Editorial to the Fifth Edition

Talking about Possibilities is a long essay on music, sound and noise. It is divided in five parts: Letter to a Young Friend, Daddy Cool, The Man at the Airport, Café Chantant and Utopian Thoughts. Some aspects of futurism, trumpism and political hooliganism are hinted at. Noise as a genre and life-style gets discussed. You can read about the social turmoil in the years before the first world war.

This essay is not aimed at scholars or academics, far from that. People who like to collect and oftentimes read books on sound can consider this essay as a larger footnote. They will encounter familiar names. I have tried to find a different approach towards the discussion on music, sound and noise. I think that the days of noise as a genre are numbered. It is time for something else, for the same old new. Talking about Possibilities attempts to tell you why.

-Rinus Van Alebeek

Letter to a Young Friend

Dear L,

Thanks for opening the pages of your thesis on the electromagnetic tape.

The history of recording devices is truly interesting. Piano wires and steel tape, one can wonder where the inventors found the ideas. The bare names Blattnerphone and Marconi-Stille-recorder evoke the images of rooms and studio’s that sink away in a past long gone since. The fact that the BBC used the Marconi-Stille recorders with their steel tape until the 1950s may explain the quality of historic voice recordings. You can clearly hear a steel resonance in Winston Churchill’s speeches; it makes me think of rust that contaminates the water supply system.

I liked the experiment with record players by Hindemith and Toch that you mentioned. It shows that musicians, or people with an ear for sound, already then, when the record player was still young, tried to integrate recording machines. In the same article that you quoted, one can read with such lines as,“Trinidad, and the big Mississippi,” and “Nagasaki! Yokohama!” Toch’s aim was to transform spoken word into rhythmic, musical sounds.
It came as a little surprise to see my quotes. I was pleased to read the thoughts of Lucas Crane and Aki Onda. I liked Aki’s I am trying to both extract and abstract the essence of memory by playing my own field recordings, so to speak my personal memories, at a location that is saturated with its own memories. This is a poetical praxis that probably only few onlookers are aware of.

When I received the text of your thesis, I had been reading two articles, that were published in a book. I found the book at a friend’s ‘home for a year.’ The couple and young kid who lived there, had moved to Taipei. Some time one morning they must have decided to leave the country and in the evening of the same day they were gone. Books, boxes with books, kids toys were littered all over the place. My friend slept in a gorgeous studio, that looked like the back room of a bookshop, where only the owner would be able to find any book you needed. Portraits of men in uniform or newly wed couples, probably made in the years between the wars, hung on the wall, or stood in line on the floor. He used the couple’s room as the guest room, a space shared with more books and a kid’s wild mural that added a sense of temporary unrest.

I wanted to find out things about sound. Every time I come across a collection of books and studies on sound, I give it a try. Normally I open the book, read twenty words, and close the book again, tired of reading already. A publication by The Wire Magazine, one of the most unreadable magazines I know of, surprised me with two essays, that I read to the very end. Hooray for The Wire. The book’s title is Undercurrents, the hidden wiring of modern music.

In the first essay Destroy all Music, The futurists’ art of noises Mark Sinker aims at establishing some kind of chronology. His chronology starts with the futurist manifesto in 1909 and ends with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in 1975. As you can guess, the chronological order becomes quite personal and thus arbitrary after the second world war. But that’s not the point here. I was more interested in some of the composers and musicians, that were mentioned in the essay.

Sinker writes: 1911 Balilla Pratella publishes a Manifesto of the Technics of Futurist Music. And he writes that Pratella in his Manifesto writes: “Music must represent the spirit of crowds, of great industrial complexes, of trains, of ocean liners, of battle fleets, of automobiles and aeroplanes. It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity.”

It is not clear what ‘the great central themes of a musical poem’ were, before Pratella came to his insight. I even don’t know what he means, when he talks about ‘a musical poem.’ But when he points at crowds, industries, trains, ocean liners and battle fleet, even at automobiles and aeroplanes, I can sense some of the excitement Pratella must have felt when walking around in a city. Maybe it was his city; it might have been Trieste. In 1911 it was still a part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. On a more profane level, I can almost envision my collection of tapes with various recordings of crowds, industries, trains and so on.

Sinker confronts us with Edgar Varèse’s thoughts (dated 1921): ”Italian futurists, why do you merely reproduce the vibrations of our daily life only in their superficial and distressing aspects? My dream is of instruments that will obey my thought – and which, by bringing about a flowering of hitherto unsuspected timbres, will lend themselves to combinations it will please me to impose on them and bow themselves to the demands of my inner rhythm.” I would say, give the poor guy a couple of tape machines and a good Sony walkman, and his problem is solved.

