D.B. Lolaq's sounds & noises

Rex Indignus - Stone Tape Sequences

2012-02-11T10:59:00.000+01:00

While my left middle finger was recovering from a cut I mentioned earlier, I've been busy with a dark ambient/drone album under my other musical alias, Rex Indignus. Since I wasn't able to play most of my instruments, especially the stringed ones, the album is built up around field recordings I made with my Zoom H2, found sounds from the amazing sonic world of the internet and sounds I created with a programme that synthesizes sound from images. After heavy digital processing, extensive cutting up and mixing and finally mastering some pieces on an hq compact cassette player, this is the result: Stone Tape Sequences.

Free download HERE, for streaming options and individual file download click HERE

This machine kills nobody pt.3: an answer to all the political shit.

2012-02-06T18:44:00.000+01:00

I've written 2 posts about the impossible mix of music and politics before. The first one was to give a sketch of the problem, with the picture of Woody Guthrie's guitar with the famous This machine kills fascists sign on it as a starting point. The second post was a reaction to the way people read the first one and a further expression of my nausea that was caused by the way people abuse music in general and by the stupidity that believers in political music display in particular in the proces of abusing it. To end the whole caboodle and the fuss about music & politics I think I should mention an alternative. If mixing politics and music devalues music, there should be an alternative. Politely asking please don't just won't work. As the final part in the this machine kills nobody triptych I will give an alternative to the political devaluation of music - or any other instrumentalist devaluation of it - by showing a way to live with music that unfortunately is not too well-known.

I've written a post about Sedayne before, he's a great musician from the UK. Primarily a folk musician, he approaches folk music in a fresh and unorthodox way, combining tradition with modern means and he's not afraid of experimenting. Since it's especially folk music that is the victim of the politically active, aggressive in-crowd, I thought it would be interesting to let a pre-eminent folk musician do the talking. Sedayne has written a piece about the notion of feral folk, an estimation of music in which both person and music can be themselves without any abuse. The original can be read on his MySpace blog.

As a musical companion to the reading I'd like to suggest the following:

~ Feral Folk ~

I came up with the term Feral Folk back around 1979 to account for the free-form happenings in the sticks which sighted on ancient feast-days, inspired by folkloric misrule and entertained at least the possibility of pagan overtones, thus revelling in a licentiousness entirely owing to the season with at least one conception taking place during that time. We took the music back into the wild wood, back into the wilderness and the green-mans; we wove masks and played drums, flutes and fiddles and our music was released on labels such as Necrophile Records, Amission and United Dairies.

In the city we morphed in bands such as Rhombus ov Dooom and carried on our campaign of mayhem by morphing rural Feral Folk (that's me on electric viola) with urban Anarcho-Punk. As WIKI says A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly or wholly, to its wild state. The introduction of feral animals or plants, like any introduced species, can disrupt ecosystems and may, in some cases, contribute to extinction of indigenous species.

At the very least Feral Folk is to go out into the wild places to commune with the primal essence of both time and place via the medium of Traditional Music and Balladry. This is something we storytellers do all the time of course. In the 1954 Definition of Folk Music it says: The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music. Feral Folk is actually a reversal of this process - it is stripping music of its affectations (however so uninfluenced) and taking it back to its rudimentary beginnings by seeking the very wellsprings of primal sound-magic & ritual experience and our primitive appreciations thereof.

Feral Folk rejects the tempered scale, celebrating in terms of pure harmonics or else total cacophony; as of the wind, the sea and the singing of birds. It is heard in the rhythms of wood pigeons and the beating of horses hooves on the frozen earth of winter; it blows with grass-blades and goats horns and knows only the enduring beauty of the pure sound / noise aesthetic which to the Feral Folkie is the pure drop.

Feral Folk is bark of foxes and the shriek of owls; it is the bellowing of stags and the clashing of antlers; it is the shadow of the hare by the newly torn furrow and the silence of the stars in the night sky. Feral Folk is the listening wilderness of sound beyond music that might, at last, come weaving into our waking dreams. Feral Folk touches the moment, knowing nothing of the past, nor yet of the future; it is our primal cry of otherness that lingers in the dark depths of every human heart.

Feral Folk is singing The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry up the boating lake overflow pipe on Fleetwood beech whilst beating on the metal grill with the rubber end of an old golf club to provide an appropriate drone. Feral Folk is being so full of cold you can barely remember the words let alone the order they come; Feral Folk is making the melody up as you go along whilst floating on the natural reverberation of said pipe and the harmonic vibrations of the grill therein. Feral Folk is having your handy Zoom H4 on hand to record this, so you might upload it onto YouSendIt as an MP3 for all the world to hear if they so wish.

To the Feral Folkie the whole world is a musical instrument; we sing with the resonances of the ambient universe; we sing in the fucking fields (and vice versa) along the Vagabondian trackways, we commune with the world through song.

Feral Folk is fiercely non-commercial, and very much anti music industry, born as it is of organic communion & principles of free floating anarchy and community, marrying as it does the principles of Free Improvisation with the Folk Music aesthetic. Feral Folk is an outsider music of cultural vagabonds exploring the liminality of both tradition and creative continuity as is embodied in each & every one of us. It acknowledges the essence & uniqueness of the creative individual. It does not pigeon-hole, and it does not sell its arse for breadcrumbs and butterbeans.

Feral Folk is not a musical genre - it is a philosophical approach to Improvised & Experimental Musics which acknowledges the Folk Aesthetic to a greater or lesser extent. Conversely it can be a philosophical approach to Folk Musics which acknowledges the Improvised & Experimental Aesthetic. For me, it works both ways.

Feral Folk exists in complement to other approaches wherein the one thing informs the other with respect of parameters both musical and aesthetical. By adopting a more improvised approach to musical performance and recording the Feral Folk Musician aligns his/herself with Free Improvisation & other more Experimental musics, none of which would exclude Folk in quite the same way that Folk would exclude them. For example, in my performances of Free Improvisation I invariably sing a Traditional Ballad or two, but I would never Freely Improvise in a Folk Club because experience has taught me that the punters wouldn't get it.

Feral Folk might act as a bridge as far as the performer is concerned - certainly as far as this performer is concerned - seeking music in the wild / ancient / sacred places of the world with a few little flutes, bells, Black Sea Fiddle, a Zoom H4, an open ear and a fistful of Jew's Harps. The same day, however, they might fetch up in a folk club and turn in a couple of respectably conventional renderings of traditional songs - much as happened the day I recorded the feral Black Sea Fiddle improvisation currently playing on my page; that very evening we paid a visit to The Joiners Arms in Bideford, where I played the self-same fiddle to accompany The Sheep Stealer and Butter and Cheese and All in the singaround, and jolly good fun was had by all.

Feral Folk is musical & personal liberation whereby the musician might slip away from the world a while, alone or with a few like minded souls, to commune with another level of possibility. It seldom works in terms of conventional performance of course, but that's not what it's about. It's about Experience Ritual, by which I might imply a non-proscriptive spirituality which occurs when one improvises on Medieval Plainsong Modes whilst absorbing the atmosphere of a beautiful medieval church - much as I do in the Launcells Kemence improv - the recording of which becomes somehow infused with both a dynamic impossible to reproduce in a studio and the genius loci which is, ultimately, what Feral Folk is about.

Feral Folk says one day I was born, and some day I will die, and this is the day in which I am alive, and in this moment I am both here and now.

It says take time out to get back to the fundamentals of what might make this music Folk Music in the first place.

It says we love you, but you don't have to love us.

Highly recommended: Lee Noble

2012-02-03T10:49:00.000+01:00

Bandcamp is a wonderful place to find good music. One of my favourites I found there is Lee Noble. His music is an electronic ambient folk mish-mash, an interesting mix of ambient à la Boards of Canada, lo-fi folk sounds and electro/noise, but it's hard to give a description that really does justice to the music. There are 4 albums available from Lee Noble on Bandcamp, most of them can be downloaded according to the principle of name your price. Take a listen, be mesmerised and download it. You can listen to the album No Becoming, my personal favourite, below and follow the link to download it.

No Becoming by Lee Noble

This machine kills nobody pt.2: Don't mention politics, nor Woody Guthrie!

2012-01-28T19:46:00.000+01:00

A while ago, or actually quite a while ago, I wrote a post about politics and music, in which I mentioned Woody Guthrie and his guitar with a piece of paper taped to it, saying "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS". In that post I argued that as a musician I hate the combination of music and politics - in general, not just in the case of that piece of paper stuck to the soundbox of a guitar. Combining those 2 damages music, because you only use it as a means to achieve political goals. Actually I wish I hadn't written that post. Why not just delete it and act as if you never wrote it anyway, you might say. But I'm just not that kind of person. I wish to hold my ground and stand up for my opinions.

I have a few reasons to have a sense of regret of writing that post. First of all it's the best read post on my blog. But I prefer writing about my own music and musical projects, that's why I started this blog in the first place. The story about the post I just referred to, was a story of coincidence. Coming across a picture that left me a sense of annoyment, an accident that might as well hadn't happened, but it did and watching that picture caused a reaction in my mind. In my blog I tried to express this reaction, because in my opinion, music has been abused too much over the decades, or even centuries, for personal gain by those who don't even know about music, for greasing people to achieve certain political goals or even to brainwash people. Someone has to stand up for the rights of the music as such, and as a musician and a lover of music in general, I felt obliged. But arguing on behalf of an abstract entity is not an easy thing to do, and takes a lot of effort. An exercise in expressing myself more or less philosophically, which does have a place in this blog, but shouldn't be the major content of it. When such a post becomes the number 1 in terms of views, I become slightly annoyed (or possibly even more than that); when I post a new piece I uploaded on Soundcloud with a player you can click on to listen, people read the blog, but don't take the time to listen to the music. When it comes to things like politics or religion, people are all ears, but the simple things in life that make life enjoyable or even bearable, oh, to hell with it, no, we don't give a shit.

Then there's that other thing that happened to my post. A short while ago, some Neil Young fan, a left-wing American who had a Republican father whose ideas he resented, thought he was a smartarse and reacted to my blog, suggesting that I was vain and stupid. A typical American left-wing way to react to things you don't like, I say as a non-wing European. No, don't read for a second time to see if your initial ideas about a written piece are actually correct, no, just start typing and try to hit the author as hard as possible. I've left that comment where it was, so that everybody can see how short-sighted people can be, lack any sense of humour, and are not able to cope with dissident ideas. Personally I hate politics no matter what side it comes from. Right-wing people tend to conceive themselves or their own group/class/community as the only person or group that is normative and truly matters. Right-wingers close their eyes for other opinions by forgetting others. Left-wingers are maybe even worse. Left-wingers have these silly things they call ideals. They are people with a chronic Stockholm syndrome, always blaming themselves for all suffering in the world, while actually they are being held hostage by all the right-wingers in the world. And don't be fooled, right-wingers are everywhere, even among those who are usually perceived as left-wingers, champions of freedom, human rights, etcetera. Ideas like that of for example the ANC in South-Africa would be considered fascist if transposed to a group in Europe, for example groups that are accidentally led by white people and resist mass-immigration and the effects it has to culture and well-being, but really, there is no difference between them. Left-wingers are right-wingers in disguise in the best case. In the worst case they are people who lack financial resources to be excepted by the opposite side. And in politics it's either to eat or to be eaten. Usually, right-wingers eat and left-wingers are being eaten. I hope that one day right-wingers will die of obesity and left-wingers will have vanished from the face of the earth in the political feast of their opponents. Politics is the main, no, probably the only cause of war in the world. Without politics, this world would be a much, much better place with a lot less sorrow, suffering and bitterness. Want to call me an anarchist? Fine. Maybe I am one.

