On the 20th September of the year 2009 (20-09-2009) The Queen of the Netherlands, Beatrix, will end her prosperous reign, and leave the crown to her oldest son, Willem Alexander. The current Crown Prince is known as a great lover of the fine arts. As part of the festivities he has commissioned 15 Dutch sound artists, be they first, second or umptieth generation Dutch citizens, to compose a sonic portrait of a characteristic part of the Netherlands. The number of fifteen is not chosen by accident. The national anthem counts fifteen stanza's. Each of them holds an encoded message. It is this message that will serve as a point of inspiration for the composing of the sonic portrait. I am proud to announce that I will be one of those fifteen artists.
Selected works:
1973-1976: The Shoplifting Estafette.
In my late teenage years, I went out to steal a dictaphone from a shop, only to bring it to another shop in another village. I provided the dictaphone with a blank cassette and put the voice sensor on, as soon as the stolen object found its new place in the shop window. I repeated this process of stealing and transporting the same dictaphone through the weeks. It always ended with taking the dictaphone back to the shop where I originally got it. I managed to do several estafettes, reaching places like Brussel, Oostende, Middelburg and Amsterdam. In September 1976 I got caught stealing a dictaphone. I managed
to get away with a warning, because I had cuckooed a dictaphone that I had bought in an other shop. The 30 minute documentary of it got transmitted by WDR Lowfunk, VPRO Rastuur and Limburgs Vrije Radio in the years 1979-1980.
1981 - 1982: The Emigrants Songs.
Inspired by a title of a Led Zeppelin Song, I went out to record songs by people of whom I thought they looked like emigrants. I made a compilation of these songs and put them on cassette. I made an edition of 45 and send them out to radiostations in countries behind the Iron Curtain, as well to the countries that
were tortured by their dictatorial regime. I never heard of songs being played on the national radio. Some of the cassettes came back in the original packages, added with beautifull stamps.
1986 - 1991: Futility and Epilepsy
In the years of elegant pessimism, inspired by the 18th and 19th century travellers I went out on a "Grand Tour du Son". I visited places like Florence, Pisa and Kairouan. Of course Paris and London were on the programme, as were Vienna, Prague and Oslo. In all of these places I bought or stole a walkman with a recording function. Then I climbed the highest building in town, put the recording function on 'on' and dropped the walkman. Back on street level I collected the remains of the walkman, put them in a silk bag and brought them to the faculty of medicine of the local university.
1993 - 1995: Parachutes
Thoman Barkarian, an Armenian artist and fashion designer developed on my request parachutes for walkmans. Those were dropped from aeroplanes with the recording function 'on' . The inbuilt microphone was protected from the wind. On 10th of August 1995, anticipating the shooting star evening in Tuscany, we had 108 walkman falling from the clouds, in an art manifestation called ' falling from grace, voices from heaven.'
1998- 2003 : Love Letters from Africa
Inspired by the numerous spam letters that arive from Africa, I did some trips to West Africa, Nigeria and Kameroun. I asked people in the street to read out these letters. I recorded them, together with the accidental sounds of the streets. The resulting cassettes I send to the World Monetary Fund.
2005 - 2008 : Life on Earth
A selection of my every day life recordings caught during my travels in Western Europe are put on cassette and packed in a waterproof package, that I send out to maritime stations with the request to throw the package in the ocean. So far 15 cassettes have been sent to the bottom of the oceans all around the world. This work will end on 31st of December, 2008 when I plan to throw the last
recording over board from a ship in the Street of Magelhaes.
All through these years I have done performances and concerts and lectures in various countries around the world, very often working together with local artists of whom I recall with greatest pleasure: Prince Joe Wembi (Nigeria) Said Berkaroui (Maroc) Asinta Mayatomi (Japan) Zan Hoffman (USA) Bela Serkhov
(Ouzbekistan) and Diana Worbelton (UK/Iceland)
My works have been released by numerous minor labels in Japan, USA, the Netherlands, Hungary and Egypt, such as Grandma Records, Icanhearyou Records, Transpoetisms Inc, Sonic Wonderland or the notorious Shout Factor One.
