x 18 inchesCollection of Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica
Photo credits: Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton
Astrid Küver
Since the Nineties clubbing, MTV, computer games and electronic dance music have formed an important aspect of Western (commercial) youth culture. Strangely enough (?) men dominate the DJ culture, only rarely do we find a woman behind the turntables. With the evolving series of works ‘(Djane) Slipservice’ Astrid Küver has been laying that fact to rest since 1995. Central to that body of works – her still-growing project includes videos, installations and photos – are slip mats: felt cycles that form the buffer between vinyl and pick-up and that are normally used by DJs in manipulations such as scratching to absorb shocks, to protect the record from damage or to keep the vinyl in place. The prints appearing on Küver’s long string of colourful, hand-crafted slip mats – the artists made more than a hundred pairs between 1995 and 2001 – point out the sloganesque nature of youth- and advertising- jargon. With her handiwork techniques, she then once again emphasizes the femininity of her creations, balancing as they do on the border between product design and sculpture. Exemplars from ‘Untitled (Slip Mats)’ will be offered for purchase during the course of ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, a deed by which the artist fast becomes a product herself.
Astrid Küver (1967) studied graphic design and fine arts at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen (1993), and completed her graduate degree in 1995 at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Next to a long series of paintings – mainly raw brushed fragmentary shots of her mmediate environment and portraits of friends and family in strident colours – she also weaves carpets and makes slipmats that, shut up in their artisanal character, censure the technology and machismo of the contemporary music/ DJ culture. Furthermore ‘DJane’ (female equivalent of DJ) Küver schematises her identity as artist with these works, as well as the product strategies bound up with it that are the common currency in today’s culture-corporation.
‘Untitled (Slip Mats)’(1995 – 2001)
‘Untitled (Slip Mats)’, 1995 – 2001, slip mats in felt with variable imprint, 12 inch cross section, Collection of Galerie Wieland, Berlin.
Photo credits: Galerie Wieland
Diane Landry
‘Les Tables Tourmentes’
(1999)
On the platforms of the twenty turntables red plastic animals can be observed. The whole is covered in wrapping paper. The plastic animals on the turning pick-ups make contact with the paper, thereby causing vibrations. The rubbing and vibrations cause a chafing sound. ‘Les Tables Tourmentes’ can be read as a strong metaphor for the ‘condition humaine’.
Diane Landry (1958) lives and works in Québec. Since 1987 she has exhibited in countries including Canada, the United States, France, Austria and Germany. She also gives performances regularly. In her work the artist integrates diverse disciplines. She produces what she herself calls ‘oeuvres mouvelles’: installations, sculptures and shows that integrate a number of heterogeneous objects. By means of a play of movement, sound, light and shadow, Landry transforms her material into symbolic statements about our daily life and our consumer society. Landry’s work is playful, flirts with elements of our cultural and folk imagination, bursts with allusions to our contemporary social organisation, and has a poetry that often tests the limits of the absurd.
‘Les Tables Tourmentes’, 20 turntables, copper, variable objects, computer, midi and lamps, 190 x 190 x 80 cm, Collection of the artist.Photo credits: Paul Litherland
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Rotoreliefs’, a series of twelve prints which must be observed on rotating record players (33rpm) and in this way beguile depth perceptions, were available to be seen and to be purchased for the first time in Paris in 1935. On the thirty-first edition of ‘Concours Lépine’, a fair for the presentation of inventions, Duchamp had erected a small stand of hardly three square meters for his ‘Rotoreliefs’. His collective project with the author Henri-Pierre Roché consisted of 500 exemplars of 6 painted records that the buyer could install at home on his own pick-up. The two set up their stand in such a way that some of the records turned horizontally, and others vertically. Later Duchamp created more ‘Rotoreliefs’: his series expanded to include twelve pieces and the editions were on display in places like New York (1953 and 1963), Paris (1959), and Milan (1965). For the last occasion, the artist fabricated hanging wall elements: wooden crates covered in black velvet, where a motor in a centrally-placed turntable showed the vertically-mounted ‘Rotoreliefs’ to their best advantage. ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ exposes the 12 optical works of Duchamp in this very same arrangement.