But I haven't made my point yet. I was talking about music actually, not about politics. Music isn't free and can't be itself if it's kidnapped by political groups. And as a musician, I pretend to be able to be a judge in cases of music being violated. I understand the background of Woody Guthrie's hand-written notice on his guitar, with all the trouble in his time. But however bloodthirsty or cruel your opponent may be, you can never use music as a weapon. You can use your life as a weapon and the way you live. Live the answer, don't just use music as a canon, or your guitar as a gun. Now I come to think of it, I guess there isn't even much of a difference between Guthrie's notice on his guitar and Kurt Cobain smashing his instruments. In both cases, the instruments weren't respected, and with them, music. Guthrie's enemies were the fascists, Cobain's enemies were the demons he carried with him, and in both cases the instruments were used in their personal struggle against their opponents. Much difference? No, not at all. In both cases you see projections of evil. You can't fight evil. You just have to accept it's there. And once you've accepted it, you might even find it has vanished completely. This world is a valley of tears, or to say it in Hebrew (the origin of the expression is biblical): עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא, Emek HaBakha. Don't try to give evil a place by granting it the right of existence by fighting it. You can fight crime and violence with laws, but you can't fight evil with all too simple human resources. Evil overcomes you when you give it a name and offer him a cup of coffee and start talking with him. Fight the means of evil and take care of it's victims, but don't think you can fight evil, you'll just help it by doing so.

Just for a moment I looked at my classical guitar and I thought: No, this one is a peaceful instrument. It doesn't do any harm, it's just some pieces of wood glued together by some friendly Korean people with some pieces of nylon string and metal that I stretched upon it. Maybe I should just stick a note on it, to make it clear for once and for all: THIS MACHINE KILLS NOBODY. And I forgot to write on it; NEITHER IS THIS AN INSTRUMENT TO BRAINWASH ANYONE IN ANY WAY.

If anyone wishes to react to this post, please don't. Just read this post again and don't consider me as an opponent - I am definitely not. I'm just a musician and philosopher who stands up for the rights of a forgotten and oppressed victim of mankind: music.

7 Pieces for the Papergirl now in hq

2012-01-25T13:05:00.000+01:00

From now on the album 7 Pieces for the Papergirl will be available as a 320kbps hq mp3 download on archive.org. HERE's the link for the free download, and individual file download options can be found HERE. I noticed the mp3 files were in VBR, a lesser quality. I prefer hq quality; the files may be bigger, but the quality is what counts.

No playing stringed instruments for a while

2012-01-13T23:29:00.000+01:00

Some days ago I cut my left hand middle finger. While washing up I tried to take two little glass flower pots apart that were stuck together. Let me give you one advise: never try to take apart two pieces of glass that are really stuck. It's a hazardous operation that can cause serious danger to your health. One of the pots was squeezed into smithereens by the force of my hand, causing a deep cut in my middle finger. It kept bleeding for almost two hours, so I was forced to go to the doctor, who couldn't offer anything more than a pressure bandage. Stitching or gluing the wound were not possible. So now I'm stuck with a big white middle finger. Finally I've got a reason to give people the finger! But one disadvantage: I won't be able to play any stringed instruments for the next weeks, and judging from the wound & and possibility of scarring it will be a bit of a problem returning to playing those. So no D.B.Lolaq guitar or mandolin pieces can be expected for a while now. However - and you might call it a happy coincidence - I was busy with another Rex Indignus album, involving found sound, field recordings and digital processing. No troubles with one useless finger working on it. It will be the third Rex Indignus album, the other two can be found here; that's the first one, titled Instrumentalist, and here; that's the second one, titled Roots. You can listen to them below.

Instrumentalist:
Download: www.archive.org/compress/MCR002

Roots: Download: www.archive.org/compress/MCR004

New track: Betula

2011-12-26T12:32:00.002+01:00

Betula by D.B.Lolaq

New track on Soundcloud: Too Much Of A Difference

2011-12-05T14:08:00.001+01:00

Too Much Of A Distance by D.B.Lolaq Uploaded a new track on Soundcloud yesterday. An ambient track this time, something I made yesterday, on an easy Sunday morning. The basic track is a guitar drone thing I recorded earlier, some time in late September and left unfinished. I added some processed flute sounds to make it complete. This track can be downloaded for free btw, click the arrow on the right side of the widget.

Aspen Grove

2011-11-02T18:01:00.001+01:00

New D.B.Lolaq upload on Soundcloud: Aspen Grove. Aspen Grove by D.B.Lolaq This track is another ode to autumn - I'm really sorry, but autumn is my favourite season. I kept this track as simple as possible, 2 guitar tracks on classical guitar and electric, with one alto recorder track over it. It was inspired by the poplars I look at when I gaze out the window where I record most of my music. Actually those aren't aspen trees, but canadian poplars, but what the heck...I tried to hold on to a jazzy sort of aesthetics when I was composing it. Fifth intervals are the basis of the 2 guitar parts, and the alto recorder part sometimes dissonances with the guitars - not an accident or musical stupidity, but a way to express the double-faced nature of autumn, a time of year that's sometimes bright and direct, sometimes cloudy and reclusive; expression & melancholy go hand in hand in autumn. On the other hand this track has a ethereal wave kind of feel to it with the alto recorder drowning in reverb & delay.This track can be downloaded by the way (click on the downward pointing arrow on the right side of the widget) as a hq mp3 (320kbps).

Let's Take A Trip

2011-10-22T12:26:00.002+02:00

Over the years I've been listening to the band Morphine a lot. It has always been a great influence in my music. I decided to record a cover version of one of their songs: Let's Take A Trip, from the 1993 album Cure For Pain. Let's Take A Trip (Morphine cover) by D.B.Lolaq

Red Evening - a jazzy ode to classic Sesame Street instrumentals

2011-09-16T13:03:00.004+02:00

Red Evening by D.B.Lolaq Jazzy instrumental piece on fretless guitar, alto recorder (as in fipple flute, not recording gear) and grave light percussion. Ode to classic Sesame Street instrumentals.

Sparkle On

2011-08-31T11:00:00.000+02:00

Sparkle On by D.B.Lolaq

I just uploaded this new track on Soundcloud. It was lying on my digital shelf but I thought it was worth bringing it to the people. I made this back in July, on those too long, too light nights when you're desperate for some darkness. There is some digital soft-synth stuff involved, some rhythm programming, but the core of this piece is the guitar. An electric with lots of reverb and volume knob playing, heard in the center (for those who doubt: yes, it is a guitar, no keyboards were used for this piece except the keyboard on my computer) and a slightly distorted classical guitar that you hear in the right, swimming in delay.

Don't fret, go fretless pt. 2: the fretless guitar

2011-08-24T22:41:00.001+02:00

A while ago I wrote about my fretless mandolin and the idea of removing frets from (previously) fretted instruments (here's that post). In the end of that post I wrote about wanting to have a fretless guitar. I thought about it for a long time and searched the web for websites with tips about making a guitar fretless. First I thought about buying a new guitar (preferably a a 3/4 size nylon-stringed guitar) and remove its frets, but I found that somewhat awkward. I could use that money for better purposes. And I already had one guitar that was a particularly good candidate for the operation: my Charvel Jackson 550m acoustic guitar. It's a steel-string guitar with quite a big soundbox, the frets already had some marks and were a bit worn after 11 years. The last years it has spend most time in its case, since I've been busy with making field recordings and used other instruments in my more melodic pieces. The Charvel has great projection in the lower frequencies, so any loss in volume as a result of defretting it would not be too much of a problem.

I spent about a week just looking at the guitar. Would I do it or wouldn't I? Would I ruin it with the whole operation? I saw some footage on the internet from fretless guitars and it was mostly electric instruments I saw. So I was a bit unsure about how the result would be on an acoustic guitar. Then one Saturday morning I decided it had to be done. I bought wood filler, went home fast, removed the strings from the guitar and took a knife too lift the frets from their slots and pulled them out with pliers. This job wasn't hard. I had already thought about the strings earlier, they had to be replaced anyway, because they were already 3 years old and didn't sound too good because of their age. They were bronze wound strings, you could say the standard for acoustic (non-classical) guitars. Bronze strings make a guitar sound like a bell, or even worse, a canon. Somehow that has become the standard over the years. For some time I used the Charvel to accompany myself while singing and that taught me to sing really loud. There was no other way to make myself audible without amplification. The defretting operation would make the guitar an other kind of instrument, so I had to think about other types of strings. Not just for the volume and the sound, but also for the sake of not destroying the fingerboard. Normally the metal frets withstand the pressure of the strings, and after some years they will show marks, but the bare wood on a fretless instrument is a totally different thing. The strings have to be lighter and sound less scratchy. I discovered silk & steel strings. The bass strings on these have a core of silk and steel fibres and are wound with some silver alloy. This would be the best string for a fretless instrument. A soft, friendly sound from a string that wouldn't damage the wood of the fingerboard. In a webshop (unfortunately there is no instrument shop in the town where I live) I bought silk & steel gypsy jazz strings. Interesting detail: the strings were from an Italian string maker, Gallistrings. It's totally absurd, but they are the first set of European made strings I've ever had on my guitar. The guitar string market is totally dominated by American manufacturers. It's really awkward that you can hardly find non-American strings in a European country like the Netherlands. I don't know about neighbouring countries, but I find it ridiculous that the Dutch market for guitar strings is so ignorant towards European products.

Filling the slots that were left after removing the frets from the fingerboard wasn't too difficult a job either. Cleaning the fingerboard of excess wood filler was a lot of dusty work and left the wood looking dull and grizzled, so I decided it could use a few layers of boiled linseed oil (and I really love the smell of that stuff too, so that adds to the experience). That left me some time to lower the string action: because of the absence of frets, the strings have to be lower so you won't have to push too hard on the strings to play a note. And a lower action makes life easier for the strings: less pressure means a longer lifetime. On a fretted instrument, low action can cause a buzz, because of strings hitting other frets than the fret behind which you press the string. On a fretless instrument you don't have that problem and you can lower the action to such a low point that you hardly need any finger pressure to play. I already had some experience in adjusting the action of the strings, so that wasn't too difficult: measure the height of the frets and lower the nut and bridge roughly as much as the frets were sticking out from the fretboard. A simple job that only needed clamping the nut and bridge and filing them down to the wanted height. In total maybe 15 minutes of work.