Arseni Avramov, you got to love him. He stages citywide spectacles with fireworks, factory and ship sirens, flags and pistol shots, and featuring simultaneous sound and action from artillery, the navy, infantry, tanks, a machine gun division and hydrophones. If only our world leaders could rethink the use of their war machinery. When reading of Avramov I didn’t think of tapes. I started dreaming instead. It happened that days on end I stared into the landscape. I thought of sounds brought forward by cargo ships, several marching bands on winding roads and fireworks.
In the 1910s and -20s musicians started to use typewriters, revolvers, ship’s whistles, sirens, propeller mechanisms, modified aeroplane engines, broken bottles, metal sheets and probably much more. Nowadays the tape artist’s suitcase is still heavy, but not as heavy as it would be if he were to travel around with a modified aeroplane engine.

The title of the second essay is: The Limits of Language, textual apocalypse: Merz, Lettrism, sound poetry. The title looks like a room full of cardboard boxes that are left in a disorderly state, because the owner couldn’t find the book he was looking for. In fact, all of the boxes in the room show this trace of frustration. The author is Julian Cowley. Every time and art form has its heroes, and when you mention ‘word,’ ‘tape’ and ‘cut-up,’ you know that almost immediately someone will drag William Burroughs out of the cupboard, put him on his lap, and perform a short ventriloquist act. Cowley opens his essay with a quote by Burroughs. The follow-up quote is by Brion Gysin. I consider the cut-up method as a variation of Scrabble. It is a game. Push ‘Play.’ I would have put the previous consideration in italics if it had been uttered by Gysin.

The most important point in the essay is, that all the described expressions and methods are rooted in poetry, and in some cases in the very essence of language itself. It is not about music. The voice was of course an important instrument in this practice, but in many cases not the only one. Marinetti had someone beat an enormous drum during his performance. Tristan Tzara incorporated the loud ringing of an electric bell. At Cabaret Voltaire poets recited nonsense while drums were pummeled and pianos were hammered. You don’t need a tape machine if you want to re-enact these or Kurt Schwitters’ performances.

After the second world war the Lettrists used all the sounds a mouth could produce to broaden the idea of poetry. Theirs was an excursion into the possibilities of every single character of the alphabet. Their shrieks, ululations, purrs, yarrs, yaups and cluckings were used as an extension of language, and not seen as a continuation of the tradition of bel canto. There was no need for a tape recorder, yet. But experimentations with tape recorders started very soon. Henri Chopin used them: Chopin was inclined to molest the machine, applying pressure to various parts of its mechanism to alter and distort sound. His contemporaries used them: During the 1960s Bernard Heidsieck integrated the tape recorder into his “action poetry”, collaging words and phrases, including quotations from newspapers, with recordings of environmental noise.

One can wonder where all the sound poets have gone. But that leads to a different discourse. You might as well wonder where arte povera has gone, the notion of the Gesamtkünstwerk, and lots of expressions more, that made the period between the 1950s and the early 1970s appear so avant-everything. Maybe the practice has faded away as a result of the disappearance of ‘the western world’ which as a nominator could define and explain cultural expressions and movements. We don’t live in that western world anymore. And what is left of it, is occupied by populists and their army of haters.
The two essays show that the described sounds can be produced by conventional musical instruments and by anything that the composer thinks is useful. But some sounds can also become a part of a sound poem. I didn’t know of this clear distinction between the two approaches. A tape can simply record any given sound. And then, working with tapes, you mix both approaches, without realising that the outcome can be music, poetry or just a work of art.

When I read As can be seen in Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-ups, tape is a modernist medium: you can fragment, split up, position yourself as losing identity in a fragmentation, and the result will be the appearance of a new, albeit fragmentary, whole. I noticed that there is more to Lucas’ work than music alone. I remember Lucas Crane was very intrigued by my four-and-a- half word manifesto I don’t make music. He sensed it was true, and applicable to his way of producing sound and asked me to explain it. I and my intuitive statement were not ready yet for a longer theoretical exercise. But that was then.

Greetings from deep Poland, Rinus

Daddy Cool

We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight
against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.

These words were printed on the front page of a French newspaper. While one can recognize the attitude of ISIS towards cultural heritage, it is hard to imagine that their opponents will be caught saying words like: We intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of emancipators, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman.

Or are the promises to make America great again, to destroy the elite and talks of pussygrabbing in the same line of thought?

In their words and actions, Trump and his ghost twitterer Steve Bannon, the man in the Kremlin, the soldiers of ISIS and the army of internet trolls can be considered the true heirs of futurism. The quotes are points 9 and 10 of Marinetti’s Manifesto.

