chefkirk - landscape with trees (2)

above are some scans of the "awkwardly awesome" artwork of chefkirk's landscape with trees. click on the images for a larger view.

chefkirk - landscape with trees

this release has been almost two years in the making (problems with money and material being the main obstacles), but it's been worth it. chefkirk's material is stunning. switching between low volume and high volume, drones, beats, glitches, clicks and harsher noise, he'll drag you into his world and tie you to a tree before burning your brain and tickling your synapses at the same time.

i must admit i am pretty pleased with the artwork; a glossy photo on glued to an a4 sized foampaperback with an ink drawing going beyond the outline and white paint bar code patches, all handdrawn on each individual copy. the cdr itself is stuck to the foampaper with needles (an idea of hel).

het perron van het geheugen (3)

the first ‘studio track’ on ‘het perron van het geheugen’ was built out of the fieldrecordings made for the performance on the 17th of march with an added drone. the changes in the drone were intended to coincide with the passing of sounds in the fieldrecordings so the shifts in the spectrum would be a bit obscured. i opted for a shriller tone at the beginning as i find these higher pitched tones act as better carriers than low rumbling tones. people seem –or at least i seem- to be able focus beyond those high tones by shielding their hearing from it. whereas low tones, especially if they go too low, muddy the whole, bringing contrasts down.
of the field recordings i used trains that passed later on through the live cuts, and also a part of the walking fieldrecording of the mechelen aurasphere that deserved more attention than it got live. there are some nice clanging and mechanical pump noises there.
again you could qualify this as an investigation into environmental noise or noises with the drone as a kind of carrier beam.
the second ‘studio track’ was basically a shorter version of the first to fit the loop.

het perron van het geheugen (2)

(pictures by bart walravens of the performance at the oude stadsfeestzaal mechelen, march 17th 2007.)

het perron van het geheugen

silence, playing silently, or rather playing with lots of space between sounds, is probably the easiest way to ensure audience participation. every noise the audience makes becomes part of the piece; however voluntary or involuntary that noise may be on their part.
the last gart&seekatze performance (with visuals by stijn pardon) at the oude stadsfeestzaal in mechelen, wasn't that silent. i came prepared for a large hall and a large crowd that didn't really know what they were going to get, and i wanted to ensure that stijn's film would get a soundtrack that was worth his effort. so, i brought two amps, the full analog-digital effects rack and two field recordings -one of trains i made earlier that week and one i made just prior to the gig in the streets of mechelen- and two guitars. laurent and sara (of veglia records and r.o.t. fame) had gotten a p.a.-system; so volume wasn't a problem.
as the film was a loop, i didn't really have to mind any duration or pace, which is always a good thing. that way sound will sometimes coincide or contrast with the image and in that way augment or warp the impact of either image or sound.
the crowd was larger than usual and pretty much into their own thing during the performance. at no point did their chatter stop, but that's really what i like. on the recording the audience noise echoing through the hall blends with the other prepared or played sounds, and lifts the recording above a mere registration of a live performance.

sadly the recording volume was too high so the loud sounds of the trains coming through the amp and p.a. got distorted onto the mini-disc and i had to doctor the recording with some filter shenanigans to make listenable to uninvolved ears. still i managed somehow to keep the weakest sound-source of the performance audible, an e-bow on an unamplified acoustic guitar.

at the moment the recording is only available as a no release by incidentalrecordings on a cdr that contains two mixes of the live material and two tracks made from the material i recorded for the performance.

(the performance on the 17th of march 2007 was part of an international architectural workshop about the dossin building in mechelen)