And then the guitar was ready for restringing...with these silk & steel strings a very easy job. Restringing bronze strings always sent shivers down my spine, with the great amount of physical pressure involved that caused psychological pressure and heavy sweating, afraid as I was that the strings might snap. The pressure of silk & steel strings is a lot lower, they almost have the feel of nylon strings to them. And they sound just perfect. An advice for everyone who doesn't know which kind of strings to use on a fretless acoustic guitar: medium gauge silk & steel strings (the Gallistrings set I use now are 011, 014, 023, 030, 039 and 047). They sound lovely on an instrument like that, not as rich in overtones as bronze, but when you want to make sounds like a bell you should buy a glockenspiel.

Making a guitar fretless isn't a difficult operation, especially not when you have some experience with woodwork and you are handy. The end result will be a totally different kind of instrument. Playing barred chords will be really difficult if not impossible, so if you're not much of a solo player and rely on playing chords solely you shouldn't do it. For the solo guitarist it opens totally new roads. My fretless Charvel reminds me a bit of a fretless piccolo bass. I found out that the fretless guitar even sound better when it's played in a bass finger style. Using a pick makes the strings sound a bit snappy and takes away sustain, which is already much shorter than on a fretted guitar. Fingerstyle playing adds warmth and warmth is what playing fretless is all about.

Highly recommended: A.K.A.C.O.D.

2011-08-21T12:48:00.001+02:00

In the summer of 1999, American musician Mark Sandman died at the age of 46. He was not a very well known musician, but a talented one all the more. His musical career started relatively late, world wide publicity came with the band Morphine, which was formed in 1989. It was a three-piece band, Mark (mostly) on 2 string slide bass, Dana Colley on baritone sax and Jerome Deupree & Billy Conway on percussion. Morphine brought a new sound. Low rock they called it themselves, but it was a mix of blues, rock and jazz with wonderful lyrics, reminding of 1950's beat poetry. Experiment wasn't avoided by Morphine, sometimes Dana was seen playing his baritone at the same time as a tenor sax, Mark played a tritar, a normal guitar only equipped with 3 strings for slide parts, also heard in the music of the band The Presidents of the United States.

After Mark Sandman's death the members of Morphine haven't been sitting still. Together with other musicians they have been involved in several projects to keep the musical memory of Mark and low rock alive. One of these projects is the band A.K.A.C.O.D. - an acronym for Also Known As Colley, Ortiz and Dersch. Dana Colley met Monique Ortiz back in the Morphine days. Monique is a great songwriter, she has a wonderful low contra-alto voice and has a very destinctive way of playing the bass guitar. She plays the Mark Sandman-style 2 string slide bass, tuned in fifths and a 4 string fretless bass. Her songwriting combines very well with Dana's sax playing. Over the years his style has changed, he can make the sax sound like a jazz instrument as well as droning rock guitar, although putting it like that doesn't really do justice to the depth in Dana's playing. It's more like pure music that drowns you in sound and it really doesn't matter what instrument it is you hear. a fat, sexy sound, no matter if he plays in the normal way or with effects like a wah-wah. And then there is the drummer of course. Larry Dersch played together with Morphine on the album Like Swimming. His style of drumming is very tight and jazzy. His style of drumming offers a great rhythmical base for low rock.

A.K.A.C.O.D. has only made one album up till now, titled Happiness, which was released in 2008 by Hi-N-Dry. It's very tempting to compare a band with its predecessors, but A.K.A.C.O.D. is entirely different from Morphine. Not better, not worse. Just great music. Definitely worth wile.

A.K.A.C.O.D - Spanish Fly door bbpradi0

experimental membrane flute

2011-07-22T14:25:00.000+02:00

Until about a year ago, I've been building lots of flutes and whistles. I now have a collection of about 20 usable ones, which I really like to pick up every now & then. Last summer I had enough of it, my collection was expanding too rapidly so I stopped making them. A few weeks ago I found it time to "evaluate" the instruments and see if I could make some changes to improve sound or see if there were some items that needed tweaking of some kind.

One of the first properly sounding instruments I made was a 3-hole fipple flute with a closed bottom, which sounded a little bit like an ocarina. You can hear it on the track Fleurs du mal on my album Verre muren (you can hear the seperate piece here). The range of the instrument wasn't really great, so I decided to add some more holes. And to avoid trouble when overblowing to play an octave higher I decided to open the closed end of the flute. A bottom hole that's smaller than the average width of the tube inner part allows the spacing of the flute's holes to be random. When you have a big bottom opening (no pun intended), you need to put the holes at specific places on the tube to avoid an out-of-tune-instrument. I made all holes by burning with a soldering iron - quite a smelly business with a flute that's already finished with walnut oil. Burning holes like that smells more like deep-frying than making instruments.

When I was burning holes I thought about the dizi, a Chinese transverse flute with a membrane on it (here's the wikipedia page about it). The membrane follows the frequency of the tones played on the dizi and adds extra sound to the played note. I like to experiment with musical instruments, so I burned an extra hole just below the labium of the flute:

I quit smoking years ago, but I still have some packs of cigarette papers. It's very thin but strong paper, that can stand a lot of moist. I use that as membrane material. Real rice paper, like it is used on the dizi, is very hard to come by. And I had a lot of paper left anyway.

There's a certain technique of playing to bring out the full potential of the instrument and I'm still trying to master it. But to give you an idea of how the instrument sounds (if you're desperate enough, you can download it here)

Cottonball

2011-06-11T15:35:00.001+02:00

A fresh new track on my Soundcloud-page. Downloadable!

Cottonball by D.B.Lolaq

Lake Placid Blue Eyed Frankie

2011-05-28T15:01:00.002+02:00

Just uploaded a new track on Soundcloud: Lake Placid Blue Eyed Frankie

Lake Placid Blue Eyed Frankie by D.B.Lolaq

It's a melodic piece, a guitar melody on a bed of field recordings (of atmospheric interference and the sound of a wind harp for who's interested). I recorded the guitar part in one go on my 1/2 scale little red devil, tuned in A. Some playing with the volume knob in the intro and outro and some genuine surprise in between...Hope you like it!

Don't fret, go fretless

2011-04-19T12:36:00.003+02:00

In modern music, notes are like caged lions. Every note has an absolute value, dictated by a system of frequencies that the musician has to abide by. Everyone who doesn't, plays out of tune. And playing out of tune makes clear that you're just not able to play. I wrote about that in a previous post. There is a way to escape from the evils of equal temperament, and technically it's relatively easy. But as with all evil systems, the equal temperament works from within its victims, the consumers of music. They reject music that's out of tune.

I started playing stringed instruments when I was about 12. My father had won a guitar once at a neighbourhood party tombola in the early 1980s. The instrument had been lying in the attic for years when my older brother decided he wanted to learn to play it. At that time I was fed up with my recorder-lessons. The recorder is a kind of fipple-flute and it can sound very nice, but repeating the same baroque melodies over and over again on a weekly basis for years made me hate it as a 12-year-old. I quit the lessons and strummed a bit on the newly discovered mesmerising instrument. I liked the feeling of the vibrating soundbox when playing the low strings. 1 Or 2 years later my parents bought me a classical guitar for my birthday and more instruments followed in the years after. All standard instruments, the first one a 7/8 sized (methinks)nylon stringed classical guitar my parents gave me, some years later I bought a Maison Strat, a standard 3 single-coil pick-up Stratocaster imitation, with a Marshall amp, nothing fancy or special. Even the feedback noise I liked to make with it was in equal temperament. After the Strat another acoustic guitar followed, a Charvell 550m steel-sting with a sexy lightbrown soundbox, an instrument with great projection and a great sound in the lows. It has a very mellow jazzy sound and I like to play bossa-nova-like chord progressions on it. And about a year ago I bought a little 1/2 scale electric Volcano, which they sold as a kids' guitar, but you can't call it a toy. I tuned to A, 2 1/2 steps up. the neck is so short that you can't tune it in the standard tuning. This higher tuning makes it possible to play higher melodies on it than on a standard guitar. And although it's a tiny instrument, it really rocks.

Guitars are usually played like pianos. On the neck of the guitar there is a fretboard, usually a separate slab of wood with little metal bars called frets. These frets essentially turn the instrument into a lightweight piano. The main difference between a guitar (or any stringed instrument) and a piano is that the strumming and choosing the right note is done with 2 hands instead of pressing the right key with 1. But this difference has to do with the number of strings. Every note has its own set of strings on a piano (for those who've never seen the inside of a piano: it's actually not 1 string for one tone, but 2 or 3 strings tuned to the same frequency). Some guitar players like to diverge from the standard by pulling the strings up behind the frets. This lengthens the string, so the frequency goes up. Pulling the strings like this is heard a lot in rock music. If you listen to Slash e.g. playing a solo you'll hear this technique. The guitar is no longer treated like a piano this way, but the tonal system of equal temperament is usually still totally intact. Would anyone like to hear an out of tune guitar solo? Don't think so. Wouldn't sell...

Years ago, when I lived in another town in another province of the Netherlands I had another TV package. In it was the Turkish national broadcaster TRT. Every evening they had programs with Turkish music. I fell in love with oriental music. Reading about the music from the Near and Middle East I found out that their tonal system is different from the Western. For many westerners Eastern music is just cat howling, out of tune, but the Western tonal system is not absolute. Considering other tonal systems out of tune is just the product of brainwashing.

In 2001 I bought a mandolin to widen my musical vocabulary. I've always used it as a melodic instrument but you see many mandolin players using it like a guitar, playing chords. I think that's a ridiculous thing to do. A mandolin is somewhat related to the violin, a sort of mishmash between violin and lute, tuned like a violin with the playing technique and shape of a lute. The guitar is a lightweight piano, well that wasn't enough. In the last 15 years more and more guitar players have been turning to the mandolin because it was even smaller. And the history of the instrument doesn't matter. Equal temperament is a direct result of playing chords and more than 1 melodies at the same time. So it's in the line of the deterioration of music that the mandolin became a baby-guitar.

My love of Eastern music made me take drastic measures with my mandolin. The fretboard was a bit loose and instead of re-glueing it, I decided to get it off and swop it for a fretless board. I made that myself out of a salvaged piece of old oakwood, originally a broken door from an antique cabinet from the 1920's. A tough job to get it exactly flat, but the new board is really great...and fretless. playing chords is very hard now, but you're not supposed to play chords on a mandolin! Some people would say my choice of wood is awkward, since some luthiers consider oak not to be a tonewood. I don't like superstition and magic, the sound proves my choice was right (you can hear the instrument on some tracks of Verre muren and on the opening track of Elementals. But the main thing is that it's fretless now, liberated from the oppression of equal temperament! Now I can play any tone I like on my mandolin. Those metal cage-bars called frets are out. I revised an historical mistake. And in the near future I want a fretless guitar too.

