Esprit Flottant

This week I received the copies of the new release by Kaon. I composed the music based on the field recordings of Cedric Peyronnet. Recordings of the river Taurion. Good recordings, nice recordings. I really liked working with them. Today I relistened for the first time in a year to the composition. To my astonishment I was at first a bit taken aback by what I heard. It sounded alright but somehow the 'rhythm' or cadence of the work was not what I had expected. I played it a second time and then remembered how I conceived this composition as a circular work. It starts with the end and then works its way towards the end again. That way it feels alright if you replay it again and again. The second session was much better. I was adapted to the pace of the work and the coming and going of sounds and the transitions felt much better. Pheww!! So, I advise anyone to listen at least twice. Thanks to Cedric for making this production available.

please visit [ Kaon ].

Other than that, I have been working on several projects, as usual. I also have been preparing my live show in Cologne on June 9. More details will follow shortly.

I will also be present in a performance by the great Arturas Bumsteinas, who will do perform at the Kunstvlaai project in Amsterdam from May 16-21. It is called "My Own Private Bayreuth" which refers to both the state of Idaho and to composer Richard Wagner. I will be present there in the afternoon of May 20. Westergasfabriek Amsterdam. More info on this project at [ kunstvlaai ]. The site is a bit strange, but I guess more info will follow.

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Remixing and Remastering my own stuff

Today I had some spare time so I decided to have a go at my own material. I have been working on two series of works that are quite old. The first is commissioned music that I composed in 1995. At the time I was asked to produce the leader audio, the audiobeds and the bumpers for an interactive learning course. The idea of the course was that it was following a crime plot. I devised a tune that could easily fit in with a typical early German crime series ("Inspector Derrick").

Anyhow, it shows quite a different side of my musical activities: applied music. The reason for my picking up this music was that I wanted to see how it could be remastered. Below a few samples, originals versus new masters.

leader [ original ] versus [ new master ]
soundbed 1 [ original ] versus [ new master ]
soundbed 2 [ original ] versus [ new master ]

Well, it also shows that I do not work only on difficult, experimental electronic stuff. The second series is from a 1998 release that was made specially for an exhibition by [ Alexander Korsmit ]. It was released as "Maybe One thousand Buddhas for One Dream with hidden Noise" and given away to visitors. The music was by me, with texts by Paul Auster a.o. Texts were spoken by Danielle Lemaire, Alexander Korsmit and a few other people, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.

Strangely enough I don't have a copy of it anymore. I have started reconstructing the music because I did have the final mixes but they were made wit Cool Edit Pro and it appears to be very difficult to transfer sessions from one application (CEP) to Reaper. Some files are missing so some of the sessions cannot be reconstructed. The ones featured below have been painstakingly put together again, file by file, track by track, volume envelope by volume envelope, pan envelope by pan envelope. So, why go through all the trouble? Because I remembered the music as something really special. The cooperation with Alexander was that, as well. But I was very tired of that, after the exhibition was over. Alexander is very well-read and has a deep interest in the history of South East Asia, especially Indonesia and India. The knowledge gathered from his reading is included into the texts and into his art work which is very hermetic.

Below are a few examples of reconstructed tracks, both original mixes and remasters.

track 1 [ original ] versus [ new master ]
track 2 [[ original ] versus [ new master ]

I hope you enjoy these.

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Drone Gnome Review

Finally a review of The Drone Gnome by someone who actually thought about it. There was a review on Foxy Digitalis but that one couldn't be taken seriously as the writer had not bothered to do so in the first place. This one was in a Dutch magazine called Gonzo Cirucs. The reviewer actually listened to the music and thought about the things that I wrote in the press text.

His comment is intelligent and boils down to this: "This disc doesn't make a smashing impression but it may serve very well as an introduction to drone music." I agree on both counts. The disc as a whole is somewhat off balance, although I think that both compositions in themselves are good. Otherwise I have been fighting with the 'genre' of drone. My goal was to 'do a drone piece' and this is as far as I got. But the final conclusion is that I will never be a 'droner'. Ever. In a peculiar way that's a relief.

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Intermittent activities

There were quite a few things taking place at the same time last week. I have been working on an electronics and guitar works that was challenging but yielded "hurrays" from the original artist. I pulled an interesting trick by sidechaining the reverb on the guitar which worked out quite well. This is of course only possible when the original work is good. Unfortunately I have also encountered commissions where the original material was 'difficult' to say the least....

Next there was some final text work for my release in Kaon's [ Taurion series ]. I haven't heard the piece in more than a year so I am curious. Kaon (Cedric Peyronnet aka Toy Bizarre) is doing a wonderful series about this river and releases the works on a bi-monthly basis.