Here’s Marinetti’s description of the massacre in the Bataclan in Paris: Ah yes! little machine gun, you are a fascinating woman, and sinister and divine, at the steering wheel of an invisible hundred-horse-power engine that roars with explosive impatience. Oh! surely you will soon leap into the circuit of death, to a shattering somersault or victory! . . . Do you wish me to compose madrigals full of grace and vivacity? At your pleasure, my dear . . . For me, you resemble a lawyer before the bar, whose tireless, eloquent tongue strikes to the heart of the surrounding listeners, who are deeply moved . . .

With every airstrike on Aleppo or any other city in Syria Marinetti ejaculates in his grave; he ejaculates so hard that he wishes that he is fucking himself in the ass:…2000 shrapnel to saw the air to explode white kerchiefs full of gold Boom-Boomb 2000 grenades straining to rip out with tearing shocks of dark hair ZANG-BOOM-ZANG-BOOM- BOOOMB orchestra of the war noises to swell beneath a note of silence held in the high sky spherical balloon golden that surveys cannon-fire…

Try to read Marinetti’s futurist publications, and you will see that his glorification of violence and war is a recurring theme. In his talks and articles he combined youth, energy, strength and the future with the necessity of violence and war. One can raise the question if he was paid for his warmongering activities. The biggest force in Europe was a military force: Austria-Hungary. It could be destroyed by war alone. A couple of years after his first futurist publication troops on their way to the frontier were cheered on by the crowds.

Do we see a parallel with the present times, where the great- grandchildren of Marinetti do everything which is in their powers to mobilize a mob. The manifesto’s of those times are today’s tweets and their one-word- marching-orders like Disgusting!, Shame!, Lies! or Wrong!. The force that needs to be destroyed is not a military, but a democratic force, disguised as the elite.

In the same manifesto Marinetti wrote: We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railway stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke; bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers, flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife; adventurous steamships that scent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest, pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes, and the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.

I have a dream.

Two years later Pratella, his useful idiot, translates point 11 of the manifesto into: Music must represent the spirit of crowds, of great industrial complexes, of trains, of ocean liners, of battle fleets, of automobiles and aeroplanes. It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity.

March 1913 Luigi Russolo showcased himself as a usuful idiot and wrote a manifesto that many eons later came to be seen as the definition of Noise music. He wrote it after he attended a concert by fellow futurist Pratella. He transcribed Pratella’s translation of Marinetti’s point 11 of the futurist manifesto and came up with this variation: Let us wander through a great modern city with our ears more alert than our eyes and we shall find pleasure in distinguishing the rushing of water, gas, or air in metal pipes, the purring of motors that breathe and pulsate with indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the pounding of pistons, the screeching of mechanical saws, the jolting of trams on their tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We shall amuse ourselves by creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop shutters, the slamming of doors, the bustle and shuffling of crowds, the varied racket of stations, railroads, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electrical power stations, and subways. Nor should the latest noises of modern warfare be forgotten.

Viva modern warfare.

Or viva Frans de Waard.

I can imagine him very well, writing a review in his vital weekly, in which he transcribes the information that came with the CD: Artist suchandso went for a walk in a great modern city with his ears more alert than his eyes. In his composition we hear the rushing of water, gas, or air in metal pipes, the purring of motors that breathe and pulsate, the throbbing of valves, the pounding of pistons, the screeching of mechanical saws, the jolting of trams on their tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. He created a mental orchestration of the crashing down of metal shop shutters, the slamming of doors, the bustle and shuffling of crowds, the varied racket of stations, railroads, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electrical power stations, and subways. All in all a quite interesting release.

Most probably Artist Suchandso did not walk out one Summer day to find a war and record the latest noises of warfare.

The Man at the Airport

Cedrik Fermont wrote a book, together with Dimitri della Faille, about noise in south-east Asia: Not your World Music. The content of the book is based on their many travels in the region and their encounters.

It presents a general history of noise music, and opens up to the noise scene in south-east Asia through a very long interview with its artists. The authors try to pay as much respect as possible towards each and everyone involved. As an introduction to the noise scene in south- east Asia the book is indispensable. You don’t need to go all the way with their approach; you don’t even have to share their views, but the vital point of the book, and therefore of the viewpoint brought forward by the authors, is that they are always open to an exchange of ideas.

Up to one point.

We have stated elsewhere in this book that noise music has originated in Europe and North America. How do you feel about it?
Goh Lee Kwang (Malaysia) : Really?
Nathalie Johnston (Myanmar) : Are you sure about that?
Yes, we are pretty sure about it.

Together with Adrian Shephard I interviewed Cedrik for Radio On in Berlin. I confronted him with this quote, and teasingly accused him of paternalist and colonialist behaviour. He leaned back laughing and exclaimed that he had studied the subject thoroughly. Of course also his research had brought him to Luigi Russolo’s manifesto.