In praise of springtime: tzipporit

2011-04-05T18:06:00.000+02:00

Tzipporit by D.B.Lolaq

With springtime in the air again, the blackthorn in the backyard blooming, fresh leaves & magpies nesting in a nearby poplar tree I came up with this little something. You can download it for free (click on the downward pointing arrow on the right) and redistribute it under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license if you like. The title, Tzipporit, means little bird in Hebrew.

church backroom photography

2011-03-26T23:04:00.001+01:00

In the winter of 2010 yet another Roman Catholic church, de Heilige Geestkerk (Holy Spirit Church), was closed in my hometown, Roermond, NL. The last weekend before the closure it was open for public. Totally. You were allowed to go anywhere (now it's being turned into a community health centre with a general practitioners' practice and an on-site pharmacy and I don't know what more.)
Walking around the building my brother and I made these pics, which I found waiting on my HD to be used for something. Some were intended to be used as album covers, but I've never used them. Picture #4 is my personal favourite.

3rd Album Verre muren now available in HQ mp3

2011-03-15T19:28:00.000+01:00

My 3rd album, Verre muren is from now on available in a high quality (320 kbps) mp3 format, and under another licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

Download HERE, other download and streaming options can be found HERE

music for refreshment: Sedayne

2011-03-14T18:21:00.001+01:00

Up till now I've been writing about myself mostly. Spring is in the air now, which makes me gasp for some fresh air and break through the boundaries of frost-infested egotism. Springtime is the time of nature regaining the strength to grow outward, expand, explore, and you can grasp the sounds and smells that suddenly surround you again.

The atmosphere of these days really needs some fresh music too, corresponding with the tingling air. I found music like that a few years ago: Sedayne. An English musician, rooted well in the English folk-music tradition without being reactionary or repeating the same gimmick over and over again. He's a master story-teller with a haunting voice and an unorthodox multi-instrumentalist, combining traditional instruments with psychedelic electronics. He and his wife, singer and instrumentalist Rapunzel, are the duo Venerum Arvum. Here's Sedayne's blog.

And to top it off a bit some pieces from Sedayne on Soundcloud:

St Anne of Dunkirk by Rapunzel and Sedayne

Winter Pastoral (20-9-10) by Ploughmyth International

Winter Pastoral (20-9-10) by Ploughmyth International

Collaberation & stupid Dutch society

2011-03-09T12:01:00.002+01:00

A while ago I decided it was time to look for people to collaborate with. I usually work as a solo artist, which gives a lot of freedom, but on the flip side, you can end up in a very uninspiring situation, stuck in revolving ideas with not much light in the end of the tunnel. Years ago, when I was studying philosophy, I was in a few bands. Stepping out of your solitary universe makes the music bloom, making music on my own almost felt like an abatement actually. About a year ago I worked with Poland-based Ukrainian musician Mandragorod, which led to some very nice remixes and a few pieces that are still lying on the shelf. Because of the distance real contact was impossible, so we recorded ideas and uploaded them on a file-sharing website. Here's one of those pieces, Alaska I: Yupik

Alaska I Yupik by D.B.Lolaq

Collaborations like this one with Mandagorod are nice, but the distance and the way we work in can be a bit of a drag. So I decided to put an add on a website for Dutch musicians, hoping that someone would be interested. Put a few widgets on it with some of my music from soundcloud and just waited. It's been 3 weeks now, still no response. Which is odd, I check the add every now & then and notice that its looked at regularly. The only response I had was an email, saying nothing more than check. Dutch culture has no place for music. Dutch culture has no place for culture. I remember uploading my first songs on a Dutch website, tribeofnoise.com I think it was. My music received positive reactions from people other than Dutch. The only reactions I got from Dutch people were things like what awkward titles you use. In the Netherlands, music is something you hear on the radio. Making music, so it seems, is forbidden by an unwritten law, called the mowing field principle. You're not supposed to stick out your neck and you're not supposed to be creative in the Netherlands, you're not supposed to give a positive contribution to society. The Netherlands are like Cold War/Stalinist Russia, culture being dictated from high above. The supposed cultural centre is the Amsterdam grachtengordel, where all cocky arrogant bastards dictate their will. These are the cultural know-it-alls of this godforsaken country who dictate the cultural do's and don't. An artist who doesn't receive the approval and blessing from this in-crowd simply is a nobody, an empty shell. On the other side we have the newly elected Dutch government in The Hague which has the policy to abolish this country. They want to cut 18 billion Euros in the coming years. Three musketeers, a liberal-democrat weasel called Mark Rutte , the prime minister, a shrewd Christian Democrat vice prime minister by the name of Maxime Verhagen and a folk hero, anti-Islamist and leader of a political rebel club with his hair dyed blonde, Geert Wilders, follow the will of the Dutch people to execute the Endlösung, the Final Solution, to Dutch society. As part of that, culture, the stepchild of politics, will be one of the expenses to suffer the most, as a good second after social welfare. But hey, it's the will of the people, it's democracy, so that's OK. If the people of this socio-political lab want to abolish their country, who am I to give a comment on that? As the US has taught us: democracy is the highest good. And extermination of culture seems to be alright too, as long as it is backed by the will of the people. But it's not my will.

Elementals

2011-02-18T10:54:00.001+01:00

My new EP Elementals is finally out on Moustached Cowboy Records! Free download - see bottom of this post.

It's a 4-piece EP, influenced by the work of 16th century alchemist Paracelsus. He wrote extensively about the 4 elements and developed the idea that there are 4 types of spirits that correspond with them: earth with the spirit Pygmaeus, water with the spirit Nympha, fire with the spirit Salamander and wind with the spirit Sylvester. These spirit are related to the natural environment and can also be found in traditional legends and myths, except for Sylvester. These creatures are living beings, Paracelsus states, and even look like people, especially Sylvester, but they have no eternal soul like people. They live their lives in their own environment, and can sometimes be seen, Paracelsus writes.

Elementals is a return to the style I used to make music in on the album Verre Muren: drony ambient folk, played with real acoustic instruments, some of which rather unusual, like a fishbowl, stones and numerous wind instruments. The background noises you hear are a direct consequence of the recording method: most of the music was recorded outdoors. This was done in different places, sought out to catch the spirit of the elements at their best.

Download HERE. More streaming and download options HERE.

The trouble with neo-paganist music. 2: Disauthenticity and hatred

2011-01-31T14:53:00.002+01:00

In my first post about neopaganism and neopaganist music I referred to the sources it draws from. Authority is given to old texts, some of which survived from ancient times because they were written down in later times. An example of this is the prose Edda, a collection of old Norse myths, written down in Iceland in the Middle Ages. Because of their relative late date you can doubt about their authenticity: medieval Iceland was christian and not pagan and the Icelandic people had adopted Christianity. Worth noting here: they did that democratically. They were not forced by the sword to forsake the old gods. The stories about them lived on though, but views on the old pagan religion changed: medieval Icelanders thought the old gods were just people who deceived others and made them believe they had huge powers. You can read some of that in the old myths. An example of this is that they needed some special golden apples to retain their youth and power. At one instance the giantess that guarded them disappeared and all the gods suddenly grew old, except for the god that was behind it all. 2 Things could have happened: the old religion was considered feeble, weak and there was a better, truer religion available, so the old customs were abandoned and old stories revaluated, leading to new versions of old stories (so the gods seem weaker in more recent stories). The second option is that the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience were just unknown before the arrival of Christianity. In that case the stories were authentic and remained authentic in the christian Middle Ages, but culture had extra knowledge, brought by christian missionaries. The ancient gods had always been feeble and weak characters in the first place, and the arrival of Christianity just caused what was inevitable anyway: people realising that stories about gods playing around with each other, with other creatures and with people was a proof of their weakness. I tend to place my bets on the last option, because there is historical evidence that in the Netherlands, where in Roman times (58 b.C.-406 A.D.) the common religion was similar to the old Norse religion, people were very instrumental when it came to religion: they asked a certain god for a favour by means of offerings and such. If the favour wasn't received, people would just turn to another god.

Now back to the musical part. Christianity has been an inspiration to artists of all sorts, poets, painters, musicians, sculptors since its earliest days. You can wonder if ancient paganism had such an influence on art. An argument that this was not the case, not in Germanic areas anyway, was the instrumentalistic way in which the gods were dealt with. Offerings were brought on alters in clearings in forests by priests. Natural phenomena were seen as godly. With Christianity, religion came closer to the people, closer to the heart of the people - like in Judaism. There was one God, almighty and all-knowing who loved each and every member of the community, not a grumpy character that had to be asked things submissively, and that would even ask for human lives to be kept satisfied, so that the community would stay healthy and alive. In that way, a loving God is far more likely acting as an inspiration for the arts.

In modern neopaganism, the most important trouble is the problem with the sources. When neopaganists want to make neopagan music, they must base their music on old sources in order to make it truly authentic. But sources are scarce. Archeologists have found remains of instruments, and some basic shapes have survived the test of time and can still be found in modern instruments. But modern instruments are played in a modern way and produce modern music. Dug up remains of old instruments are nothing more than remains, they are usually unfit to be played on, not to mention the fact that tunings and other technical aspects have changed over the centuries. And in music theory, there is always discussion about the technical aspects and what is authentic. Take a basic musical principle as the fundamental, the keynote. What frequency should be the basis of that? In modern Western music, the basis of musical tunings is a=440 Hz: the foundation of tuning is the note a, with a frequency of 440 vibrations per second. But not everyone agrees with that. Some people think that a=432 Hz (432 vibrations per second) should be the basis. People would almost kill each other over such differences.

This brings me to the central problem: what are neopaganist musicians' intentions? They themselves usually say that they want to use their music to bring the old died out pagan religions back to life with the music and eradicate the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I know a political group that has been active worldwide in the first half of the 20th century, especially in Germany, that had ideas like that. I assume I don't have to tell you what the name of that group was. And like this political movement, neopaganists make up a story by randomly adding remnants of old traditions that couldn't stand the test of time to a blind hatred towards the traditions they've grown up in themselves, an attitude not less dark and lifeless than the dark clothes they usually wear. Whether it's the real deal or not is not the question, they make up traditions that have never existed. Authenticity is not what it's all about. Hatred is.

If love for the ancestors was the incentive for creating a neopaganist tradition, than neopaganists forget the ancestors who chose for Christianity. And the lack of authenticity suggests that all neopaganist cultural expressions are just postmodern utterances of a deep caving for a community that the modern capitalistic and individualistic society has shoved aside. In that craving neopaganism confirms the power of capitalist consumerism, because it's capitalist consumerism that created the myth of evil Chistianity that killed millions and brought billions under the yoke of its power (one of the ideological priciples of neopaganism,)and capitalist consumerism created the myth of the individual consumer that should be able to choose their own way of life (one of the founding principles of neopaganism). Neopaganism is also essentially postmodern in that last aspect. Only some neopaganist groups and individuals have totalitarian ideas and seek real power.