Please order the complete series!!

Then I received news about my work for [ Brombron ]. After more than three months I got an answer to a series of questions. Unfortunately I now have to dig deep into my memory to understand my own questions :)) So I will have to give this some more time.

There was a request for the mastering of a complete CD. This is quite a challenge as it consists of 10 songs (catchy tunes) which are quite different in sound quality as they have been recorded over a period of more than 3 years..... How am I going to bring it down to something coherent? Or should simple NOT make it into something coherent? Sometimes the answer is to do the opposite of what one aimed at first.

I have been preparing a new concert. Next Saturday I will be in [ Maastricht ] and on June 8 I will perform in Cologne (Koeln), Germany. These sets will be different from the earlier Extrapool concert. They will be twice as long and thus have more room for depth and detail.

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weekly report (september 20, 2009)

Been working on and off. Had to get rid of a kidney stone. Got into the stone crusher (3,000 sonic pulses straight into your abdomen) on Monday and got rid of the stone(s) by Thursday evening. So there were several painful interruptions. Been sculpting a few tracks. Nothing that is presentable, I'm afraid.

On Sunday I received my copies of the latest release. Sietse van Erve's Moving Furniture Records released "The Drone Gnome", a short series of works that can be regarded as my comment on drone music.

Please visit[ Moving Furniture Records ] and support Sietse (and me).

Extra snack:

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Sounds from the past RETURN

Blogger "The Thing On The Doorstep" re-releases ancient history. Almost every day there is another gem from the 70's and 80's available for download. Recently there was one on which I collaborated as well.

I remember very well, working on this stuff. It was quite exciting, especially receiving material from the other contributors and getting to work with that. Everything done by hand, no digitals. Quite nice to see it available again!

Read about it [ here ]

Get the files [ here ]

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Gaussian Transient, 12th review

A belated review of Gaussian Transient (Megaphone) which I found belatedly :) Squidsear reviewer Darren Bergstein wrote the following: "Some beautifully abstract pieces of sound art/processed field recordings from the always-reliable Jos Smolders, founding member of Dutch post-dadaist electroacoustic ensemble THU20. The fragmentary yet vibrant clutch of sounds embroidered on his small catalog of recordings are no less richer despite their minimalist bent; his works feel carefully chosen and smartly demarcated, musique actuelle that nevertheless derives a good deal of its staying power from the use of the most nourishing sample food. Smolders' own ruminations on how he arrived at the tableaux spread out over Gaussian Transient provides some welcome context. Self-imposing compositional limitations became his m.o. after his first (latter 80s) vinyl recording — because, as he states, "sometimes I needed to contain myself within certain boundaries, mostly because I had a subject of research in mind" — boundaries that make the listener sharpen their aural focus to glean the tiny non-events and small gestures Smolders buries deep within the mix. Paradoxically, Gaussian feels like the "busiest" of NVO's releases, its quiet passages suddenly upset by bursts of activity (a raging subway, a flurry of conversing passers-by) that would be jarring if they didn't adequately flesh out the dense physiognomy of Smolders' constructions. The sounds have their literary analog in Smolders' choice of track titles, penned by British artist Tom Phillips. Smolders notes that "I have always been intrigued by language, words and meaning... in the 70s, Phillips reworked existing pages of books...painting or drawing over the text he erased most of it but left certain word combinations intact." Smolders' own use of juxtaposition combined with abject Burroughs-ian cut-up/edit techniques yields just as fascinating sonic results. So much happens (even for such obviously well-considered sonic paucity) throughout the twelve works here — erected out of everything from vials of hiss, aberrant digital processing, strange quarks in the night, massed voices, the rhythmic banter of footsteps — that any literal dissection is a fool's gesture at best. Suffice to say that the closing eleven minutes of "The First Scenes and Feelings" illustrates fully Smolders' cinema pour l'oreille. Warbling skeins of moist static unfold in various layers, so that what is glimpsed in between are variable bits of microscopic activity — plastic balls impacting concrete, the distant hum of generators, flaccid raindrops — that colorfully sketch untold visual phantasms in the mind's eye. Author, author!"

Thanks. Buy the album (NVO 015) [ here ] at Nonvisualobjects

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Disquiet on EARLabs 3

Marc Weidenbaum, the omnivorous soundart journalist gave the EARLabs3 disc a spin and dedicated a review to it:

"There are ghastly, dead winds that rotate slowly in the distance, and sudden sounds that signify something happening, and just as quickly disappear. There are what could be muffled calls for help, and quick edits that make it easy to lose one’s sense of time during the five-minute recording.