‘Rotoreliefs’(1935, 1953, 1959, 1963 and 1965)
‘Rotoreliefs’ (Optical Discs), Paris 1935, Set of six cardboard discs, printed on both sides in colour offset lithography, each 20 cm in diameter, designed to be rotated at 33 1/3 rpm in a circular plastic holder (25 cm in diameter), Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp.
Photo credits: Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp
EN/OF
The German EN/OF presents a limited (100 exemplars) edition that joins together two worlds: that of the plastic arts and that of experimental music. Wrapped in neutral black sleeves, these editions combine an artist’s edition (still approximately 30 x 30 cm; the size of a record sleeve) with a vinyl LP. The link between sound and image is, in the thus far nine printed editions, as of yet not present. But according to the initiator Robert Meijer this isn’t really necessary: ‘questioning the cross-pollination between disciplines is more valuable than seeking them out.’
EN/OF 001: Liam Gillick / Ekkehard Ehlers & Joseph Suchy
EN/OF 002: Olafur Eliasson / Heimir Björgúlfsson
EN/OF 003: Tobias Rehberger / Stephan Mathieu
EN/OF 004: Sarah Morris / Jan Jelinek
EN/OF 005: Henrik Håkansson / Alejandra & Aeron
EN/OF 006: Angela Bulloch / TV Pow
EN/OF 007: Gerwald Rockenschaub / The Rip-Off Artist
EN/OF 008: Carsten Höller / Wander (Freek Kinkelaar & Frans De Waard)
EN/ OF 009: Simon Starling / Oren Ambarchi
Concerts
Staalplaat Soundsystem
Since 2000, the loosely-fixed collective Staalplaat Soundsystem (SSS) has carried out ‘musique korrekt’ elaborations at varying locations, performances with implements and home-made appliances that hold the middle somewhere between orchestra and installation. Formally, SSS reinterprets the modernist tradition of sound installations: this collective combines the mechanistic, constructive elements skimmed from ‘sound art’ with the dynamism of techno and DJ culture. With their four-armed record players, dot-matrix printers, ‘vinyl killers’ (red plastic toy cars functioning as autonomous turntables), radios and modified kitchen gear, to name just a few, SSS works out eclectic audio collages which tend to sound like a toppling record cabinet. Prior to this the group brought us a composition for 104 washing machines, a ballet for 12 electric floor polishers and the ‘great earitainment road show’, where pogo-ing spin dryers, flute-playing vacuum cleaners, drumming jigsaws and a choir of mixers are co-ordinated by a four-armed turntable.
For ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, SSS members Geert-Jan Hobijn and Carsten Stabenow have created ‘Speel Goed’ (2002), an on-site Matrix Art Project inculcated variant on the work ‘Yokomono’ (carried out for the first time in Vienna’s Künstlerhaus, in the framework of the exhibition ‘Sounds & Files’, March 10 – April 16 2000). ‘Speel Goed’ is constructed of amongst other things ‘vinyl killers’, portable radios, children’s records in three languages, and toy trains. On top of leaving behind a sonic fire-curtain, the work throws light on playful reflections about childhood.