The only essential totalitarianism in neopaganism is in the music. If it's true that neopaganists see their music as a vehicle for their beliefs, you could state that their opinions about music are both instrumentalistic and totalitarian. Instrumentalistic for the fact that the music should cause a certain way of thinking or a certain belief in the listener, and totalitarian towards the music, in the sense that it's not just for entertainment. In that first aspect neopaganist musicians are exactly like Medieval christian artists, who wanted to show the Gospel through their art. In the second aspect they just show aversion towards the modern musical consumerism that was created by the music industry. You could call that reactionary in its revulsion to, and, in that way, closely linked to that which caused the rise of neopaganism in the first place: consumerism.

What should neopagan music be done with then? I think it's a nice costume play. When you know what it's worth, and you know what's behind it all, it can be very entertaining. Some radical christian groups say it should be banned. I disagree with that. Analyse it, listen to what neopaganists have to say about it themselves and compare it to what your own beliefs are. But be aware of the fact that it's not always what neopaganists say about it themselves.

B'racha

2011-01-30T20:01:00.001+01:00

Here's a little musical theme I'd like to add to my previous post.

B'racha by D.B.Lolaq

It's a piece from my soundcloud which I recorded last spring. The title, B'racha, means prayer in Hebrew. The last few years I've been listening quite a lot to Jewish music, both religious and secular, and I think I can say it has become a great source of inspiration to me, both as a musician and as a person (I have some Jewish roots myself, though halachicly I'm not a Jew).

The trouble with neo-paganist music. 1: The backgrounds

2011-01-30T18:48:00.001+01:00

The musical styles that I move about in, ambient folk and ambient drone, are a world of their own, very colourful, inhabited by many striking characters. It's a world with outspoken ideas, of course musically, since it's not the mainstream world with its blunt and flat taste, but also religiously and at the level of the worldviews lying at the base. When you roam around on the internet, most musicians of these genres seem to have a love of black clothing, monstrous make-up and seem to fill their days with odd rituals and reviving old religious customs. Some even state that their music should evoke the depths of old wisdom and spirituality.

Personally I'm a great advocate of a spiritual way of life, and there's a certain human need of ritual to offer a matrix in which life has a pleasant order. Music is a ritual on its own, and whether you're a listener or a musician, music always seems to open up something which you can't really describe, but it makes you experience a strong spiritual effect. I remember being in a band in the late 1990's as a student. Although the level wasn't that high and we were just playing cover versions of alternative rock songs, there always seems to be someone who wasn't physically there when we were playing, someone who left when the song ended. A very awkward feeling, I think it's to cause of the ancient Greek concept of the muse. So the effect of making music is stronger than that of listening, although listening can bring you in a totally different state of mind.

For some musicians, especially in the musical styles that are an inspiration to me, the effect of music doesn't seem to be enough. They seem to follow - or pretend to follow maybe - some sort of vocation. The music is not a thing on its own, but part of a larger whole. Which makes sense: making music is a ritualistic activity that has deep spiritual meaning. For some, it can evocate spirits, or their apparent presence - the experience I had in the student band. But it's not just the music with its effects that shows the ritualistic background, also the physical act of making music is highly ritualistic: the instruments are tuned in a certain way, you follow melodic lines that are in a way predetermined, the second note is related to the first note you play, and so on. Music, in that way, is a homage to the moment and the ritual is the vehicle.

Music has always had a complicated relationship with religious practice. In organised religion, there are usually many rules surrounding music in the ceremonies. Religious books sometimes tell what has to be sung, what instruments have to played, etcetera. Tradition is a key factor in all this. But tradition is a concept that has lost its splendor. Tradition is a spell that has to be broken. Modernity sees tradition as an obstacle that withholds mankind from reaching further. The modern Western attitude towards life sees chains that shackle mankind all around. But there's always a spiritual core in people. The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated that man was an animal metaphysicum, a metaphysical animal, because there's a counterweight to the reasonable, so to say scientific state of mind. But for modern people in the West this brings a problem. Religious traditions from the past have seemingly been refuted, making place for a seeking individualist without much spiritual support. Christianity, especially in Western Europe, is a smoking ruin, and with its loss of spiritual primacy, culture lost an important steering principle.

Over many centuries, music (as any kind of art) in the West was essentially christian, even in the choice of worldly themes, until the decline of Christianity in the 19th century. People got into contact with other cultures and adopted customs and cultural expressions from all over the world. And not only from other places in the world: historiography as a science was a new scientific field, people became interested in long gone eras. Hundreds of years ago, the past was considered past and gone, what really counted was here, now and the afterlife. That changed drastically, ancient archeological finds were suddenly cherished and ancient texts were examined in detail. And not only science adopted this new way of looking at the past: not only expressions from far away cultures were adopted, but also ancient rituals. Some people who had lost their faith in the christian way of life adopted ancient methods of worship, worshipped gods they found in old texts. Not that it had any real traditional significance, because the old traditions were long gone and the texts neo-paganism based itself on were litarally dug up from the ground.

Music, as a sacred, ritualistic act had to find a way into this new heathery too. But what music should be used? This question is usually answered in a rather childish way. Most neopaganists have a rather gloomy world view. And when you think of ancient peoples struggling to stay alive, what do you see? Exactly, grim forests, infested with bears and wolves. So if you want to make music like a new pagan, you have to sound like a poor bugger afraid of all the darkness surrounding you. It's highly unlikely that real pagans spent much time in the forest, apart from hunting, which wasn't really needed anyway since farming was highly already developed from early on. Neopaganism and its music is a very 19th century thing in its way of expressing a gloomy view of the world around us, and very romantic. It's very plausable that neopaganists who would be beamed into pre-christian times would be tied to the trees and left as food for the ravens and wolves, because they would be so vain that they would be useless in the harsh agricultural life. And for the music: there's nothing pagan about neopagan music. It tries to create a wicked, unfriendly atmosphere, because neopaganism tries to chase away everything that's christian. Christianity is associated with potty ways of cultural expression, so it seems. But hey, is a 33 year old man dying horribly on a cross potty? And the story that follows it, not less fantastic than all those ancient Germanic or Slavic stories, no even much better?

Anyway, it's all about the authenticity of the music I think. And I'll talk about that later.

Nightly Shapes

2011-01-11T19:12:00.002+01:00

Playing with some field recordings I came up with this little something. Downloadable (ogg-file) for free (use the downward pointing arrow on the right side of the widget)!

Nightly Shapes by D.B.Lolaq

The piano was recorded about 2 years ago at my aunt Bertha's and uncle Frits's place, an old wonderful bakery in a village called Siebengewald, just a few hundred meters (or a few hundred yards for those without the blessing of the metric system) away from the German border. They have a large kitchen with tiled walls and an old grand piano (pre WW2) standing in it. Here's a pic with my niece playing on it...

The other sounds are a field recording of geese I made a few days ago. I live next to a little river called Roer, which has been flooding in the last days from melting water from the High Fens in Belgium where the river has its origin. All the extra water makes the pastures in the other banks interesting for geese and I've seen more cormorants as usual. At night the geese don't seem to sleep but argue a lot!

partial solar eclipse - a sign?

2011-01-04T13:24:00.000+01:00

Usually I'm a very reasonable, rational person. But there have been some events lately that can be interpreted as signs. I know signs & omens are epistemological disasters, but I have this gut feeling that just won't go away.

This morning, there was a partial solar eclipse at sunset in the Netherlands (as in other parts of Europe and the Middle East too). The sun rose in the shape of a horn. I knew this would happen, because it was told in the news on tv yesterday evening. So this morning I got up in time to be able to see it. Unfortunately there were some clouds in the eastern horizon, so all I could see was a orange glow, though I noticed there was less light that usually at sunset. The path of the sun at this time of the year leads it directly behind a flat-building directly after setting, so the first 30 minutes, the sun is not visible from my house and I didn't feel like going out before breakfast to see it. But by 9.15 I saw more light, and from the attic of my house the sun rose over the flat-building. It was already too bright to look into directly, so I took 2 pairs of sunglasses and I saw the bright yellow horn, open to the left side.

It was the second (partial) solar eclipse I ever witnessed, the first one was in August 1999. But that one was in the afternoon, and this one was at sunrise, which makes it more spectacular. and this time there's something odd in the celestial movements preceding this eclipse.

Now what harm could an event like this do? By itself not much, probably. Scientifically speaking it's just the moon crossing the path of the sun. But you could see the world we live in as a meaningful complex of events. Authentic astrology observes the world in that way - and I don't mean the nonsensical pseudo-astrology that you find in glossy magazines: today you will have a hard day at work, dear Sagittarius, because Mercury is passing Taurus. In ancient times and in many parts of the world today people see a connection between mankind and the celestial movements. Think about it what you want, but maybe there is a truth in the core of that belief.

There is an eerie coincidence. Today is the first new moon after Winter Solstice. This new moon made the sun rise in the shape of a horn. Last full moon was just before Winter Solstice, on December 21, 2010. But that full moon was eclipsed in the Netherlands. Maybe that's more than just a coincidence. But meaning as such can never be explained in any way, so I have this awkward feeling, about the same if you've had a predictive dream or a strong vision. We'll see what the future brings. Anyway, its a great inspiration for new music...

Sketch

2010-12-28T11:39:00.001+01:00

Here's a little leftover from my recordings for the Elementals project I uploaded on my soundcloud.

Salamander by D.B.Lolaq

It's inspired by the spirit of the element fire, the salamander, as described by Paracelsus (more on this project here). The background sound of a fireplace was recorded by Ludovic Kierasinski. Enjoy.

The Absurdity of Copyright

2010-12-14T18:45:00.001+01:00

I found this interesting article about copyright on the web. I think it's worth passing on through my blog. The author is Dr.Godfried-Willem Raes. The original can be found HERE

THE ABSURDITY OF COPYRIGHT

As far as we know, the idea of copyright and the royalty-fees in connection to it, did not originate in the minds of composers nor creators at all! Protection of copyright entered our law-systems only under pressure of publishers and replaced their former privileges to print and to sell books. Therefore the idea of copyright cannot be traced back any further than up to the moment of the invention of the printing press with Gutenberg. Even if the idea of individual authorship and moral rights with regard to intellectual property goes back on the french revolution, it should be said, as to musical composition, that all copyright regulations date back only from the second half of the nineteenth century. The time when our music culture took a turn towards historicism.

Concert life at that time just achieved independence from contemporary music production and concentrated merely on reproduction of so called classic music from the past. Only commercial, i.e. mass-consumption oriented new music (Strauss-walzes, the real origin of pop-music) was really in demand. The majority of academically schooled composers became sort of superfluous and thus felt a lot of social frustration. Nobody was in need of their music and thus, economically speaking, their music was (and still is) absolutely worthless, since out of demand. Organisations such as Sabam here in Belgium, were not founded to help out poor composers, but only to secure them a place in a capitalist economical system: to give them some psychological feel of being valuable. It is thus very well explainable why those organisations where founded by probably the worst of those days composers, and... why still today they are led by the worst and most academic amongst them. But, what they have done in fact, was nothing else than copying the idea of copyright protection from the publishers, but without understanding the very basis of the system. Publishers in fact used and needed copyright protection in order to protect their investment. Composers at the other hand do not usually invest anything but cheap ink and musicpaper.

