Coming monday you’ll have a change to see and hear the work of Telcosystems at DNK (Amsterdam, OT301, Overtoom 301, 21.30h). Telcosystems is of course Lucas van der Velden plus David and Gideon Kiers.

You’ll get Jozef van Wissem + Tetzuki Akiyama that night as well.

(And a good atmosphere).

http://www.telcosystems.net
http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com

For whomever wasn’t there last week: you missed a superb and very radical performance of Mattin.

Another night with beautiful music, yesterday at DNK – packed again, an audience of 70 listening first to the 4-tet of Seamus Cater, Nate Wooley, Audrey Chen and Robert van Heumen, then to the trio-version of the N-Collective (Koen Nutters, Carlos Galvez and Enric Monfort Barbera, playing resp. bass, bass-clarinet and percussion). Quiet music, on the edge of control.

Weeks ago I heard the new set of Moha! again there, followed by the exhilirating hardcore-punk-licks of Yoke & Yohs (drums and baritone-saxophone).

Coming up in the next weeks a.o. Telcosystems, Mattin, Ultralyd, a programme of “contemporary concrete music spatialized on surround soundsystem” and much more: http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com/.

Writing a post to excuse oneself for not blogging for weeks, then excusing oneself for only blogging the bike-rides, and subsequently making an inventory of all the topics one would have liked to ‘blog’ but didn’t for lack of time, or whatever other reason.

So here I am: on the 23d of september, sitting in a deliciously hot sun on the roof of my apartment, catching up. And yes, that’s mainly catching up on the bike-rides, since nowadays this blog is the only place where I keep track of my rides. So that had to be done.

I would’ve like to blog the Night of the Unexpected, sometimes jokingly called the Night of the Usual Suspects, not so much because of the scheduled acts, but because you meet so many friends. This year’s Night was particularly good.

With a new set of MoHa (Morten Olsen and Anders Hana), suddenly doing a sort of fast and loud elektro-techno-free-rock. You can catch them tomorrow at DNK.

I should’ve blogged the performance of Goodiepal at DNK. He only talked. It was a concert. It was awesome. One of the best things I’ve ever seen.

I would like to write a bit on Zorn’s gamepieces, as I’m scheduled to do a small lecture on that in Groningen as part of a course on games and art. (Also because suddenly I see a connection between Zorn’s pre-game-pieces Theatre of Musical Optics and Goodiepal).

I would’ve given you my impressions of Andrew Delbanco’s Melville, His World and Work, a concise biography of Herman Melville and I guess a very good introduction to his works as well. (I find Melville mostly very difficult to read, well, not Typee, not Bartleby, but I’m still stuck in Moby Dick, Pierre and The Confidence Man.

I am now reading the new Gibson, Spook Country. Hmm, it’s not “a big disappointment”, but only because I wasn’t expecting it to be his masterwork. Honestly, I can’t ‘get into it’. I read on, because I want to finish it.

I’d rather get back to my Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract Models for Literary History of Franco Moretti. Sublime. Very good. Will write on that.

Check out Peter Luining’s blog for Youtube-footage and pictures of Oorbeek’s performance at W139: http://www.ctrlaltdelete.org/oorbeek.html

Earlier this week Max Roach died. It might have catched your attention, as the blogs are full of obituaries, reminiscences, short essays and mp3-excerpts of/about, well, the most influential drummer of the 20th century. He’s always been my favorite, as everything he plays is ultra-clear, and he thinks compositionally.

I don’t feel that there’s a need for me to write an appreciation of Roach’s work from his be-bop drumming with Parker, via Monk, to his own groups with Brownie and Booker Little, to the stunning duo’s from the seventies that I’m only now discovering; just start browsing here and you’ll find the rest: http://destination-out.com/?p=135.

(Free improv trombonist Paul Rutherford passed away as well earlier this week, and also as it seems bassist Art Davis).

On Monday August 20th, W139 presents

OORBEEK: Life in a Lamp

doors open 20:30 | start 21:00 uur
Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam

Concept: Serge Onnen
Light: Tom Verheijen
Dance: Sandrina Lindgren
Sound: Oorbeek

(Thanks to Rapenburg Plaza)

http://www.oorbeek.net
http://www.w139.nl

According to iTunes I am Felix Hess. I just burned an audio-CD with one 8 seconds track that I ‘composed’. I feed it into my computer and into iTunes and there it is: Air Pressure Fluctuations by Felix Hess, genre ‘unclassifiable’. In fact it’s 8 seconds of crackling at the end of a 7-inch vinyl of Gerard Souzay singing Schubert, doubled up twice (and recorded at both 33 and 45rpm).

But iTunes thinks its air pressure fluctuations.

Beautiful.

This afternoon I did an hour and a half of ‘real’ radio at the studio of Radio Oltranzista: http://www.radioltranzista.net/. Federico Bonelli had asked me to come to the studio to play some stuff and I’d quickly copied a bunch files from my harddisk to choose from. I know of Federico’s love for futurism and interest in poetry – so I started with James Joyce reading Anna Livia Plurabelle. Then via Cage’s Roaratorio and Imaginary Landscapes 4, to Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend. Then, to wake up, some loud USA/USB, after 8 minutes merging to Oorbeek, to old wax recordings from Uzbekistan (1905) and Angola. Followed by Ezra Pound and Charles Olson reading poetry, ending with a glorious set by Pho. We’ll do it again. It was great fun. The magic of radio still exists when you’re in a studio, making a program live, improvising.

Yesterday the audio-input and/or output of the logic board of my Powerbook G4 was destroyed. It happened while playing a composition of Thomas Köner. Whenever I turn on the volume on the laptop there’s a very loud high pitched noise. And I mean very loud – much louder than you’d image would be possible. Think: ear-piercing. Everything else still works. Well, the option is to have a new logic board installed (400 – 700 euro’s), or just keep working on this machine and not use sound. And eventually when other parts start breaking down buy a new one. Hmmm.

So I started testing my old white ibook, the one that had screen problems. Maybe I could use that for playing music?

This is the time of the endexam exhibitions of the arts academies. So I’ll plug the exhibition of the Frank Mohr Institute, that runs from now till the 8th of July in the building of Media Arts Friesland in Leeuwarden (Nieuweweg 1a, in the centre, above the Halfords/MacDonalds). Painting and Interactive Media are in the same building. Worth a visit if only for the organ-installation of Steven Jouwersma: http://borgels.blogspot.com/. Also the rest is very much worth the visit.

I’ll also point you to the exhibition of ‘our friendly competitor’ the Piet Zwart Institute, whose students will invade the stage of Worm in Rotterdam: http://www.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=1002.

Then, connected to the upcoming 5daysoff-festival, Montevideo has a show with a lot of sound art, (In)visible Sound: http://www.montevideo.nl/nl/agenda/detail_agenda.php?id=361&archief=M

But most of all I’d like to plug the breathtaking exhibition that Lucas van der Velden curated at the Vleeshal and the Kabinetten van de Vleeshal in Middelburg – with very careful, precise, concentrated works of Thomas Köner, Jürgen Reble, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag and Ryoji Ikeda: http://www.vleeshal.nl/.