Select performances Staalplaat Soundsystem:
‘Yokomono’ (Vienna, March 10 – April 16 2000)
‘A Composition for Eight Refrigerators’ (Stralsund, August 12 2000)
‘A Composition for 104 Washing Machines’ (Berlin, September 8 2000)
‘A Lullaby in Kitchenland’ (Berlin, November 14 2000)
‘Earitainment in Stereo’ Transmediale.01 (Berlin, February 7-18 2001)
‘Sweet Sissy and the Ballroom Hiss’ (Gent, March 26-30 2002)
Alain De Filippis
The French autodidact Alain De Filippis, active for more than twenty years as a sound artist, describes his sonorous work as ‘cinema for the ear’. Operating out of Nantes, he works within four territories: writing compositions in his own studio, in concert situations (comprised partly of improvising a play on variables like space), in relation to other disciplines like theatre and dance, and in an exhibition context using sound installations. De Filippis continues to depart from his starting conviction that for the listener, every sound possesses a suggestive power that reaches the unconscious, there to stimulate one’s subjective imagination. The Frenchman’s compositions are worked out as scenarios: these are mental representations — figurative or abstract — gleaned from organised electro-acoustic sounds. ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ delivers De Filippis’ ‘Phono Parade’ (June 13 2002 on display earlier in Blockhaus DY 10, Nantes). His auditory and visual installation consists of vinyl and turntable as a basis. The two apparently irretrievably-connected elements are pulled apart by the artist, he relieves them of their original functions; now vinyl and turntable act as autonomous entities to create new sounds and images. What’s more ‘Phono Parade’ plays on our collective memory: in his improvisation De Filippis encloses chunks of debris from bygone hits and loops from long-forgotten voices. On the opening night of ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, the artist inaugurates in concert his second, specially on-location designed for Matrix Art Project, version of ‘Phono Parade’.
Select discography Alain De Filippis:
‘Ton dieu ne s’appelle-t-il pas Ego ?’ (Metamkine, 1994, 3 inch CD)
‘Bynocchio de Mergerac le Dics’ (Bouffou Théâtre, 1995, CD)
‘Petites Musiques de Bruits’ (Ground Fault Recordings, 2001, CD)
Comae
23 okt 20.00/ recyclart
Comae is the co-operative link between the Londoner Robert Hampson and Janek Schaefer. Insofar as these gentlemen have widely divergent backgrounds to draw, they share an interest in testing the limits of the sonic qualities of their set of instruments, in view of producing a ‘three-dimensional’ sound. Robert Hampson saw an international breakthrough in the middle of the Eighties with the skewed rock trio Loop. After three successful long players the group split at the beginning of the Nineties, and Hampson embarked on various collaborations (including Godflesh) to further his researches. He distinguished himself especially with the project Main, initially a collaboration with guitarist Scott Dawson, but now Hampson’s solo project since 1996. With the help of guitar, analogue, digital and electro-acoustic techniques, the Briton consistently rediscovers a delicate balance between presence and absence, between sound and silence. It delivers impressive, non-linear clouds of sound: abstract collages that allow themselves to be experienced as complex labyrinths. Janek Schaefer is trained as an architect. Active as a plastic artist and as a sound artist, his sonorous output centres around deconstruction. ‘Turntablist’ Schaefer is the master architect of turntables such as the ‘Twin turntable’ and the ‘Tri-phonic Turntable’ (according to the Guinness Book of Records ’the world’s most versatile turntable’): mutated pick-ups with which he explores and expands upon the compositional role of the instrument. In his improvisational sets Schaefer combines modified vinyl with treated field recordings and ‘found sounds’. This leads to sketch-like compositions that carry a slipstream of rich details along with them. Schaefer and Hampson founded the electro-acoustic project Comae in 1999, a feeling out of the dynamic of sound while being sensitive to location. In their sets the duo emphasizes the emotional and imaginary impact of the sound stream. Also here with ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, the goal is more important for them than the means: with the creation of ‘a space within a space’, Comae finds their applied techniques to be irrelevant.