However, I am not going to annoy you all with historical facts and details, but the only reason why I am raising these few points is to show that the underlying motivation to the legislation of such a thing as copyright was nothing else than the protection against competition of the publishers material production. The publisher, before printing, had to do a for that time rather substantial investment, and he did'nt like the risk of someone else producing the same book - cheaper - in fear of major financial losses. He didn't protect the contents of the book, but merely used the criterium of the contents as a way of protecting his material production and financial investment. One can consider such an attitude to be clearly in contradiction with liberal economic theory. Information in the second half of the nineteenth century still was quite strongly bound to its medium, to its material carrier. As a parenthesis, allow me to remark that the first books printed in large numbers were actually bibles, wherefore nobody could really claim any form of copyright anyway! One thought of it being quite evident, the Holy Word going round. And, as a second remark, of course also before printing the practice of copying was widely in use, and nobody ever made a problem with regard to the "property of the contents" . Every copy - a manuscript in itself - was a new commissioned product and that product was owned by the one who payed for it. In every case, the notion of content was entirely unrelated to the economical value of the manuscript. The labour of copying - by hand - was what was payed for. Furthermore, in the case of "original" work, the new work was either a commission in some way (of a publisher, a monastery, a government, an art collector, an institution...) or a normal result of a given job situation (as in the case of professional researchers in service of an institution, university, conservatory etc...), or else, it could also be a new work under the personal initiative of the writer. In the first case the work was of course payed for by the commisioner or the employer, whereas in the second case, no claims for remuneration could of course be made.

Up to the beginning of the 19th century, this procedure sounded - and so it still sounds to me - quite fair. Things have changed from the second half of that century on, where the first associations of authors and inventors were founded in an attempt to protect the economy against its own and most beautiful and democratising consequences: technology. And here we enter the level of the philosophical debate of the matter, since this paradox can only be solved by careful analysis of the different concepts used. So, let's first have a brief look at the notion of 'information', and let's define information broadly as a set of perceivable forms of matter or energy (form in space or form in time, as in the case of music). As such any form is transferable to any material or energetic substrate or carrier. This is a logical consequence of the defined notion of information itself. It seems extremely evident when we apply it to such things as knowledge: it simply means that I can tell you something I know, that I can also write it down, record it on a cassette or store it as a sequence of bytes in a computer. The basic property of information seems to be that its transfer and multiplication is possible without taking away anything from the source. When I tell you something, I don't lose anything from what I'm telling you. I just lose some salliva, some energy etc...

This entails that information cannot be owned for very intrinsic reasons. Property after all, is something you can lose. If you can't lose something you can't consider it to be your property neither. Thus the whole notion of intellectual property, property of ideas, appears to be nonsensical, and , not for ideological reasons but logically so. Its merely a bad metaphor. Secondly, as information is not a product and an object of possession itself, it cannot be considered to have been produced neither. The notion of production can be sensefully applied only to the substrates and the labour put into shaping them. This means clearly that thinking is not producing. An idea is not a product. A score is, speach is, just as making (and I mean, playing) music is the result of a real production. Now of course, it may be true that it is quite impossible to communicate ideas, or information in general, without producing shaped substrates, but still the distinction remains fully correct.

Knowledge is not a product nor is it produced. Knowledge and memory are simply properties of collective systems necessary for their survival in an steadily changing environment. I say clearly collective for transferability characterises information and for the fact that this implies a social context. Knowledge and information in the broadest sense therefore is a capacity of a system and its transferability is even a criterium for its being knowledge! If society takes care of its members' knowledge, by organising schools and such more..., it does so because only doing so it has a chance to increase its survival and developmental chances as a society. The members do not own this knowledge, but they share it, change it, contribute to it, examine it, recombine it, transform it and... can only give it back (i.e. let it know) to society. Nobody doubts this reasoning as long as we apply it for instance to the discovery of physical laws. Who would say that Einstein owned the general relativity theory? Or stronger, who would find it logical to pay a fee to Einstein (or his heritagers) everytime "his" knowledge would be used for something? Where, but more important, why do our institutions draw a line of calling something property or not? There is absolutely no intrinsic difference as to the nature of information in the case of a physical law, a technical idea to solve a problem, an argument, or an expressive piece of music! Therefore, any legal limitation on the reproducibility of information is an infringe on the proper character of information. It is an epistemological lie! Moreover, it is purely immoral towards society. So far it should be clear that I support the idea that an effort - labour - should be payed for only once. More so, if an effort is done without anyone asking for it, it should be clear that that effort should not necessarily lead to a remuneration whatsever: it becomes a leisure activity. As to music, we can distinguish both cases very clearly:
(i) Either a composer gets a commision for a piece, in which case he also gets a remuneration for the writing. There is no problem, the author is simply a "professional". His labour is payed for. No further royalties should be payed to him, regardless the number of performances the piece eventually gets.
(ii) Or else, the author takes the initiative to the creation of a work. In this case he becomes an "amateur" - and I do not have any negative associations with this term whatsoever -, just as those who are helping in the Red Cross, collecting stamps, playing chess, or perform any kind of hobby. It seems logical that he does not get payed automatically, since his effort was not requested at all.

Consequently, to me the idea of a composer, author... as a 'free' profession is pure madness. In the margins of this all, I could of course also remark, closer to the everyday practice amongst the vast majority of new music composers, that they generally compose within the time they are already payed for by our social institutions: radio-stations, music schools, universities etc..., or else they are on welfare, social security or such more. If these composers claim and get copyright royalties I would not even hesitate a moment accusing them of theft.

Yet another, more practical question one could ask with regard to the corruption of the royalty system, is related to the object of protection itself: the information and the properties characterising it one would consider protectable. Speaking of music for instance, traditionally melodies were considered to be the criterium for deciding whether one piece of music was different than another. Since almost a full century now, virtually all possible melodies have been written and one could question whether melody is even a criterium. Are two pieces of music on the same order of notes different? Why not protect instrumentation for instance, or, as would be most appropriate for most rock music, the 'sound' as such. A full analysis along these lines must lead to the unavoidable conclusion that those aspects of music that are probably the most 'original' and typical are not quantifiable, and thus cannot lead to any kind of formal and non-arbitrary legal protection.

Within the last decennia, the whole paradoxical issue of copyright became really something enjoyably problematic. I think that it will become even more problematic up to the moment that it will collapse. Since the idea of copyright is based on the false assumption that information is a product, it will reveal to be auto-destructive. Moreso, it will destruct itself relatively fast: recently our technology made reproduction not only possible, but also accessible to almost everybody at little effort, and the prices of copying (in any medium...) sink everyday. This is a natural consequence of the transferability of information and technological progress. A single CD-rom disk can nowadays contain many whole books for only a fraction of the price, and contrary to the photocopy-procedure, which is still quite time-consuming, here dubbing takes only a fraction of a minute, and this medium has the great advantage of ease of transfer everywhere in the world: only use a modem or better, a fast broadband internet connection! All this beautiful technology made the "music publishers" - the social group that originated the copyright idea - completely anachronistic. Publishing in the traditional way is nowadays only done in two cases:
1. When the published product, by mass production, can be brought on the market at a lower or equal price than the price of a 'pirate' copy. This is the case of our newspapers, many paperbacks and such more...;
2. When it may serve the purpose of a anachronistic honoration of an author (generally, the publisher only starts working, when can he be certain to get some subsidy in some form: guaranteed clients, such as libraries, universities ,orchestras). In most of these last cases, the reason for the publishing is not so much related to the contents of the work, but rather to the 'product' character of the publication itself: it becomes a bibliophile-edition. This of course, is material production, and copies here do indeed lack the prestigiuous values associated with the owning of these publications.

Applied to the realms of new music, we will see the publishing companies disappear entirely within the next generation. Already now it is true that photocopies of scores are always cheaper then the originals, and consequently, most new music is played from copies... As to music in its quot;realized form", we see very similar things happening: so called "pirates" appear everywere, and I find it awfully hard to call them pirates, since dubbing here is just an act of normal common sense and economical behaviour. If publishers want to change this situation, they can only do it sensefully, by lowering the prices of the originals below those of the copy, which is, in the case of records for instance quite possible. The only other alternative they would have, and some actually take this consequence, is to market a product with a high product value (e.g. expensive and complicated covers), but this reflects a change from publishing to producing. For video, of course, the same phenomena are true, and in the last decennium of the 20th century we saw it already happening for digital audio: for instance the recordable CD's as well as the DAT recorders, MD disks, MP3 formats and players. The 'royalty maffia' will of course try to fight this, but they will always be late, since whenever they've succeeded in forcing laws, technology will come up with another not yet covered technique of reproduction and distribution. Consequently I do not only see copyright disappear from our socio-economic system, since its paradoxical position will reveal itself as entirely untenable, but also do I think this to be a very favourable thing for our music culture and for culture in general.

At a very first sight it may appear sort of strange for a music maker as I am to defend a thesis against his own (financial) interests. But, defending the case of copyright on such low and muddy grounds would be purely childish since the long-term advantages, particularly for "serious new music" are huge. Therefore, let's look for a moment to what would happen to the commercial music industry if royalties on copyright grounds would cease to exist: very probably the whole industry would collapse pretty fast and would become, in order to maintain some market position, even more boring than ever... going into real massive mass production. Small scale music production everywhere would flourish and only as long as the participants are interested ("no labour, no money" principle!), so many more musicians would get chances to play more musics. Nobody would make music only for the royalties anymore - no more top hits - since that ridiculous hope would have no more grounds. Reproduction of music would no longer be in the financial interest of the record producer, so he would to a much lesser extend put media under pressure to program it. Also, radio and T.V. would become substantially cheaper, what would render regional TV and radio a lot more possible and interesting. Also, in the realm of technology, inventions would improve a lot faster than now and show economically an ever steeper price evolution. Inventors and factories could no longer sit on their patents and by doing so, slowing down the otherwise very natural process of improvement and further development. Computer software would be free or else, customer-specific. The nature and the possibility of the secret of course remains, although such could only be for a limited period of time, since all codes are in principle breakable...

But, what interest or motivation would the author or inventor have in such a royalty-less society? First of all it should be noted that his value as an author remains as before: his value would still be higher, the more of his ideas get accepted and applied or performed in a society. Such would of course increase his social status, for, the refusal of royalties and of the economical consequences of copyrights does not lead to a denial of authorship. The author, or the collective of authors in some cases, will still be the origin, source and cause of new information, and should be given credit. He does not become anonymous, since for control and improvement reasons it is always better to have the possibility to trace back the origin of information. Copyright would end up being nothing more than a matter of honour and prestige deserved by the author. Breaking these minimal copyright rules in this respect, would be nothing different then lying!