Sounds Like
Self-described dutch pop musician Rinus van Alebeek, manipulator of tapes and realities and audio-novelist, visited Porto for a conference at the Fine Arts University and a concert in Casa Viva. The conference, held in an auditorium with all the lights turned off, was a masterly display of how to lead young artists down the road of absurdity, perversity and mental health. Later on, the concert mixed numerous tapes through Rinus’s custom-made “acoustic laptop” system, creating instant mental landscapes, soundtracks and book pages of the soul. Among the audience stood out a supposed shaman en route to Jerusalem, who confessed to Rinus the concert had been “healing”. If you ever wonder how to measure success, healing a shaman is definitely making it, big time.
text by Jonathan Hhy from soopa
Rinus Van Alebeek is a tape musician and performer born in Holland in
1956. He arrived to music relatively late, after publishing two books in his
native country under the pseudonym Philip Markus, the first of which,
released in 1991, received the prize for the best first novel.
His approach to musical improvisation is seen as a radical one. Very
frequently he uses as a source for his work the sounds recorded in his many
trips to the USA, Europe and North African countries. Rinus Van Alebeek is a peculiar observer of reality and an artist who instinctively transforms lo-fi tape recordings into evocative sound poems, being able to create a “détachement” towards the used media, which is a characteristic of the most original artists. He transforms a specific technology (the magnetic tape and the recording device) into a “poiesis”, a transcendence that goes beyond the immediate limits of matter, whereas the majority of artists can only deal with a “praxis”.
According to Rinus Van Alebeek himself: "There are different ways of
presenting my music. Call it musique concrète because of the use of tapes;
call it noise because it can be loud; call it dark ambient, because you like
it that way; call it industrial, because there is some drones every now and
then. Call it poetic, because you want to get away from worn out
definitions, or call it soundscape, because you have read that one book. I
call it pop music. And by now I know there is enough of us, worldwide, to
justify this definition."
text by Luis Costa from binaural media
What am I doing here?
To friends who know me in real life I have explained more then once, why I am not interested in a myspace account. Now that it has happened to me, I will not spoil the party by telling why I shouldn't be here.
One day, when coming back from a flee market-sardines-and-pimentos-eating-beerdrinking-friend-visiting-round in Madrid, I discovered I was on Myspace. I thought of a practical joke. The pope and the prince of Orange, Macbeth, God and Mao Zedong are on Myspace. Even Fidel Castro hangs around, Godot, Cocteau, Bardot, all are here.
In fact, it was my friend Jeff who made this page for me. He has been decisive more then once in my sonic career. So when he discovered that there was already a Rinus here he decided to make things clear, and create a home for me in this ever expanding community. I will trust his intuition. And I will trust you to spread the news that our music can be bought here.
dimanche 13/7 - "Big Band" .... (Sturm der Liebe / Orage d'Amour) DIKTAT invite un ensemble d'instrumentistes dans une performance-voyage, guidée par une vidéo composée autour d'extraits d'une série télévisée allemande : "Sturm der Liebe / Orage d'amour" .... avec Jean-Jacques Duerinckx (s), Elena Dunkelman (voc) Anthony Carcone (g), Pascal Marzan (g), Yoko Miura (p), Frantz Loriot (v)
la Comète 347 45 rue du faubourg du Temple (fond de la cour) 75010 Paris 20h30 / P.A.F. 6 euros *****
lundi 14/7 - "Branché" ..... (Placard XI) DIKTAT, avec Jean-Jacques Duerinckx (s), Elena Dunkelman (voc), Yoko Miura (toy-piano)
la nouvelle Générale 6 Grande Rue 92310 Sèvres 16h-17h / entrée libre *****
mardi 15/7 - "Unplugged" DIKTAT (quartet)
la Veilleuse 26 rue des Envierges 75020 Paris 20h00 / P.A.F libre *****