Select discography Comae:
Comae (Rhiz, 2001)
Select discography Main:
Hydra-Calm (Beggars Banquet, 1992, CD)
Dry Stone Feed (Beggars Banquet, 1992, 12 inch & CDS)
Firmament (Beggars Banquet, 1993, CDS)
Motion Pool (Beggars Banquet, 1994, 3 x LP, CD)
Firmament II (Beggars Banquet, 1994, CD)
Corona (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Terminus (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Maser (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Haloform (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CD)
Ligature (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Kaon (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Neper (Beggars Banquet, 1995, CDS)
Hz (Beggars Banquet, 1995, 3 x LP & 2 x CD)
Firmament III (Beggars Banquet, 1996, CD)
Deliquenscence (Beggars Banquet, 1997, CD)
Tau (K-RAA-K)3, 2002, CD)
Select discography Janek Schaefer:
Recorded Delivery (Hot Air Records, 1999, 7 inch)
Out (K-RAA-K)3, 1999, CD)
Above Buildings (Fat Cat, 2000, CD)
Pulled Under (AudiOh!, 2002, CD)
Le Petit Théâtre de Mercelis (Audiosphere, 2002, CD)
Rink (AudiOh!, 2002, 3 inch CD)
GCTTCATT
23 okt 20.00/ recyclart
The Australian Martin Ng handles his CD-players and turntables as full-fledged instruments of creation. In his work he explores the friction between the digital, the analogue and the acoustic. This explains Ng’s collaboration with the likes of guitarist Oren Ambarchi or with the saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Jim Denley, both fellow country-mates of the sound artist. Next to this the Australian is active as GCTTCATT, together with the Austrian Matthias Gmachl – himself member of the laptop/ performance collective Farmers Manual, amongst other things. In essence Ng’s and Gmachl’s shared performances form an attempt to siphon DJ/ turntablism-practices into an audio-visually perfectly synchronised, highly detailed entropy. Through a collaboration between radical turntablism and real-time digital splicing plus recombination, GCTTCATT re-define DJing into a tour-de-force act of audiovisual atomisation and hyper-transmutation. In image and furious sound - on a similar level with the musique concrète of Schaeffer, Henry, Eric La Casa or Lionel Marchetti – GCTTCATT mixes digital techniques with analogue ones. Concretely the duo begins with vinyl manipulations that come from the hand of Ng. A camera registers his actions; Gmachl ‘scratches’ the projected images once again with the help of digital techniques. For ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, GCTTCATT will premiere a new performance modus operandi. Drawing upon inspiration from the ancient Chinese mythology of a demigod who travels the universe inhabiting the voids between the very fabric and molecules of our existence, the Interstitial Butcher is a demon who can atomise our existence by exploding us from within. ‘The Interstitial Butcher’ is a performance vehicle which starts from a DJ template but ‘transfects’ the notion of club culture performance from within with a virulently polymorphic aesthetic – the smallest shards of vinyl manipulation and DJ images are exponentially diced plus sub-atomically re-constituted into a dizzying multi-faceted multi-channel work. Sampledelica in the age of biotechnology.
Select discography Martin Ng:
Reconnaissance (Staubgold, 2001, CD & LP, Oren Ambarchi & Martin Ng)
Vergency (Grob, 2000, CD, Jim Denley & Martin Ng)
Select discography Mathias Gmachl & Farmers Manual:
fm (Mego, 1996, LP)
no backup (Mego, 1996/1999, CD/ CD-rom)
fsck (Tray, 1997, CD)
explorers_we (Or, 1998, 2 x CD)
Select discography GCTTCATT:
ampErase (Mego, 2001, CD)
Michael Gendreau
24 okt 20.00/ recyclart
For more than twenty years the American Michael Gendreau – in his solo work as much as in diverse collaborations – has aimed for the emotional and sonorous essence of turntables and vinyl. Trained as a physician and working as an acoustian– Gendreau’s designs include the sound isolation of machines – his musical career began in the early Eighties. As Crawling With Tarts, a duo with his partner Suzanne Dycus, he experimented with old vinyl and acetate shellac records (giving preference to pedagogical material or transcription records) which were played on turntables coupled to external motors. Their performances and releases (often called ‘Grand Surface Noise Operas’) confront the musical qualities of the superficial sounds with the moods and emotions carried within the existing recordings. Gendreau himself describes his solo work with the concepts ‘parataxis’, ‘environmental and temporal persistence’, ‘construction and collapse’, ‘sonification of scientific concepts’, ‘stochastic resonance’ and ‘elementalism’ (a distinction with which Gendreau would like to indicate an opposition to art and calculation, with a focus on preverbal significance and meaning). For his work ’55 pas de la ligne au n°3’, to be seen and heard in ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’, Gendreau places two old turntables on a chassis of ‘shakers’, systems that generate vibrations. He controls the turntable installation with the aid of seismic accelerometers, making use of transcriptions records amongst others. He offers up a black-as-night crescendo of murmuring superficial sounds. Gendreau presented ’55 pas de la ligne au n°3’ for the first time in 2001, at the ‘Semana Internacional Música Experimental’ in Barcelona; for ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ Gendreau designs an on-site for Recyclart-adapted version.
