Gone well into its teens, the international headphone festival Placard crowned its 12th year with a ringing 72 hours. That was "au Vaisseau", the new spot of the CLeUB over in the rue Stendhal, in Paris XX.

That's how I found myself entering a CLeUB which containeda placard. And "au placard" which was au CLeUB ...

A sort of a double homecoming, indeed.

And while this unique event is impossible to faithfully picture, thisentry still is much like that: a 12th grand Parisian Placard Picture book.
*Everybody* should go play there, if only *once* ...

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Read all about in a fine series of soundblog entries :

1. Petit tour de table, grande bouffe [i]
2. A Table! au Brasse (sketches)
3. Cover thyself

On the evening of june 6th, the association  "Douche Froide" (that means: 'cold shower') organized an interesting festivallette in lower Montreuil, with parallel performances and installations at four different places: a yellow store, a van, a wig maker's atelier and a garden.

I spent the evening in the Boutique Jaune, a former confectioner's store, together with tapes that over the years I had picked up in the neighborhood ... Read about all that went on, and why I was happy to be there, even though I secretly wished I were two ...

For at the same time in the far north-west of France, Ana-R participated in yet another festival. That one was organized by the association "c Dans nos cordes", which means "it's In our strings" ... or rather: "Yes we can" ... so after our report on Montreuil we go join Ana-R in the Land of Giants ...


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When i hopped over from Amsterdam to Maastricht for the weekend starting on friday march 20th, i forgot to bring my toothbrush. as a result i discovered the inside of the brand new suburban MFA, Centre Manjefiek Malberg, also home to the Tijdverkijker, an interesting interactive video installation by dutch artist Geert Mul.

At the Rondeel, i admired the inside of the gigantic red hot air balloon, which has become a second, an interior, skin for the Artspace, that visiting artists may get under. in between the meeting with old friends, as one might have expected, the evening there brought quite a bit of noise.

The noise made me wonder ... it led to some lines on Edd Noi$ and Willy Fistw€ll's performance, and then some more on an heroic attempt by Kim Laugs and Rinus van Alebeek - none though really concerns this or that duo, or such or such group in particular: it addresses the pathetic impotence of 'fringe noise' as a contemporary (bourgeois) practice in general ...

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Much of modern art is very much like music: its essence, like that of life, does not reside within eternally existing material objects ... It is one of the reflections that somehow arose from the sudden crash of my MacBook hard drive about a week ago, and from attending a meeting at the Netherlands Institute for Media-art in Amsterdam, on the conservation of the continually expanding dutch national heritage of video- and other media-art, the originals of which all are threatened by a sudden death sooner or later, due to the degradation of their obsolete physical carriers and the ongoing changes in technologies and formats. Whereas the dutch dat-art curatorial institutions brace themselves for a costly periodical migration (every 7-10 years) of the entire collection to whatever are the then-generation standards to come, I think we just should let them die in peace. And set them free, by allowing the potentially unlimited distribition of their digital copies, in whatever format. This is not a popular opinion ... Neither (yet) is KorggroK, our analo-electronic trio that made its debut on sunday march 1st, when we performed La Fin des Temps at La Guillotine in Montreuil ... "It no longer is. Nonetheless it continues to be." ... [ read more in the SoundBlog ... ]

It was storming and it was raining. "Alle mensen wat een weer!", I overheard a woman exclaim in dutch, who was struggling on along the wet pavement and looking up at the sky from under her broken umbrella.

It was like that: the weather of Holy Fuck, le temps de Bon Dieu, het weer van Alle Mensen ...

So why not stay inside, and get creative with crassettes? ... Read about belt buckles, trendy shop window deco, urban DJ gear and Florencia Viton's collection of amazing tape necklaces (lots of Elvis, and quite some Shirley Bassey's as well) ...



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In this final article on das kleine and Tuned City, last summer in Berlin, I finally take with Rinus to the Wriezener Freiraum, late afternoon of friday july 4th, after that day's episode of 'Sturm der Liebe'.
"I still wonder how it would have been if the weather had been different ..."
How a drizzle not became a rain, and a row not managed to turn into a riot. About Composed City, metal containers and fly papers. About contingency and necessity. About explicit gesturality being an artist's responsability. About listening in the undergrowth ...

A relatively short post, only looking ahead ... I already imagine myself later this year, when, as a latter-day Leopold Bloom, I will try to find my way through the city of Dublin, following a path traced by Kassettenkopf. But first, in Brussels, from january 19th-24th, I will be working my Found Tapes in the rue Crickx straat, in '? Footage or Fetish', followed by a weekend of performances: as a quartet with Jonas Kocher, Raed Yassin and Jean-Jacques Duerinckx, and with JJ in A Table! ... And though ookoi's 1024 and l'Ecoute are projected throughout january in the Instants Chavires in Montreuil, you will not find me there... From Brussels I'll be driving back up to Amsterdam, where we will be checking connections, streams and servers, transporting a barrel organ from there to here, scratching our heads and comparing notes, while setting up and rehearsing for Raudio's ookoi@E@rport in the Theaterzaal of the Amsterdam Conservatory, on saturday january 31st, from 12h until 17h ...

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Little will make me as happy as happening upon a good idea, be it my own, or somebody else's ... Therefore this edition of the soundblog is dedicated to (at least) three (3) simply wonderful (and wonderfully simple) ideas.

- First, there are the (many) fine ideas of dutch fashion designers Viktor & Rolf, now on show in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht ...

- We then reflect sort of heavily upon the craftful and enjoyable music of british electronician & band-leader Matthew Herbert, who in his polit-pop does not allow himself the use of sounds that 'exist already'. Matthew creates much of his sound from field recordings, often obtained during pretty extravagant recording rituals. I argue that the logic that leads to him to doing so, in fact is a logic of magic ...

- In the third and final part we then reveal the true 'voise of noise' by partly erasing it, in 'denoising noise music' with Richard Eigner ...



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