So what's new since my last post? My son Castor Abel ter Linden was born on June 8! Needless to say he dictates my daily schedule at the moment...

Also some new reviews of my work appeared: on Stranger, Whistle Pig Saloon, Fury and OfficeR's latest album Recording the Grain.

Out for now, changing dipers.

Last week my CD 'Stranger' was released on the Creative Sources Recordings label. It consists of the electronic composition Stranger and an instrumental version of the radioplay No Man’s Land.

The CD is for sale at Creative Sources and Fridgesound.

Track listing:

1 Stranger

No Man's Land soundtrack
2 Boise City, No Man's Land
3 A hard place to love
4 The first black duster
5 The skies that brought no rain, only dirt
6 Killing animals
7 Ruth Nell
8 Black sunday
9 Hope

10 Stranger (ambient)

No Man's Land deals with the Dust Bowl period in the USA, particularly with the people who lived and stayed in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The film portrays the story of Hazel Lucas, who migrated to Boise City in Cimarron County as a child and lived through the worst hard times during this ecological and economical disaster. The story is adapted from the book 'The worst hard time' by Timothy Egan. Most of the sounds on the soundtrack are produced in the CEM studio at WORM Rotterdam with the ARP 2500 and Korg MS-20 synthesizers and a Synton stereo EQ.

Stranger is inspired by Albert Camus' L’Étranger, Philip K. Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep, the film Bladerunner and as always by L.E.J. Brouwer. Utilizing a formalized process, the sounds were taken from one single source, processed at EMS Stockholm and put together at STEIM Amsterdam and Culture Lab Newcastle.

My partner is about to give birth. (So poetical in English, 'giving birth', while the Dutch word, 'bevallen', sounds like 'to fall'). Due date: May 27. It feels like being in limbo, floating in space. Waiting on the unevitable but also the unimaginable. No urge to be creative, to think of the next composition or work on my live set, just reading, listening to music, waiting, being. I guess waiting until the ultimate creation exchanges the inside for the outside. Waiting until life changes, into something I have absolutely no conception of. It feels light, feels like I'm at ease.

Reading 'A wild sheep chase' by Murakami again, now in English (which feels like its original language, which it is not of course). Noticing different things from last time (which must have been more than 5 years ago): the girl with the beautiful ears is the reincarnation of the girl the story starts with. And: the main character tells the story and tries to make you believe it's about other people (the deceased girl, the girl with the beautiful ears, The Rat) but it is actually about himself. Might it be one big metafor? About his incapability to make decisions, to have an opinion about anything? Reminds me of the main character in Camus' L'Étranger.

A redesign of the Fridgesound website.

Earlier this year I submitted a SKIF++ piece to the NYCEMF music festival. The track was accepted, but it turned out impossible for the whole SKIF++ group to go to New York (not that I didn't want to go, mind you!). Jeff was the only one able to be there at that time.

The SKIF++ performances are improvised, but guided by pre-conceived structures, and with interaction between the 'soundguys' Jeff and myself, and the 'videoguy' Bas. We decided to present the people at NYCEMF with an experiment: Bas made an interactive standalone patch in Jitter, that responds to incoming audio (much like the way he works when playing with SKIF++, except that when he's actually participating in the performance, he'll tweak the way the patch responds to our audio) and Jeff and myself choose a track from our forthcoming album and extracted only my part from it. At the concert, Jeff performed solo along this track whilst interacting with the Jitter patch. From what I heard, the audience was thrilled by the result.

The audio-visual composition Solitude played probably for the last time at the Frascati Theater in March 2009. It was a succes, with a full house 4 times in a row. I was very glad to see a number of people that hadn't experienced it yet: Jaap ter Linden (my father-in-law and famous early music specialist), Louis Andriessen, Jacqueline Oskamp (currently writing a book on the history of Dutch electronic music), the STEIM crew (Nico, Kees, Erika).

In March I visited the Borealis festival in Bergen Norway to give a lecture on STEIM and perform with John Ferguson from Culturelab (Newcastle UK) as Whistle Pig Saloon. Before the concert, we spend a day in the BEK studio, recording possibly the next Whistle Pig Saloon album. BEK is a place very similar to STEIM, although smaller. Many thanks to Trond Lossius, BEK's artistic director, for arranging all that.

The studio was on the 9th floor, with windows on two sides looking out over the bay and the mountains - a very inspiring view! Recording went well, first we were searching a bit, but things became more tight later. I haven't gone through all the takes yet, but I think there's some nice new material.