Select discography Crawling With Tarts:
Crawling With Tarts (L100X)’ (ASP, 1984, cassette)
Bombast From the Hut (ASP, 1984, cassette)
Teaparty (ASP, 1984, cassette)
Tearoom (ASP, 1984, cassette)
Loneliness (ASP, 1985, cassette)
Voccianna (ASP, 1986, cassette)
Haselrüte (ASP, 1987, cassette)
Bled es Siba (A/a, 1988, 2 x cassette)
Operas (ASP, 1993, LP)
Madeleine (Suphur (Silent Records), 1995, CD)
Grand Surface Noise Opera Nrs. 3 and 4 (‘Indian Ocean Ship’) - (‘Drum Totem’), 1995, CD)
Sarajevo Center Metal Doors (Realization Recordings, 1995, CD)
Matorini Elettrici (Gyttja, 19936, 2 x 7 inch)
I am Telephoning a Star (ASP, 1997, CD)
Ochre Land, Blue Skies and Grand Surface Noise Opera Nr. 7: The Decadent Opera (Rococo) (ASP, 2002, CD)
Select discography Michael Gendreau:
Orchard 4 (Orchard, 1993, cassette)
Orchard 7 (Orchard, 1994, tape with phone message)
RLW: Tulpas (Selektion, 1997, 5 x CD)
In their Sleep they are Free (Povertech, 1999, 7 inch)
55 pas de la ligne au n° 3 (23five, 2002, CD)
Philip Jeck
24 okt 20.00/ recyclart
As a DJ the British sound- and installation-artist Philip Jeck discovered the compositional qualities of mixing with pick-ups in the early Eighties. Under the influence of the groundbreaking work from the likes of Grandmaster Flash and Christian Marclay, Jeck continued to progress still further into the mixing of various vinyl fragments and loops. This is a technique that he showcased in productions by Laurie Booth and The Anatomy Dance Company to name a few, and in the avant-rock explorations of his band Slant. Jeck has a collection of somewhere around a hundred pick-ups at his disposal: old models from the brand names Philips, Dansette and Bush that can play rotations at speeds approaching 16, 33, 45 and 78 revolutions per minute. The ‘turntablism’ of this quinquagenary takes the concept of repetition as its starting point. Thus the artist plays around with ‘locked grooves’ resulting from stickers he applies directly to the vinyl. On a network of three to twelve turntables, he allows a selection of vinyl grooves to diverge and agree with each other with the utmost precision. In Jeck’s meditative compositions surface noise and vinyl flaws form a tangible portion of the work, while references to the original seldom remain audible. Next to being a ‘turntablist’, Jeck is active as a plastic artist. Here too sound, the turntable, and vinyl figure prominently: his installations are often enlarged or exaggerated versions of his performances. Thus in 1993 he elaborated on his most well-known, monumental installation ‘Vinyl Requiem’, an ode to vinyl constructed of twelve projectors and 180 Dansette record players amongst other things (a collaboration with the plastic artist Lol Sargent). ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ invites Jeck to present a concert for (merely) three turntables: a man who speaks about his records as if they were his children in his purest form.