Now most law systems speak in terms of "the necessary protection of the author", but... who is attacking him ? If I choose to play someone's piece of music, then first of all I should know it (for instance by having a score). This means that the piece cannot be a secret. If it is not a secret, it must have been the author's wish to have it known to others. If I choose to let it know to more, what the hell could I be attacking the author??? Furthermore, this raises the question of control. Since at the end we would have no other alternatives than either some kind of 'Big Brother' watching you or no controls on information use whatsever. Who would suggest hiding spies in my bathroom to make sure I'm not whistling "The bridge over the river Kwai" with my window opened to my neighbour???

Dr.Godfried-Willem RAES
p/a Logos-Foundation
Kongostraat 35
B-9000 G E N T
B E L G I U M
e-mail :GodfriedWillem.Raes@logosfoundation.org

Publications

first version : Stuttgart, 09.1985
revised : Ghent,02.1989 , Hilversum, 11.1994, Vermont 08.2001
Published by :
"Musiktexte", Koeln 1988 ( in German)
"Interface", Utrecht 1988 ( in English)
"Muzikon-kongresverslag", Gent 1988 (in English)
"Option-Magazine", Atlanta 1989
"Vidal", Den Bosch, 1991
"Aktief", Brussel, 2004 (in Dutch)
Presented at conferences and Colloquia in Madrid, Amsterdam, Hongkong, Sydney, Melbourne, New York , Banff , Sao Paulo , Salvador Bahia, Gent, Hilversum, Leuven, Antwerp, Brussels....

The sounds of ancient times

2010-12-09T13:50:00.002+01:00

The world of music is in a great crisis these days. Nearly everybody knows the problems in the record industry, that's a fact, but I don't need to write about that. After all, its their own fault that the industry hasn't been able to explore the possibilities and recognise the potential dangers of the use of the internet. They somehow found it necessary to stick to ideas about intellectual property that date back to Cold War times. But there is a greater crisis than just for the logistical part.

Many people only know pop-music as music. Look at MTV with its highly pretentious name. They only broadcast pop-music, in whatever format (I should say used to broadcast, because the stuff they dare show these days is truly appalling. Shows depicting a false mythology about successful lives and self-centered appreciation of the ego or the make-believe world of swarovski-crystals and other stuff that magpies love, used to cover a rotten core of hatred, grudge and envy. Brave new world that has such children in it. Does MTV stand for Magpie Television these days?) But back to the music... be it r&b, rock or whatever, it's all pop in the end. And before the rise of the pop-music industry, not even that long ago, people would only classify classical music as the real thing. The industry was classical-minded once, but changed styles over the years. I'm a bit fed up with Mozart now, let's take a look at that blind blues-singer with his beaten guitar on the corner near the bakery store, maybe we can make some bucks with that sonnovabitch, said one record company boss to the other. His companion responded: I know a retard a few blocks away from me, he keeps banging on his mama's pots and pans, maybe we can make some records with him. The public will never know the difference between a retard and a musician anyway.

Maybe it's because of the fact that I'm from northwestern Europe, the old world, and that I'm obsessed with the concept of heritage that I don't consider the modern music culture worthwhile. I started out as a rock-music adept when I was 15, but a friend of mine brought me into contact with folk music from all over Europe. In my home country, the Netherlands, folk music doesn't get the attention it deserves. Not that strange for a country that's largely man-made and over-organised. But thank God I live in the province of Limburg, an area above sea-level (16 meters above sea level (about 53 feet for those who don't know the blessings of the metrical system) in the place where I live, but my house is just above the floodplain of the river Roer, so relatively low compared to the surrounding area) and inhabited since ancient times. Archeologists have found remnants of Stone Age artifacts not too far from where I live, and there are indications that there has been constant habitation since those times. People in my province are true Europeans, Belgium and Germany are just around the corner, France is very near too and in the local culture you can find traces of the foreign powers that ruled this area over the centuries, the Austrian Habsburg empire, the Spanish kingdom, the French Republic and you can often find it in people's blood line. My father was partly of Basque origin, my mother is of Dutch, Indonesian, Belgian, German and Jewish origin. People from the western parts of the country often consider the inhabitants of my province to be backward, but that's historically and culturelly explicable envy. They had to fight the water and eat mud, while over here, relatively rich farmers earned a good living and had contacts all over the known world. Up here, we don't wear wooden clogs, we don't grow tulips and you won't find too many windmills. And people don't sound like they have a throat-disease when they speak Dutch.

That cultural background made me curious for other music than the easily accessible pop-music the television, radio spat out. And my university friend Carlo put me on the right track. Sadly I've lost contact with him, but I must say that I owe him a lot as a musician. Albums like Verre Muren wouldn't have existed if I hadn't met Carlo. I've been playing around with ambient drone music for about a year, resulting in the albums Aantallen, Vondsten, 7 Pieces for the Papergirl, The Concept of Presence and Instrumentalist (under the alias Rex Indignus instead of D.B.Lolaq), but right now I'm back on the ambient folk track with the project I'm working on right now. The sound of ancient times, but with a modern twist.

Delay due to wintery weather...

2010-11-27T18:29:00.001+01:00

My elementals-project is at a low ebb right now. When I was busy recording for the project at home, I realised that the pieces missed something. Recording indoors can lead to uninspired working, and I had the impression that the first "Elementals" recordings sounded uninspired. So I took up the idea to go outdoors, make recordings in the open, where the spirit of the elements is most tangible. But it's hard to make music in the open when it's nearly freezing. Astronomically it's still autumn, but a few days ago winter set in. There's a little comfort in that, though: cold temperatures temper human activities and annoying artificial sounds in the background are reduced to a minimum. Recording music outside in summer requires a recording spot that's as far removed from civilisation as possible. A difficult thing in the Netherlands. It's the most densely built country in Europe, you're nowhere more than 10 km away from a main road, a railroad, a town or village and there are always aircraft in the sky. There's artificial sound everywhere. Maybe emigration would be an idea. And in wintertime there's a physical problem: for this project I use wooden flutes. These are very fragile when it comes to changes in temperature and humidity. The difference between cold dry air on the outside of the flute and moist warm air (coming from the mouth) on the inside of the flute causes the wood to crack. That's why every recording session must be very short. Only recording bull-roarers and other non-wind instruments can be recorded outside without problems. I'm playing around with the idea of making a gemshorn from a cow's horn, maybe that wind instrument is more winter-proof.

In the mean time I can spend some time on the artwork for the project. And I've laid aside some of the recordings I wasn't satisfied with to be featured on my soundcloud. Below you can listen to the first one.

Autumn Skies by D.B.Lolaq

Next project: Elementals

2010-11-06T12:57:00.007+01:00

In these days of slowly fading natural growth, animals preparing for hibernation, leaves falling down the trees and dusk appearing ever earlier by the day, there's more time to meditate on reality. It seems that mankind has some sort of hibernation process too - a spiritual one, in a period of darkness and cold that draws attention and mental energy inwards. Of course your geographical orientation is a key factor in this, a person on the equator will probably experience this process less then someone up here at 51° N. But I believe that it is not a matter of accident or coincidence where you are born in this world and in what place you spend your lifetime.

My latest musical project is about a topic that affects everyone: the structure of reality. In modern science, reality consists of unearthly small particles that are clogged together in accidental lumps, forming galaxies, stars, planets, people, trees, cats and computer keyboards. Atoms are understood by a minimum of rules, led by nothing or no one and reality is a soulless game of scientific nothingness. Not even the curious person who's looking out to understand the world has a real being in that model of reality. Everything can be reduced to the unanimated game of atoms. It's not a recent invention that reality is structured this way. Some ancient Greek thinkers had similar ideas in about 400 bC. And nowadays, there are many people who hold other ideas about how reality is structured.

One of the other systems is that of the elements. In this system, everything in reality consists of a mixture of the 4 elements earth, water, air and fire. they are not real earth, water, air and fire, but representatives of those, in a symbolistic way. They are compositions of pairs of properties: wet/dry and warm/cold. Earth is dry and cold, water is wet and cold, fire is warm and dry and air is wet and warm. This model can be found in classial medical science, and in some religious practice around the world. Sometimes a fifth element is added, aether, not an earthly element, but an element associated with the celestial bodies.

One of the thinkers that has worked with the system of the elements was Paracelsus. He recognised 4 mythological creatures that correspond with the elements, the elementals: gnomes correspond with earth, undines correspond with water, sylphs correspond with air and salamanders correspond with fire. These creatures are the inspiration for my new album. It will not be a drone album like 7 Pieces for the Papergirl or The Concept of Presence, but a more melodic work. Field recordings will be an integral parts of the music and electronics are only used to create a certain atmospherical element. Melodies played on my collection of elderwood wistles and flutes will be the main features.

Field recording podcast #2

2010-10-18T18:28:00.002+02:00

Download HERE.

1. Wind & Water. Recording of wind & groundswell on a windy spring day at the Oolderplas near Roermond, NL. 0:00-7:00

2. Bus Drones. Recording of a bus trip. Monotonous motor hum, squeeking steering gear and people talking to each other & having phone conversations. 7:00-13:43

3. Gregorian. Chanting during a Roman Catholic mass in the Saint Christopher Cathedral in Roermond, NL. 13:43-16:16

4. Far Away Joys pt.1. Recording of djembe workshop & sport activities in an activity centre in the woods near Molenhoek, NL. Interesting mix of human activities and natural sounds. 16:16-17:59

5. Far Away Joys pt.2. Recording of the sounds of a far away house music festival. The sound of wind-drifted but tight rhythms. 17:59-21:26

"Zuur als brem" - rediscovered an older piece

2010-10-15T20:54:00.001+02:00

Zuur als brem by D.B.Lolaq

I just logged into my Soundcloud account again, for the first time in a while, and listened to the little thing above. I recorded it in March, inspired by the fresh leaves in the poplar trees across my house. On Soundcloud it doesn't get that much attention, so I thought I just put it here. You can download it for free, it's published under a Creative Commons license, just like all my other works. To download: click the downward pointing arrow on the right. It's an ogg-vorbis-file, if you are a Windows user you probably need a codec for decrypting it. You can find that here. Ogg is an unpatented open source high-quality music compression format, comparable to mp3, but with a higher quality.

The title, Zuur als brem, is an expression in the dialect of the Dutch province of Brabant, used when something tastes very sour. Literally, that is, so you'd hear someone saying it when biting on a piece of lemon or something. An odd expression: when you translate it word for word in English, it says sour as broom. Broom is a shrub, of which the Latin name is Cytisus scoparius. It grows on the slightly acidic sandy soils of the southern Netherlands a lot. People are not very lightly to take a bite out of a broom-shrub, it's not edible. But maybe it's too sour for that or something!