We also took some time to think about a structure for the concert, something we didn't do for the DNK concert the week before. My notes:

• start free, John standing
  
• after a while, go to a big buildup
  
• after the climax, repetitive small sounds are leftover, very quiet
  
• John goes into granular stuff, balancing the guitar/Wii
  
• John sitting down, ebow & more plain guitar
  
• back to textural, repetitive, Robert introduces the final forcefully
  
• in general: stay a while at certain places, give space to eachother
  

Borealis 2009 was the first installment curated by Alwynne Pritchard, winner of the Ton Bruynèl price 2005 in the Gaudeamus Music Week in collaboration with STEIM. The program was varied under the theme 'George and the lion'. There were a number of works by Michael Finnissy performed by the Asamisimasa ensemble, works for a huge stack of organs, installations in a church, the Dutch POW Ensemble performing on the local race track and a couple of films being shown in an intimate setting.

The highlights:

• MEM1 (Laura & Mark Cetilia) created a beautiful soundworld of subtly processed cello and an analog synth, building up from barely audible via high pitched screetching to waves of noise, moving between the 4 speakers with grand gestures. At the end, after 40 minutes, I wasn't sure if the chill on my back was from the music or someone opening the outside door to let the Bergen air come in.


• Pascal Baltazar presented a number of improvisations, using crispy sounds and heavy bass, performed using a custom tabletop controller. The broad and active gestures of the performer and the well-balanced structures made for an impressive concert.

(photos by Thor Brødreskift)

More photos at Flickr.

On March 12 ABATTOIR played a concert at STEIM again - where it all started in May 2008. After that initial period of studio recordings and concerts, Audrey and myself did a short tour (6 concerts in a week) in November 2008. After the Cologne gig on March 5 this was our second this year. And it was good! Amazing how comfortable it feels, never that feeling of having to play to avoid silences, or having to stop playing because the other cannot be heard. The audience was also captured, judging by the big applause and the nice comments after the concert. The whole thing was recorded, and a part will actually end up on the CD, to be released probably in June on Evil Rabbit Records. An excerpt can be heard on the ABATTOIR page.

On March 5th ABATTOIR (Audrey Chen on cello & voice, myself on the sample machine) played at Nachtjournal in Cologne. This series, organized by the friendly people from PIRX (Marion Wörle & Marciej Sledziecki) takes place in the Tsunami Club, a small but cosy performance space. It was good to play again with Audrey, and the audience seemed to be happy too. ABATTOIR is currently working on a CD release, and we're also playing on March 12 at STEIM's Local Stop concert.

(photos by Joker Nies)

So finally some time to write a decent entry:

STEIM was invited as special guest to the Spark festival in Minneapolis, USA. Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Joel Ryan and Robert van Heumen performed concerts, and held keynote lectures.

The festival took place around the University of Minesota campus, so all venues and lecture spaces were walking distance. A new aquisition this year was the Bedlam Theater, where most of the evening and late night concerts took place - a very intimate space, but still big enough to fit quite a crowd. Speaking of crowds, it was amazing how the organizers managed to get such large audiences interested in experimental music. Although Pole’s dance music probably helped…

The festival was a nice mix between academic lectures and presentations, installations, social events (Ali Momeni showing groups of visitors around the Fine Arts building), performances and meals ;) Some of the highlights:

• Jeff Lubow from CNMAT: improv with Monomachine & Machinedrum, skipping beats, beautiful sounds


• David Bithell (UNT Texas) & Ali Momeni (UMN Minneapolis) performed their piece Liminal surface: moving around wooden blocks on contact mic’d surface, totally choreographed and fast, very musical and theatrical


• Alison Ogden (Louisville KY)’s piece Attabi: clarinet & electronics in balance, nice and dissonant, very much sound-based as opposed to a lot of pieces at the festival that were more traditional


• Krzysztof Wolek (Louisville KY) & Alison Ogden: improv ambient with nice soundfields;  too bad they were hiding behind their laptops


• Ted Coffey’s piece Blue Cycle Noise; guided by a text about noise which was projected in a nice way, with good vocal processing and ‘noise’ sounds


• Lorenzo Bianchi (sound) and Michele di Stefano (choreography) Comfort: interesting to see a modern dance piece at a festival like this - great piece, very good dancers, music and movement went well together

Some photographs.