Select discography Philip Jeck:
Loopholes (Touch, 1995, CD)
Surf (Touch, 1999, CD)
Vinyl Coda I-III (Intermedium Records, 2000, 2 CD’s)
Live in Tokyo (Touch, 2000, CD)
Stoke (Touch, 2002, CD)
Soaked (Touch, 2002, CD, Philip Jeck & Jacob Kirkegaard)
Radboud Mens
25 okt 20.00/ recyclart
After his studies in sonology at the Koninklijk Conservatorium of The Hague in 1993, Radboud Mens fast became a prominent name in the Low Countries’ experimental music circuit. Mens draws on various techniques and formal angles of approach: in his first stages he worked with the help of turntables, ‘found sounds’, electronics and self-made instruments – constructions of discarded hi-fi material and implements, such as a turntable with hundreds of nails – within a thorny framework of noise. In a later phase Mens, in his partially improvisationally-constructed compositions, focuses on the quest for structure and rhythm. That work alternately touched upon various genre-domains like sinewave-minimalism, techno and ‘clicks & cuts’, yet always bore Mens’ incontestably singular stamp. Accounting for this is his approach: in his sets the Dutchman uses things such as ‘locked groove’ records of his own design; he considers turntables to be autonomous musical instruments. For ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’ Mens improvises on three turntables, tape-delays and filters, to name just a few.
Select discography Radboud Mens:
EMS (Staalplaat, 1999, 10 inch)
Kapotte Muziek by Radboud Mens (Korm Plastics, 1999, 7 inch)
ALR100N8 (Bake Records, 1999, CDR)
Live Performances 1998-1999 (ERS Records, 1999, CD)
Merzbow: Live at Radio 100 (ERS Records, 2000, CD)
Tweede Mixer (Mixer, 2000, 10 inch)
Cl;ck (Noise Museum, 2000, CD)
Sine (Staalplaat, 2000, CD)
Audio NL 10 (Audio.NL, 2000, LP)
Bek (Brombron, 2002, CD, Radboud Mens & Jaap Blonk)
Institut für Feinmotorik
25 okt 20.00/ recyclart
Mark Brüderle, Marc Matter, Florian Meyer and Daniel van den Eijkel sealed their connection in 1997 as the Institut für Feinmotorik (IFF). Their project is directed primordial at sound, and playfully questions the compositional power of the machine. Supported by the club- and DJ-context, IFF’s motto runs ‘To produce from almost nothing almost nothing’: in order to get an output, the foursome makes use of as little input as possible. In their sets, the members often use six to eight pre-modified record players outfitted with everyday objects like rubber bands, tape and toothbrushes. Vinyl is for the most part absent, and when IFF does make use of records, the group has an unconventional method of approach. Thus the quartet plays the paper circle in the middle of the record or the ‘empty’ grooves between tracks; the resultant ‘white noise’ is re-appropriated in a techno-aligned, clicking and rustling lo-fi composition. For ‘Pitch- Mutating Turntables’ the four members of IFF bring us a concert on four turntables. Afterwards they take over with a lengthy and danceable DJ set.
Select discography Institut für Feinmotorik:
IFF (released at own behest, 1997, 10 inch)
Archivmaterial (released at own behest, 1997, 12 inch)
Störungsfrei (released at own behest, 1997, VHS-video)
Wenig Information: Kein Titel (Staubgold, 1999, LP)
Negemergenz (Fusetron, 1999, LP)
Hans Appelqvist
26 okt 20.00/ A.B. Club
Hans Appelqvist, who resides in Malmö, studied guitar and piano during his middle school years. He later departed for Peking for a couple of years where he laid the basis, in the form of the registration of hundreds of field recordings, for the release of his first single ‘The Xiao Fang EP’ (2001, a co-operation with the singer and linguist specialising in Eastern languages Eric Veermets). Also with his first long-play record ‘Tonefilm’ (2002), the young musician was already researching the compositional power of language. The artist construes, based around dialogues from Swedish films that lay close to his heart, a nostalgic ambiance constructed of electronic and acoustic instruments (mainly guitar and piano). ‘Tonefilm’ has an eye out for the dance floor too: Appelqvist regularly flecks his sonic reminiscences with bossa nova or breakbeat rythms. At the closing party of the argos festival 2002, the twenty-something brings us his ‘Tonefilm’ live. The tie that binds in this work is a rattling film spool; Appelqvist functions as a kind of conductor somewhere between projectors, electronics and turntable.