And what there is, foremost, is a balance between calm and tension. This is not music to relax to, nor is it the score to a slasher film. It’s an investigation, painstaking in its rectitude and attention to detail, that commands attention — attention to every brittle cue, every choking gasp, every abstract fragment."

[ read all ]

and after that buy the disc at

[ entr'acte ]

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Yay ! Ouch!!

I can be such a goddamn calvinist. I feel a pique of pride and immediately some little devil stings me in the back of my head, telling me I shouldn't. But I AM proud. The first review of EARLabs 3 arrived today, from no less a magazine than The Wire. So why shouldn't I be proud? Here it is.

Yes, yes I know. We are just one of many. And I really am puzzled by the strange remark about the Northern European potting shed.

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Entr'acte releases Helix

Finally, more than a year after its completion, the cooperative works with Sascha Neudeck (upper picture) and Christopher McFall (lower picture) have been released. This coop started when Christopher and I exchanged ideas about stuff that we worked on and had released. I set up a webserver which was used as an exchange platform. Each of us placed basic material on the server which the other guy then downloaded and included into a composition. This worked quite nice. Then after a while Sascha who also circled around in my EARLabs network proposed a cooperative project. We suggested that he joined our duo project which then became a trio.

We then decided to produce 6 pieces. Each duo producing 2. Each duo had one piece started by one with alterations and additions by the counterpart and another started by the other. Etcetera. This worked really fine as we all had approximately the same basic idea but also our own approaches to sound. That way we sort of meandered around each other. That was what lead to the idea of the title: Helix.

The production was finished by the end of summer 2007. Allon Kaye of [ Entr'acte ] decided to publish it but it did take a while. We were okay with it and moved on with our personal projects (like Gaussian Transient which was my immediate successive project). Then, early 2008 Allon requested a new master and so I remastered the original and sent that one off. That was, I believe May 2008. And now the result is seeing the light of day.

Marvellous!

[ Listen ] to a special mix I brew for Entr'acte!

Cheers, Allon!!!

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New THU20 release available

As I mentioned in my message of May 3 there was a new THU20 album on the way. It's a mix of a live session we did in October 2007. There are two tracks on vinyl, 17 minutes each. That's actually rather short, but guarantees maximum dynamics.

All of the members discussed the liner notes. And when we finally agreed, somehow the text about where the concert was actually given, had disappeared. How stupid!! Oh, well: here it is again. The concert was given in my hometown Tilburg at the Paradox venue. Some 30 visitors listened to 2 sets of approximately 22 minutes. Each of us recorded their own part on minidisk or harddisk. And there was one tape recording made by the engineer. Unfortunately the Revox he used recorded with heavy compression so a lot of mixing was required to get it into a good listening experience. We think we succeeded in this. The first mixes have been done by myself and dj DMDN early this year. Final mastering was done in cooperation with Roel Meelkop at EARLabs.

It's for sale, of course. You can (strike that: you SHOULD) buy it directly from Korm Plastics.

Noise magician Jliat commented as follows: Practicing priests . for once information is to hand - (A rare live work from THU20- Jos Smolders and Roel Meelkop (computer) Peter Duimelinks and Frans de Waard, acoustic objects and the analogue electronics of Jacques van Bussel.) and if not then this multilayered work might suggest some studio piece - which would account for its un-noise structuring of abstract "shapes" of sound, more sound collage, sectioned to short to evolve into something which once called itself industrial, with almost nostalgic references to the Abstract of the previous century, charming rather than American brashness or lost in translation Japanese renderings, I'm reminded of that strange and interesting Abstract Expressionist movement in Northern Europe of Wols et al. - an intellectualism which was overwhelmed by first the size and then the brash confrontationality of US Nimitz sized and culture art. Which was a pity, no longer the intellectuals smoke in street cafes Gauloises, but if at all Malbro lites, indicative of the refusal to live and denial of the truth, SMOKING KILLS, and here in Tilburg some smoking clearly takes place, a careful and thought out improvisation that is just like the eddy of Gauloises smoke and thickened with the taste of real, not instant coffee and real not instant improvisations of sound - not noise then- something that might speak from the past and say here is something to talk about. (jliat)

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More reviews on Gaussian Transient (megaphone)

More reviews on the nonvisualobjects' release Gaussian Transient (megaphone). De-Bug and the Wire have written favorable comments. Read them here

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Pause: unpublished material #3

The video version of this material has been shown during the Earational festival of 2006. That's the last time I ever saw it. I still have the ISO with the DVD material but it has never been viewed. I don't think it will ever be released as DVD, because of the high production costs. Perhaps somewhere online? I don't think I will start another such project all by myself (but maybe in a coop with someone else?). l have given up working with video because I don't have a good camera. I dó have quite a lot of ideas but not the time to materialize them. Soit, as the French say.