When Russolo walked around in his imaginary city, dreaming of a tape recorder, he heard a great variety of sounds. In Italy sounds are ‘suoni.’ If you put a number of sounds together, in such way that they create an amorphous piece of sound, one speaks of ‘rumori.’ Rumori became noise, and the music that Russolo made with his intonarumori became noise music. Intonare means harmonise or play with.

It might have been in the late 1970s in the bedsit of a young post-punk graduate with books by Gramsci, Bataille and Artaud all over the place, that noise music as a genre was born. In Thatcherian England, Reaganesque US and nuclear bomb threatened Europe everything that could feed subversion was used in the process. Anti-establishment was a program. The music was industrial or noise.

Those pioneers are older man now. Cedrik Fermont is of a younger generation. But also he can be considered old. Still, noise as a genre persists. And, as he describes in his book, it also implies a kind of attitude. The question is, what kind of attitude. Is it still subversive, or is it to be understood as a form of non-militant cultural criticism?

Trump, his army of trolls, European populist leaders and their parrots speak of ‘the elite.’ It is their aim to destroy ‘the elite.’ Does this mean that, belonging to a noise scene, or to a DIY community that shows itself critical of the establishment, and thus of ‘the elite,’ that all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by the alt-right mob?

You know what. I’d rather not. Moreover, I’d rather like to think a little bit. Considering that I can move freely, speak freely and express my art freely, sometimes even with money from institutions, I think this elite of ours is not doing so bad at all. You may or may not like the EU, but one of the most important messages it has brought across, is the message of constant dialogue and thus of peace. The leaders may be technocrats. They operate with facts and try to find solutions to problems that are bigger than the sum of each one of us grouped together in Texas waving at the clouds. Whatever the outcome of the ongoing process may be, these leaders don’t use outrage and anger as a unifying and catalysing tool.

I was in Kraków to perform at the annual audio-art festival. It is one of those pleasurable occasions that you actually receive a fee. The festival was well promoted. All over town one could encounter posters and flyers. They all looked the same, of course. The wordings were in black and white and at the top side of the poster was the comic strip representation of one of the artists, who would perform at the festival. I didn’t recognize it first, because it looked like someone somewhere in the galaxies looking down on something that could be earth. The surface he was looking at was full of little things that could be cities, and baubles of various colours that could represent our universal dream of everlasting christmas.

Even after the performance by the artist, I didn’t make the connection. It was only when we sat together with friends in a large bar full of smoking people, that my girlfriend told a story. We have to imagine that already for days the town was full of posters, for which the image was used of this particular artist and his table that was full of colorful lightbulbs. I had seen it, she had seen it, everyone had seen it, because it was almost impossible to not see it.

Then the day came that the artist arrived at the airport. He soon found out that there was noone to pick him up. He waited and waited, but noone showed up. I listened straight-faced. “Can you imagine” she said, “The whole town is full of his picture and they forget to pick him up.” She wiped the tears out of her eyes, and started laughing again.

In 1937 John Cage wrote: I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. His clearly echoed Pratella’s words It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity.

Pratella was the musician. He became director of the conservatoire in Ravenna. He got into folkloristic culture from the Romagna region and founded a choir. As a fascist you just had to love those traditions. In fact, he could have cycled to Forli, birthplace of Mussolini. It could have been a joyfull ride, if he was accompanied by his choir. See and hear them go along the river, in the early lights of a Summer’s day. The Taataaaa taa’s of war were still very far away.

I feel that Luigi Russolo is a little bit like the man at the airport. At the end there was noone to pick him up. Luigi disappeared to Spain to encounter occult filosofies and returned to Milan before the civil war started. He took up painting again after a couple of years, figurative now. He died in 1947.

Café Chantant

The book The Bad Bohemian has a long subtitle: The extraordinary life of Jaroslav Hašek, author of the good soldier Švejk. The book is written by Sir Cecil Parrott. It was published in 1978.

This sole information, and the fact that Parrott was British Ambassador in Prague in the years 1960-1966 were two convincing arguments to read the book. It was a good decision, because it was very entertaining. One of the most fascinating parts is the description of life in Prague in the years before the Great War started. Prague was part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

“They want to tie a Clerical teacher by the leg to a chair and force him under the threat of a beating to recite the prayer ‘Our Father’ and ‘Ave Maria’ for six hours. Let’s hope he’ll be utterly sickened by it.”
And,
..he stood on the podium and, when the audience was looking forward expectantly to his jokes, sat down, slowly and deliberately took off his boots and undid his dirty ragged foot wraps.