Select discography Hans Appelqvist:
The Xiao Fang EP (Komplott, 2001, 10 inch)
Tonefilm (Komplott, 2002, CD)
Column One
26 okt 20.00/ A.B. Club
The audio-visual collective Column One, founded in 1991 in Berlin, is shored up by its ideological basis: their aesthetic approach critically enlightens on topics like (contemporary) Western icons, societal structures, political points of departure and the media. Earlier the core members René Lamp and Robert Schalinski had worked on film shorts; as Column One the two allow themselves to be accompanied – depending on the nature of the project – by Andrew Loadman, Jerôme Soudan (aka Mimetic), Wojcek Czern (aka Zia Siodma Gora), Jürgen Eckloff (Kein Zweiter, Kino) and Leo Solter (Kein Zweiter and Tornow). The film and video work of Column One devotes – not infrequently via cut-up techniques and synchronised montage – a lot of their attention to sound. In this way the group decodes the audio-visual ‘reality’ of for instance advertising, animated films or video clips in their work, and re-mounts them within a new context. As a result the original dialogues, phrases or treatments are mangled and recast as music. As founding influences the group points to the pop terrorism of Psychic TV, but then also combined with the radical constructivism of the author Paul Watzlawik and a string of film makers including Derek Jarman, Ingmar Bergmann and Alexandro Jodorowski. Next to videos Column One also produces music, a sonorous output where electro, noise and robot-pop interface. At the closing party of the argos festival 2002, the group (represented by René Lamp, Robert Schalinski and Jürgen Eckloff) will be presenting a new audio-visual work. Their performance gives both commentary and ironic critique on the theme of the concert series and exhibition ‘Pitch – Mutating Turntables’.
Select discography Column One:
Two Flowers for the Travel (A.N.Column Release, 1992, VHS-video)
World Transmission 1 (A.N.Column Release, 1992, MC)
World-Transmission 2 (A.N.Column Release, 1993, LP + 7 inch)
Dream Box Experience (A.N.Column Release, 1994, LP)
Vis Spei (with G.P-Orridge) (Cut-Up-Constructions Records, 1995, CD)
Classic Chill Out Rhythms (Dossier Rec, 1996, CD)
Doubt (Moloko +, 1997, CD)
THX 1138 (Tochnit Aleph, 1998, 12 inch picture disc)
The Last One Is Dead (Cut Up Constructions Records, 1998, LP Box)
Classic Chill Out Rhythms 2 (Moloko+, 1998, 2 x CD)
White Errors part 1 (Artefakt Mag, 1999, CD)
Simulation (Rendez-vous Radikal Records, 1999, 2 x 12 inch Box)
Unrealizer (Stateart Records, 1999, LP)
Live im Hybridraum (Mouth label, 2000, CD)
World Transmissions 3 & 4 (Stateart, 2001, 2 x LP)
Braunserver (90% Wasser, 2001, VHS-video)
Electric Pleasure (Alice in Wonder/ 90% Wasser, 2001, CD & LP)
Electric Light (90% Wasser, 2001, CD & LP)
Die Truhe im Fuss – Featuring Ditterich Von Euler Donnersperg (90%Wasser, 2002, LP)
The Audience is Sleeping (90% Wasser/ Moloko +, 2002, CD)
Thomas Köner & Jürgen Reble aka Porter Ricks
26 okt 20.00/ A.B. Club
Porter Ricks is the progressive techno/club project of the electronic musician Thomas Köner and his fellow countryman Andy Mellwig. After his studies at the music academy in Dortmund (his current place of residence), and at the Centrum voor Elektronische Muziek in the Netherlands’ Arnhem, Köner has operated since the beginning of the Nineties as a sound technician and (film) composer. His compositions are representative of an extended quest for the qualitative characteristics of sound: within a minimal aesthetic his work explores the colour and texture of sound. In order to intensify sound perception, Köner has sought for an approximation of other media from the very beginning. Thus it happens that for some ten years now he has worked out electronic soundtracks for silent movies on assignment from Paris’ Louvre, collaborated on a project with Max Eastley, and performed live with the film-maker Jürgen Reble. In the Eighties, the Bonn-based ‘film alchemist’ Reble made a name for himself with ‘Schmelzdahin’, a collective of film makers – to which Jochen Lempert and Jochen Müller also belong – who treated celluloid with both chemical and natural techniques. For this they exposed their material to algae and bacteria or buried their reels in order to later — following an intensive cleaning process — copy them onto new film rolls. Just as Köner tested the structure of sound, Reble searches for the distinguishing characteristics of the image: the coincidental intrusions of biochemistry and biological processes offer up a non-linear storm of images that are concentrated around abstraction, around form and colour. On the closing evening of the argos festival 2002 Porter Ricks, represented by Thomas Köner, offers together with Jürgen Reble a fleeting mixture of ‘essential’ image and music, wrapped up in a dizzying, festive context.
