Platform for Avant-garde & Urban Media Explorations

You can just play long-play records, but you can also make use of them in
a different way. For instance scratching. The same goes for tape: making
long tape loops, letting the sound bounce between tapes and literally
cutting and pasting. These are good old proven techniques.

Philip Jeck sometimes plays a lot of turntables simultaneously and
constructs in this way his sound collages. With plug-ins for syntesizer
and music programs one can add tape hiss and tics of damaged vinyl to
digital recordings. Just as we see the CD carried to it’s grave,
foundation Plan B presents a programme in which new compositions for tape
and vinyl are the focus; two analog media which seemed to be completely
lost.

In Smart Project Space from the trusses above stage tapes are hanging in
serpentine lines and on tables onstage old cassedecks, walkmans,
dictaphones and portable turntables are parading. Voice artist and singer
Anat Spiegel is guiding the listener, who’s ostentatively as well a
spectator, through a special and unheard soundworld. The visual part of
the concert is at least as important as the sonic part, for Muziek als
Vinyl, Tapes & Songs wants to present live music as a theatrical art in
which light, colour, objects, words, gestures and movements are of equal
importance as the music.

 
The design is strongly conceptual but through the accomplished solos of
Spiegel the evening doesn’t end up in navel-gazing or arty-farty-ness and
the essence doesn’t get lost in technical mannerisms. For this second
concert in a cycle of three applies the expression: less is more.
Especially for this concert new works were written, like the playful piece
of Lola Linares for voice, metronome and dictaphone, or a spatially
diverging composition for three cassetteplayers (Piet Jan van Rossum).
Arnold Marinissen fetched works in which Spiegel indulges in dramatic
melodic lines and fysical expressiveness and the trio for two record
players and vocals by Cecilia Arditto is raising nostalgical feelings by
the crackling noise and ticking of the records.

The final is an installation piece, a composition for voice and two

shopping trolleys in which are placed two tapedecks. These specially
prepared tapedecks play tapes stretched between 2 walls. The trolleys are
controlled by 2 gentlemen, playing a score which tells them how to move.
(piece by Wobbe van der Meulen) This is no bulshitting around, this is
contemporary composed music at it’s best, consciously exploring the
(im)possibilities of tape and vinyl, resulting in brand-new and
progressive music. If you like to be surprised by the many ways of
presenting and experiencing music, be sure you’re at the third concert of
this cycle.