The first quote made me think of Wiener actionists. I could envision a bearded man in his mid thirties, naked, and tied to a chair. On the table a reel to reel recorder plays unpleasant noises over a single loudspeaker of crappy nature. The Wiener actionist, maybe bald, maybe half bald, but the hairs growing on his head are long and greasy, shouts the prayers at the top of his voice for six long hours. And because this is Wiener actionism he will piss, shit and vomit too, and maybe there is some blood involved as well.

The second quote made me think of a performer in a small space where-ever in the world, who is ready to play some contemporary avant-garde music before an audience of 13 people. He or she wouldn’t leave a big impression by sitting down first and then taking off the shoes.

Those years before the first world war were full of events and people who wanted to put an end to a tradition or to a life. Every week thousands of poor people embarked on ocean steamers and travelled to an other continent to start a new life. New newspapers saw the light almost every month. Painters broke with tradition; musicians broke with tradition; writers broke with tradition; architects broke with tradition; philosophers broke with tradition.

In and around the ticking time bomb of the Austrian-Hungarian empire the young and the old visited café-chantants or music halls to shout and insult or laugh at the artists. Political parties assembled in bars or were founded in bars. Opposed to this life of getting drunk and shout, laugh and fight was the life of literary salons and spiritual seances with dancing tables and the voices from the after-life. And all this was set to a background of political powers whose men liked to dress up in operettesque uniforms.

Did the Dadaists invent a new art-form, or were they mocking the mediums who started to talk gibberish when they got in contact with the spirits. A woman or man caught in all his seriousness while declaiming verses, what better way to make a fool of them than going ‘Brzz méééé wo fatta fattea Goosssh’ while wearing a funny hat? And the naughtiest among them ridiculed bishops, generals and politicians. Authority was questioned and attacked in every form. And this happened everywhere in Europe.

Point 11 of Marinetti’s manifesto hints at the reasons that caused the public uproar in the 1900s and in the first years of the 1910s. Cars, planes and trains added a new sense of speed to life. The crowds and the factories gave cities a different dynamism. Everything was in movement. Big ocean steamers made people understand that the world was shrinking. Distances were easier to cover. This was not the only thing that affected mind and matter. The people witnessed that the old empires were coming to an end. Germany was a young nation, and so was Italy. The big void to be filled was that of political consciousness. The old lawmakers were bound to disappear. New lawmakers were getting ready to take over. It is of little wonder that the composers wanted to change the music as well.

Utopian Thoughts

Music, that is the law. Music is the maintenance of the law. And sound, sound is the collective effort to define freedom.

Now when people make music, they play this do-re-mi thing, or variations of it, but whatever is played by soloists, ensembles or orchestras, it can always be abstracted to sheet music. So that is the law, a set of rules in music, but also in society. I mean, music is at the heart of society, just like the law is at the heart of society. Symphony orchestras or string quartets play at funerals, marriages, coronations or baptisms of royal families.

Classical music is played live whenever political leaders need ceremonial behaviour. The world is in a beautiful order, that some people call divine, because inspiration was linked to spirit and the head of state was linked to God. The symphony orchestra, the conductor, the shining gold of the instruments, the old concert halls, the red plush, the richness and the modest glamour, it is all still here, with us. And it is okay, because the law was always open to new adaptions and interpretations. In our western world one leader can’t rob an entire country and turn it into his private property. Those days are over. And somewhere in classical music you can hear this glorifying victory of humanity.
Now don’t think that noise is a twentieth century invention… noise… no, not noise, let’s call the extra-musical noises, sound… Yes, let’s call them sound. Music and sound. Noise is a genre and an attitude that with time will disappear. Sound will always remain.

Let’s try to go back in time, when music was music. Of course there were sounds too, and people caught in their daily routine, a routine that brought them satisfaction and not misery, say people who encountered the same people and more or less the same situations every day, on their way to work or elsewhere -these people might have been using all their senses, and found pleasure or satisfaction in seeing beautiful things, in smelling fragrances that send the mind adrift, in tasting good food, and, yes, in hearing trusted sounds, ‘rumori’. They might not have paid attention, but they would have noticed a change. Sounds accommodate.

When music was music, people sang or played, and they danced or they reached a higher level of consciousness. So when music was music, and being played in a room, or outside, or in a vaulted space, the music always sounded different. It sounded different to the lovers and it sounded different to the drunk. It sounded different to the exalted and it sounded different to the musician. What I want to say is, that when music is music, it will always happen that inexplicable sounds emerge from that music. It can happen because of a sudden echo, a reverb, un expected harmony or because of the narcotising effect of sustained sounds.