Below are the two final sequences for your pleasure:

seq6_a

seq6_b

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Pause: Unpublished material #2

Part 2 then. Tietchens material revisited. When I had almost finished the music, I decided that I wanted to experiment with video. I bought a very cheap webcam, I took pictures with a pda (700 kb pixels, so not even 1 mb) and I started to experiment with VVVV software. VVVV is a video specialized counterpart of MAX. Naturally, as with all experimentation this was a struggle. I didn't have a fast enough videocard in my pc to do all the things I could and wanted to make with VVVV. But in the end I got what I wanted and went on to the next stage: Adobe Premiere. So I mastered that software as well. That was great fun, by the way. I really liked it. Syncing the sound with the video required a new mix of the audio. That being finished I authored all of the material onto DVD.

Pfeww, yes I did learn a lot in those days. But I also learned that I am very bad at 'selling' my stuff. I wrote to a few labels but they refused to release this as a DVD. Business is bad, of course. And releasing a DVD, well, it's just too risky.

This weekend there are four downloads available:

seq2
seq5_a
seq5_b
seq5_c

Next week the rest (of the story).

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Pause: Unpublished material #1

Because my production has come to a stand still (for the moment) I have decided to offer some unpublished stuff for download. There is a project that I have been working on from 2001 to 2003. It has never been released. I offered it to Die Stadt but they turned it down (after leaving me hanging for 2 years, thanks very much). Does anyone remember Asmus Tietchens' "Von Mund Zu Mund"? Three 7 inch singles with vocalities. Heavily distorted stuff. I liked it immediately and decided to 'do something' with that material. I reworked all of the music into an opera. I invented characters for the voice treatments and so made up a plot and went ahead. All fine and dandy but the story never really materialized. And so the end result was a suite of electronic arias.

For download there is :
sequence 1a
sequence 1b

There are six other parts in the series. Next week there will be more.

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A bit silly....

The reviews for Gaussian Transient have been favorable until now. You can read them [ here ]. But now two of my fellow reviewers at EARLabs.org decided that they write a review as well. All fine and dandy, but I'd like to point out that I did not push them in any sort of fashion to do so. Neither does writing a review about my music entitle them to some sort of bonus. Just so you know....

.. and to give this post a bit more content I'd like to add the fact that I actually didn't know that Gaussian Transient actually means something. But if you google this word combination you will find a book title like this one: "Efficiency of real-time Gaussian transient detectors: comparing theKarhunen-Loeve and the wavelet decompositions". I have really no connection to either Karhunen or Loeve.

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Old masters and remasters for sale

This weekend I had the strange impulse to start an online store with my own recordings. I have remastered some of the old stuff, there are still a few originals lying around and there is this compilation of material that I have contributed to other compilations, which might be interesting. It's all material that is no longer available through other sources, except as a second hand.

So, I have opened my little store and you can go there and order. Most of the stuff is printed on cd-r and comes with a special cover, handmade and signed and numbered by me. The cd-r's are printed at low speed and checked. They cost 10 euro's including handling and shipping.

The store will be more professional when sales have started. Now you have to order each item separately which might be a nuisance, especially when you want to order multiple items. Just start ordering one, and I will jump to the possibility of including a cart before you know it. And next time you order something you can do the whole catalogue in one go :).

EDIT: I have decided to stop this initiative. It takes too much of my time designing covers, and such. Sorry, people.

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First reviews of Gaussian Transient (Megaphone)

Two reviews I have read on the latest release through Nonvisual Objects. I am pleased to read that they are quite favorable. Although I have a special relation to the work which is partly quite detached from that of the listener and I therefore could stay indifferent towards any criticism. But it is always nice to read or hear from others that from the heap and mash of things and ideas that I put into the work is picked up by total strangers.

Read the reviews here

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GAUSSIAN TRANSIENT (MEGAPHONE) released

NVO releases GAUSSIAN TRANSIENT (MEGAPHONE)
Grab some info here. Now, let's see what you people think of it. I am terrible pleased with it and I thank Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser for their arduous work with the Nonvisual Objects label, which rules for quite some time now and which continues to release great material.

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Beequeen re-released

Today I received the re-release of Beequeen's "Time Waits For No one". I did a bit of remastering of this release. I cleaned up the analog tape, updated the stereo image and aligned the overall volume. I think it's better than the original and that one got quite nice reviews, which you might read here.

Oh and by the way: I'm in the market for remastering other stuff as well. Just mail me about the conditions (some are for free, others cheap).

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