This machine kills nobody

2010-10-07T12:46:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I had some time to take a walk up town just before work. I work in the Dutch city of Maastricht at an institute offering philosophy courses. Maastricht is a place full of historical buildings & sights and a few bookshops here & there. So I popped into De Sleghte, a bookshop that mainly sells books that can't meet the publishers' sales goals & second hand stuff. You can always find some pearls at the music or architecture department and it's a great place for finding special Bible-editions or Torah translations - when you're lucky, that is.

Rooting about in the music department, my attention was caught by a National Geographic book about worldwide music cultures. Usually publications like these are quite shallow, but there were great pictures in this one. Browsing, I saw a picture that I remembered seeing once, but that had moved to a dark spot in the back of my mind. It was a man playing a guitar with the text This machine kills fascists sticked to it near the soundhole, with duck-tape I think.

I read the caption, it turned out to be Woody Guthrie, the well known folk singer, the great historical bum, as he called himself. A singer, story-teller and professional protester. A man I've always considered to be a bit of an awkward character in music. Maybe that picture contributed to that. The text on the guitar annoys me. First: who the hell advocates fascism - apart from a bunch of brainless, cultureless people who won't listen to music anyway (apart, maybe, from hate-driven noise)? Second: apart from hanging people with the strings, a guitar is not much of a weapon. Not the sounds you make with it. Not even the lyrics you put to those sounds. Unteachable people aren't called like that for nothing. And third: please don't stick things to a guitar with duck-tape! It damages the finish (something I am familiar with).

Without sarcasm: politics & music is a terrible combination. Musicians that want to be politicians should give up their music career and politicians that want to make music should stick to their trickeries, or entertain
family and friends with it. And as a musician I can say that my guitars don't kill anybody. On the contrary: I hope they add a little something to the lives of those who hear their sounds, whatever their political views.

update 01-31-2012: I've written a second post on politics & music which you might want to read too. You can find it here.

MCR002 Rex Indignus - Instrumentalist

2010-10-05T11:11:00.003+02:00

I would like to draw your attention to the latest release on the Moustached Cowboy Records netlabel:

Download HERE and more stream options HERE

It's the first release by Rex Indignus, featuring 2 long pieces in a classical ambient drone style, both about 30 minutes long. Leave your mind to rest over the roomy and air- & water-filled flowing structures that Rex Indignus has created. The length of the 2 pieces is an ode to the compact-cassette era and the pieces follow a linear structure, suggesting a trip through 2 different environments, 2 different landscapes, revealing many sides of the human mind.

Field recording podcast

2010-09-28T22:30:00.004+02:00

For my drone music I regularly make use of field recordings. I make them with my Zoom H2 portable recorder, a very small, simple and nifty device. It's the sort of device that you can take with you easily. Which is the reason why I have so many recordings I never use. I now made a podcast with pure, uncut and unedited sounds.

Download HERE

1.Forest & Civilisation (0:00-3:22).
A recording made in a forest, just a short distance from an industrial site & busy roads. A monotonous drone of industrial noise at the base and different insect noises over it, with some distant traffic noise here & there.

2. Distant Celebrations (3:22-12:21)
A recording I made at home during the World Championship football 2010. The Dutch team won the June 26 match against Cameroon and these noises came from the centre of my home town Roermond. Mainly Vuvuzela sounds & car horns.

3. At the Waterside (12:21-30:59)
A sunny spring day at the banks of the river Maas, busy with recreational boats. Engines humming and waves splashing on the bank, some people speaking on the passing boats.

Underwater wonder mic...

2010-09-17T20:12:00.005+02:00

About 7 years ago I bought a Philips microphone, a cheap karaoke-thing with a fixed wire and a 1/4" jack plug. At that time I was experimenting with recording and I knew almost nothing about mics. It was a bargain, about €10, and the sound quality was what you would expect of a thing like that. My first recordings of my mandolin and acoustic guitars were nothing to write home about. Which is a pity, because I like to recycle older recordings and process them into new stuff. Too much static hiss and humming makes melodious recordings unusable I think.

So the mic ended up lying on an old oak sidetable, next to a pink piece of cloth and a few empty glass pots. I rediscovered it last year. I plugged it into my little 10 watt guitar amp and, together with a distortion pedal, and I could make a lot of wonderful noise. Which led to my first album Aantallen. At last I found a way to make use of the thing. But after the recording, again, it ended up on the sidetable, next to the pink piece of cloth and the glass pots. Until last week.

I was wondering how to record under water. I live next to a river, or I could call it a stream, called the river Roer. There is a little drainage channel divaricated from the river with special accommodations for fish like salmon. They threw some boulders and rocks in it, creating little rapids, ideal for salmon on the dramatic journey to the spawning grounds. It's a 10 minutes walk from my home, and the sounds over there are really interesting from ear level, so I was wondering how it would sound like below the waterline. I searched the web and found a solution: using an ordinary mic and putting a condom on top of it. A condom. Yes. Very interesting use of those things! So I put a condom over my cheap mic, put it in my bag with my Zoom H2 recorder and went to the water. I connected it to the recorder, dipped it into the stream and yes! It worked! But the condom had torn while the mic was submerged and it was still functioning properly. The cheap bad Philips mic turned out to be a bit of a miraculous bugger. Surviving even running water! The recordings are not of very high quality and since it is a mono mic, the recorder has only recorded on the left half of the stereo track (only stereo external mics are recorded properly on the H2, but usually you only use the built-in mics). But that's not a problem, with audio editing software like Audacity I can split the left & right channel and make a stereo recording by doubling the left channel recording.

Maybe you can hear those underwater sounds on my next album.

The Concept of Presence

2010-09-10T12:52:00.007+02:00

My latest EP, titled The Concept of Presence, is now available on Moustached Cowboy Records

After the emotionally dark period in which Seven Pieces For The Papergirl was conceived it seemed to be inevitable to search for lighter sounds. Picking up the guitar was the best way to achieve that. This EP contains less field recordings than 7 Pieces and is composed with a more melodic approach.

7 Pieces For The Papergirl

2010-06-28T13:54:00.004+02:00

New ambient/drone album out now on archive.org!

Vondsten now available on jamendo.com!

2010-02-10T11:02:00.003+01:00

My second album Vondsten is available for free download on jamendo.com, next to archives.org. Jamendo reaches a larger audience, and in order to have this album heard by more people, I also put it there.

Soundcloud

2010-01-20T15:58:00.004+01:00

I just opened an account on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/d-b-lolaq.

mp3-album Verre muren available now!

2010-01-08T20:53:00.006+01:00

Mp3-album Verre muren now available on archives.org for free download.

It's a compilation of mainly older material, previously available on tribeofnoise.com, 9 pieces in organic ambient style. Acoustic instruments, mainly flute, whistle and mandolin, with some studio recording magic added. 2 Of the pieces are more recent recordings, but in the same style. Hope you'll enjoy it!

The end of natural music?

2009-11-15T11:43:00.003+01:00

Music is one of the major battlefields in the ongoing struggle of mankind against nature. Everything in nature vibrates and nothing remains the same. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can't even step into the same river twice, and even if you step into it, it changes while you're in it.

Mankind has the tendency to preserve. We're probably the only creatures in the sublunary world that cherish memories. and once we've found a good solution for a problem, we stick to it. We don't want to re-invent the wheel again and again.

Sound has a natural order - but it's hard to find this order in the ever changing world of phenomena. Therefore mankind has "discovered" mathematics. It's supposed to be the basis for every ordered phenomenon in reality, but can't be found plainly in nature. You have to observe and calculate first, although mathematics ois supposed to be superior to any science that is based upon observation. One of the greatest early scientist who worked with calculations was Pythagoras, the man who composed the formula with the right-angled triangle. Not only was he a mathematician, he was also a mystic - the main reason why he did mathematics in the first place, because in this way he would find out godly laws in reality. one of the other fields he did hiws calculations in was music. He calculated the intervals behind the scales and defined them by the place where you have to press a string on a monochord (a simple ancient Greek instrument with only one string, used for explaining music theory) and found out the regularities.

But there was a slight deviation in the distances that had consequences when you combined notes in chords and used different instruments with wide ranges of more than an octave. western music grew more and more complex, chords were built out and over time, musical ensembles consisted of instruments with an enormous range in the scales. Musical theory had to be adapted to the will of the people, instead of keeping the music simple and in line with natural principles. They came up with tempered scales, in which all notes have the same distance, and they decided to change pitches of the tones.

Nowadays, people are used to music that is out of tune. Musical traditions that hold on the the natural order are considered odd in the West and pushed to adopt the "wrong" musical theory by imposing pop music in old cultures. It's like Coca Cola and McDonalds destroying the tastes of the world. A great, great shame.

New album on www.archives.org

2009-10-22T14:10:00.005+02:00

New drone album of mine out now on http://www.archive.org/details/Vondsten. Free download.

This album consists of 4 pieces: Blankwater, Tinteling, Onderwijl and Kwartelei. It's more electronic than the first one on archives.org, though the original soundsources are mostly acoustic recordings. Hope you will enjoy it.

Now also available on Jamendo.com

2009-10-12T20:35:00.007+02:00

My album Aantallen is now also available on jamendo.com. See the gadget on the left side of the page. One little thing: the Jamendo-version of the album has the first and second piece inverted.

mp3-album "Aantallen" on archive.org

2009-10-03T11:42:00.003+02:00

Now freely available on http://www.archive.org/details/Aantallen. It's an mp3-album with 3 pieces on it: Cartesianus, Aantallen tellen and Acer Campestre. 3 Experimental/drone pieces I recorded in August and September. For me it was going back to the roots of music. I left my flutes and whistles where they were and avoided as much high-tech wizardry as possible. Minimal music with minimal means: a cheap mic run through some stompboxes to an old guitar amp and a laptop with Audacity installed on it, a mandolin, which I played with a mallet, instead of a pick, a metronome and a few bullroarers and shell rattles, together with some field recordings. No searching for the right key or melody lines, just sound and structure.

Ghosts and responses

2009-08-22T12:50:00.001+02:00

I prefer talking to ghosts in the daytime. In the daytime there are few people to bother me and the sounds from the outside world tend to come hauntingly close. Curtains are my main line of defence. Loud music is my last resort, but loud music takes away one's soul. At times when the sun is at its highest point, the music must stop in order to make the ghosts audible. Contrary to popular belief it is definitively not the nighttime when ghosts appear. The night brings peace and concentration in the best case, and deception and delusion in the worst. The nighttime, that is me and the world, for good and for worse.

daytime/nighttime

2009-08-18T22:26:00.001+02:00

Nighttime is the best time for making music. I must say that all creative activities are best done after dusk, but that goes specially for music. Maybe it's the darkness that sharpens the hearing, or the human mind that's turned into another mode when the sun is down. Why is love and romance usually associated with moonlight and candles? Meditating monks search the darkness in caves. What is it with daytime that it seems to muffle creativity?