A group of persons singing their sacred or ritual chants in caves, or in a vaulted space, they hear how the sounds escape from the songs, and an invisible dance commences over their heads, and lifts them up… this effect of music…is it simply sound? The polyphonic chants from shepherds or who-ever would meet on a hill, or, “hey, let’s try this space where the sound bounces back from the rocks”, or “here, let’s go here, where you got this beautiful echo” and then sing into the night and don’t know, that the musical spirals they create echo the big spirals of galaxies in the universe, or perhaps they know… and later, when those Vivaldis and Haydns heard their music executed in churches and noticed how also there the music disappeared in the spaces above their heads and came raining down again on them…wasn’t that a different music they heard, a music they wanted to write down the next time, but couldn’t, because it needed the space to create the mysterious sound?

So, sound, that is our freedom, and sound is also the way how we want to define this freedom. When at the beginning of the twentieth century composers went outside into the world to find new inspiration, they thought of bringing the objects as well. And then came a time that only those objects mattered. And here it happened that sound loosened itself from music, and you saw in society that more and more ideas and people were tolerated in the discussion on how the law should be written and applied. Because that is what happens in a democracy. The existence of sound, the ongoing discussion on how the principle of freedom should be defined and expanded is fundamental to democracy.

It is here that sound works independently from music, and yet there is this great interdependence. It is the same with parliaments and extra- parliamentary movements. There are loads of factions out there, all with their own ideas, and even with their own lifestyles. And now, in our times there is lots of talk of globalisation, gentrification and how all things look the same and shit. And somewhere hidden in all these processes are those artists who dedicate themselves to sounds, or to music as they think it should be played. And the closer you aim your microscopic view on them, the more you realise that all these artists, in their approach, in their networking have created a parallel world, where managers and the models and methods that they brought from the business schools have no access at all. So that is what we have, right now: a movement, an invisible group of people with a really good working bullshit detector. And yet these people have been defining freedom and how this freedom can be used, and nobody knows.

And this, in fact, is a kind of Utopia in a world that sees disasters come from everywhere, a world full of dystopian visions. And somehow I think, this is not necessary. This is not necessary at all, because right at the heart of society you got this unpolished, untreated, independent group of people each with their own vision, their own taste, and their own bullshit detector. Within their own world they don’t need to change anything at all. They should continue doing the things they are doing, even now, in these so called dark times.

There is only one thing that should change, and that is that people who through writing, image and spoken word can reach out to the one hundred thousands should pay attention to this invisible group. They should create curiosity; and in terms that are used today: they should create a market. And this can happen in the most simple way possible, by paying attention. And then the social experiment can start. Because if the artists who struggle to sell their works, and hardly find one paid gig, would find themselves with money to spend, then, I think, it is very well possible that different ideas will become visible and enter our society on a local level, and from one local level spread out to other local levels. You might want to tell a journalist to take notice of this.

Editorial to the fourth Edition

After a long interval a new edition of staalzine, born from a simple idea of exchange. Send a postcard or a gift to Anne-F Jacques in Montreal, and you get one of her Crustacés Tapes in return.

She sent me a handful. That’s why I wrote a short story in exchange. In six short chapters you can read about David Bowie’s death, a post office in a small town in Calabria, a visit to Montreal, and of course about Crustacés Tapes.

I intend to write more specials about tape labels in the future. I also hope it won’t take such a long time to publish the next edition of staalzine.

Rinus Van Alebeek

The Day Before

The first thing I found out on the day before, was that David Bowie had died. I read it first in a tweet by a friend and then went to a newspaper site. The shock announced by my friend’s message came to full expression when I read the news article.

Mind you, it was not a shock that paralysed me, or brought tears to my eyes. It was a feeling of contraction in my breast, an immediate notion of sadness. I read the news with the same nervous expectation that I have, when looking at a replay of a match lost by my favourite soccer team, but the news didn’t curl back on itself. He died.

I sang for the rest of the day. I didn’t sing in a loud voice, though sometimes the songs in my head bursted into loud hums and lalaas. They were all Bowie songs. I felt surprised at this reaction. It made me also realise how big an impact the man must have had. Or should I say how big an impact FMradio and MTV had on my auditive memory? Name a band or a singer and I immediately sing one of their songs.

He died when the earth casted a shadow on the Moon, and made it invisible. It was a black Moon night. Probably elsewhere on the planet people were looking at the sky and thought of ‚starman’ and ‚major Tom.’ In the reactions I read, people expressed how important he had been in their lives. Such confessions told me more about the social and emotional backgrounds of the places where those people grew up. Their world must have been a grim place back in the early 1970s.

Of the songs I sang in my mind, no song was made after the year 1983. Maybe he had been innovative and spearheading a generation before that time. I can hardly imagine that the more obscure artists, that emerged in the post-punk era, and those who started experimenting in the outer margins of that genre, thought of David Bowie as a source for inspiration. After the year 1983 the name ‚David Bowie’ became a brand and rightfully so. It was time to cash in. Before those years Bowie became an icon, because his fans hoped that he would be the voice of a generation, and as such add sense to their existence. The invitation to dance defined the end of that era. He lived on in his greatest hits, and sometimes somewhere along the line of life that proceeded slowly to the year ‚NoW!’ I read, saw or heard that he was considered a great artist, which, obviously, he was not.