Select discography Porter Ricks:
Port Of Transition (Chain Reaction, 1996, 12 inch)
Port Of Nuba (Chain Reaction, 1996, 12 inch)
Nautical Dub (Chain Reaction, 1996, 12 inch)
Biokinetics (Chain Reaction, 1996, CD)
Redundance Vol.1 (Force Inc., 1997, 12 inch)
Redundance Vol.2 (Force Inc., 1997, 12 inch)
Spoil (Force Inc,. 1997 12 inch)
Explore (Force Inc., 1997, 12 inch)
Porter Ricks (Mille Plateaux 1997, CD)
Trident (Force Inc., 1998, 12 inch)
Symbiotics (Mille Plateaux, 1999, CD)
Select discography Thomas Köner:
Nunatak (Barooni, 1990/96, CD)
Teimo (Barooni, 1992, CD)
Permafrost (Barooni, 1993, CD)
Aubrite (Barooni, 1995, CD)
Teimo/Permafrost (Mille Plateaux, 1997, CD)
Kaamos (Mille Plateaux, 1998, CD)
Unerforschtes Gebiet (Die Stadt, 2001, picture LP)
Daikan (Mille Plateaux, 2001, CD)
https://www.koener.de
https://www.filmalchemist.de
Wenkar
26 okt 20.00/ A.B. Club
Two years ago the Brussels-based Wendy Van Wynsberghe inaugurated, shortly after her completion of a graduate degree in German philology, the programme ‘Storing’ on this capitol city’s independent radio station ‘FM Brussel’. At the moment she is working for the socio-cultural organisation ‘Bruxelles nous appartient/ Brussel behoort ons toe’, studying electro-acoustic composition at the music academy of Mons, and making her first steps towards becoming a sound artist. Karen Vanderborght, similarly residing in Brussels, completed a Masters degree in audio-visual arts in 1995. Since then they have made a handful of short films together and have conceptualised video clips including those for Porter Ricks, Senking and – more recently – the Finnish Killa. In the first months of ‘Storing’ – the only radio programme presenting thematic series about things like ‘housewives’, ‘Tik-Tak’ or ‘noodles’ – Van Wynsberghe added Vanderborght to the mix; since then the two have operated as the radio- and DJ duo Wenkar. The twosome will bring the argos festival 2002 to a close with a nightly DJ set: a wild ride somewhere between beat experiment and pop, between forgotten hits and fragments of field recordings. Wenkar embellishes their sound with a series of abstract and autobiographical images.
Selection of live-DJ sets Wenkar:
Hey chick let’s click (2000, City of Women-festival, Ljubljana)
Animal special at Cafe9 (2000, Brussel/ Bruxelles 2000, Brussels)
Pick-up (2001, Brussels)
Nous n’irons pas à Avignon (2001, Paris)
Dj Wenkar vs Colin Powell (2002, Bruges)
Dit evenement is onderdeel van argosfestival 2002
-
vr 18.10.2002
- za 26.10.2002
-
Praktische info
Location 1:
argos
Location 2:
Recyclart
Urselinenstraat 25
1000 Brussels
Location 3:
AB Club
Anspachlaan 110
1000 Brussels