But his fans and followers who through all those years had been waiting at his door like a hungry dog were convinced. And that’s how surprise number two started shining into the day, as I read how everybody bowed in reverential respect at the way he had chosen his moment to die. It was the perfect ending; it turned his whole life into a work of art. And my surprise grew even bigger, when a lot of people started to see signs and messages in the videos and songs of his last album Black Star. Suddenly it was very obvious that he had been dying. I think David Jones got seriously sick of ‚David Bowie’ before everybody else would. If you create a fictional character then you can also get rid of this fictional character. That’s why ‚David Bowie’ had to die.

Those songs and videos also tell a different story. Have a look at a short film, especially the first minutes of it. It is called SYMPTOMS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA and it was made by James D. Page in 1938. It is archived at the psychological Cinema Register of the Pennsylvania State College and on the web at Archive.org.

The abstract tells us that this film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.

In an extra note it is said that the patients were blindfolded to safeguard their privacy. David Jones has always been very careful about his private life. The fact that he appears blindfolded in his videos, might indicate that he appears as Jones alongside to his alter ego ‚Bowie’ who is not blindfolded in the videos. Both Jones and the Bowie character mimic gestures of the patients, and even transport some situations into the videos, like the man at the window, who brings his hand to the nose and makes the gesture ‚thumbing the nose.’

Is there something to explain when it is so evident that the videos show the schizofrenia of the Bowie/Jones construction? There is only one cure. He has to liberate himself from the fictional character ‚David Bowie.’

If you know that he has been married to a muslim woman, who never gave up her belief, it is easy to assume that David Jones must have expressed some interest in the Quran.

Compare the quotes from the Quran down here with fragments from Lazarus and Black Star, and discover what I have been doing on the day before, apart from singing Bowie songs in my head, while sweeping the terrace and read some news articles.

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star”

a solitary candle”… „at the centre of it all” … „I am a black star” – in Black Star

Or [they are] like darknesses within an unfathomable sea which is covered by waves, upon which are waves, over which are clouds – darknesses, some of them upon others. When one puts out his hand [therein], he can hardly see it. And he to whom Allah has not granted light – for him there is no light.”

… describes the situation of the blindfolded man who suffers from schizofrenia.

Do you not see that Allah is exalted by whomever is within the heavens and the earth and [by] the birds with wings spread [in flight]?

Look up here, I’m in heaven” … „Oh, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird” – in Lazarus

At the end of the day I wanted to believe that David Jones had converted to Islam.

His father-in-law was a diplomat for Somalia. To change the name and get a new passport must have been a piece of cake.

Maybe Sean Penn will trace him on his 80th birthday so that on 8. January 2027 The Rolling Stone will have only three words on its front page:

HE IS
ALIVE

The Day Itself

On the day itself it was sunny again. January was well on its way and, still, there was no sign of winter. It was warm in the morning sun. I put my table and chair outside and had breakfast on the terrace. The winds had cleaned the horizon. The coastline of Sicily appeared in full gloom and Mount Etna rose majestically above it, even more beautiful now that the top was covered by snow.

An hour later I took my backpack and started my walk uphill to the village. It is a walk passing onion fields, a farmer’s house and an almond tree in full bloom, between walls of reed and at the side of a large road that after a couple of curves ends at the village. There is nothing special about the little town. No tourist would take up residency here. No house seemed to be finished and no house seemed to be the same. Some of the older houses made of sandstone still stood, but you could see how the weather and vegetation slowly made them crumble. It would be a lovely place if you’d tear down a couple of buildings and liberated the view. The volcanic island Stromboli was just behind an ugly apartment block. I needed to go to the post office. I walked right in front of the oldest bar in town and noticed how the old lady of the bar leant forward from her chair and waved her hand to say hello. It was an invitation, of course.

The first time I entered the post office I looked in wonder at all the bullet proof glass, the double door with the space in between that served to hand over bigger parcels. I asked myself why this was needed in such a small, apparently sleepy village. But this thinking didn’t need much time. Most of Calabria’s youth would leave their hometown, go north or abroad to find a better future. There were not many opportunities here, not for work, not for hanging out. The strongest subculture was that of crime. The post office held the bank and it was the place where the older inhabitants collected their monthly state pension. People came to pay the bills. I had learned pretty fast that the best hour to arrive was shortly before closing time to avoid endless waiting. The bullet proof glass was needed to protect the safe. The wild west was invented here, in Calabria.

No postman would find the place where I lived. And that was okay by me. I got two huge envelopes from Canada and a smaller one from Ravenna in Italy. I gave a smaller packet in return, destination the state of New Jersey in the US. I did my shopping at Gianni’s small supermarket on the square. With my backpack filled and an extra plastic bag full of vegetables I crossed the street to the bar. It is a bar like I think a bar should be, where it is clear to see that nothing has changed over the last forty years. Well the lady of the bar, now in her eighties, must have changed over those years. We talked about the weather just as long as I needed to finish my coffee, and so I heard temperature had reached 23ºC last weekend.

On my way back I kept my eyes on the Gulf of Gioia in front of me, the street of Messina that divided the main land from Sicily. The Sun had changed a big surface of the sea into a plate of sparkling silver. A car stopped beside me. It was C. He offered me a ride. He talked about the weather, the nice days we were having. But he announced the arrival of winter. A massive front would bring in the cold directly from Siberia. People in the north were alerted; it would be harsh up-there in the mountains. We would be okay, temperatures would drop to 5ºC in daytime, like last year. He advised me to prepare myself, get some wood. I assured him that I was okay.

Many Days Before

I met Anne-F Jacques for the first time in Berlin. It was the Winter of 2009. She had come over to play the CTM-festival. I can’t recall the exact reason why she wanted to meet me. Maybe it had something to do with the ‚das kleine field recordings festival,’ that I organised around that time in unusual bars, that I spotted during my bicycle rides.

Setting up an evening of easy listening music with a narrative and natural feel about it, that would not exceed the volume of people talking, was fairly easy in the last years of the noughties. Most of the time I walked into the bar, explained what I wanted and the prompt reaction would be, that the barowner took out his or her agenda and offered a date.

It was a cold and uncomfortable February day. I had chosen a bar not far from Görlitzer Park, on Skalitzer. Someone had recommended it to me. It was one of those bring-in-the-furniture-from-the-street-and-thrift-stores-bars, that appeared like mushrooms and added a stylised version of squat esthaetics to the town, without changing its down-and-out character. It was uncomfortable as well: the furniture was puppet size, which didn’t seem to hinder Anne-F, because she was just over 1.50. What did we talk about? No idea. Probably it was things you talk about, when you first meet. She was from Canada. I am sure, it would have helped a lot, if I had known more about Canadian culture. As I see it now, it is all about being friendly and helpful in an enormous country, where every family had arrived only yesterday and had to learn how to cope with long, biting cold winters and a new sense of space, which was enormous, of course.

In the years that followed, we knew that we existed and, when needed, we would help eachother as much as possible. Occasionally we exchanged tapes per post. Her envelopes were filled with little things, that I would never throw away. She was there, at the outskirts of my existence; her image evoked a sense of compassion and modesty. But there was also something about her, that reminded of small animals in a children’s book, who became your companion and could talk. They too appeared and disappeared, whenever they wanted. In fact, if you listen to Anne’s soundwork, you will allways hear nearby sounds, as if she tries to imagine what an ant hears, when it shuffles through sand, or how a bee listens to itself when flying around. If mysterie exists, she must be capable of becoming miniature size and hear the world around her with different ears.

I finally made it to Montreal. On the occasion of my arrival she had organised a Tape Run. She had good hopes to finish it during my stay. That would have meant an absolute record, because the tape would travel from artist to artist almost at the speed of one track a day. I met Nicolas Dion and Martin Tétreault who were numbers 6 and 7 in the run, as the hand-over of the tape took place. It was a few blocks up from the book store where Anne worked. „She knows everyone in Montreal,” Martin said. He explained his track which was based on a gold disk that was sent into space. Engravings in picture language explained to the receiver out there, how life on earth was organised. In a next voyage the Montreal Tape Run will be part of the message.

I made good use of my days and drove around town as much as possible, albeit on a miniature sized bicycle. The bike figured in one of my 140character impressions.

“On a 9km/hour bike (20cm below my size): enter the fairy tale railway station with the phantom hall, where no-one leaves and no-one arrives.”

One of my favourite places was the island where the expo 1967 had been held. I stared at memories of a black and white era, got on a little stage where The Supremes performed, and, probably, the iconic president Trudeau had held the inaugural speech. I saw Buckminster Fullers geodesic dome and rode on the racetrack, still at my modest 9km/hour, thinking of the Formel 1 cars that drove 40 times as fast. Moreover I had to think of the enormous roar that would be heard in every part of the city.

“Long bridge, turn to the park, mysterious rumble in my headphones, riverside & city view, then this 1967`s naiv optimism”

I had seen a lot of the town, but when I saw the map, with all its rivers and islands, I realised that there was so much more to explore. Most of the little things pass by unnoticed. They become precious once you get to know them.