Serge Onnen

Oorbeek: Kavel LP

Here they are! 12 sonic snapshots of the semi-unguided missile called Oorbeek.

Ja, ze zijn er! 12 momentopnames van het half-ongeleide projectiel dat Oorbeek heet.

Cut to tape by Kasper Frenkel in the Electric Monkey studios in Amsterdam using loads of vintage equipment. Mixed down, with real tape, in fact, for some of the effects, by Kasper Frenkel and Mark van Tongeren.

Onversneden opgenomen en gemixed in de Electric Monkey Studios, Amsterdam, met vintage studio apparatuur,

 

Packaged with Oorbeek’s own artwork in a limited, numbered edition of 320. Each LP sleeve in silk screen print was handmade by Oorbeek.

Kavel is ingepakt in eigen artwork – 320 unieke, genummerde exemplaren in zeefdruk.

 

 

Go to Blowpipe Records for listening and to order your own copy of the vinyl + redeem code, or ask your local record store. Official release date: October 14, 2020.

Ga naar Blowpiperecords voor beluistering en om je eigen vinyl exemplaar + download te bestellen, of vraag je platenboer ernaar (officiële releasedatum: 14 oktober).

All of the band members during the recording:

Alle leden tijdens de opnamesessies:

 

↑ Peter Cleutjens, drums, percussion

↑ Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, bass

↑ Maarten Hepp, voice and acoustic and electronic instruments

↑ Serge Onnen, trumpet

↑ Arie Altena, electric guitar, banjo, marimbas

↑ Mark van Tongeren, voice and acoustic and electronic instruments

and  ↑ Alice Smits, electric guitar

 

 

Check out impressions of the unique silk screen covers while listening to the Jew’s harps of Maarten Hepp and Mark van Tongeren, accompanied by the rhythm section, on this video.

Hier voorbeelden van de 320 unieke, gezeefdrukte hoezen op een rijtje, met de mondharpen van Maarten Hepp en Mark van Tongeren +  ritme sectie.

 

Search for Oorbeek’s deep past on Arie Altena’s Oorbeek pages, like texts and reviews about Oorbeek, or here on Fusica.

 

Amsterdam’s most uncompromising

7-piece weird-jazz-avant-rock outfit

OORBEEK

organically blends

atmospheric film music with hard rock,

tribal vocals with distorted New Age bells

and yodel with dub.

For experienced listeners only!

 

↑  Oorbeek in the Electric Monkey studios, July 2018.

From left to right: Arie Altena (gtr), Peter Cleutjens (drs), Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (bs), Mark van Tongeren (vc), Alice Smits (gtr), Serge Onnen (tpt), Maarten Hepp (vc).

 

Shipping and streaming  now.

Get it at / ga naar Blowpipe Records.

 

LINK

↓  180-grams coloured, marbled vinyl, silkscreen cover

 

Oorbeek’s X-mas 7″

After some years of relative silence, the full seven-piece collective of Oorbeek reunited again this Summer to record in the Electric Monkey Studios in Amsterdam. We did some cool new stuff in those two days, and picked out some of our time-tested game pieces, which are guaranteed to produce music no one has ever heard before (our two motto’s are ‘Oorbeek always starts over again’ and ‘Oorbeek liberates sound’).

 

 

As a band proclaiming to do things differently, every time we play together, we decided to make a fresh rendition of two all-too-familiar Christmas tunes. That’s right, Oorbeek is joining the musical madness of X-mas, where dozens of groups and singers produce scores of iterations of the melodies we know so well. Of course Oorbeek would not be Oorbeek if it did not give that unique … what shall we call it…  New Dutch Swing-twist.

Now hear for yourself if you can recognise these tunes and sing along in your own language. Get the 7″ or listen to the tracks for free at Blowpipe Records.

And look out for more vinyl and downloads from the Electric Monkey sessions to come out in 2019.

If you use Facebook, you surely will like Oorbeek there.

Watch Oorbeek on Youtube.

 

MERRY X-MAS!

 MARK ALICE SERGE

SERGE

MAARTEN

KLAAS

PETER

ARIE

SERGE

MARK

Sound piece for The Fear of Small Numbers

I recently sat down to create a contribution for Serge Onnen‘s exhibition, opening tomorrow at the Kunstfort in Vijfhuizen, called The Fear of Small Numbers. Among the exhibits is a record player for which visitors can change the speed. Our collective of sound makers Oorbeek (where I got to know Serge in the first place) recorded a contribution in the studio this Summer, while recording a new album, and a host of other performers (me included) were asked to contribute. The record contains all these short pieces, one after another, and as a listeners you can play them back as fast or slow as you like. An interesting challenge for which I produced the following short piece, which I think will sound good no matter how slow or fast it is played back. I looped the original track of 22 seconds several times to make it longer. And for lack of a turntable I give you the half and double speeds as a bonus.

 

 

 

 

Here is the whole blurb for the exhibition:

In the fortress Serge Onnen (FR / NL,
1965) constructs an alternative
economy. Hard numbers become
fluid and loose the definite meaning
as we know it. A roulette, a wheel of
fortune, rotoscopes, a phenakistiscope
and a LP spin at high speed.
A party of Chinese shadow puppets
plays a sudoku-like game and looks
with half an eye at Onnen’s newest
animation movie CLOACINAE (2017)*,
which is here shown for the first
time.
Onnen works with drawings and
pre-cinema techniques. He was a
resident at the Rijksakademie and
teaches at the Rietveld Academy.
Onnen lives alternately in Brussels
and Amsterdam.
With sound contributions by i.a.
Jaap Blonk, Li Daiguo, Dick el
Demasiado, Fred Kienhuis, Jonas
Ohlsson, Oorbeek, Yvo Sprey, Mark
van Tongeren and Mariana Ungureanu,
Simon Wald-Lasowski. *I.c.w.
Sverre Fredriksen.
Festive opening on Sunday,
October 14, 15.00 with the artist
present. Opening speech at 15.30,
followed by drinks and music by
DJ Marcelle / Another Nice Mess.
Also on show this Fall at the
Kunstfort:
• Charlott Weise – He at Sea
in the Genieloods.
• Interventions by Yin-Ju Chen,
Roderick Hietbrink, Rachel
de Joode, Lennart de Neef en
Micha Prinsen, Lonneke van
der Palen, Marius Schwarz,
Dan Walwin.
Save the date: Sunday, December
16, 15.00, finissage with Onnen’s
band OORBEEK.
Image © Serge Onnen
Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen is supported
by the Municipality of Haarlemmermeer
and the Mondriaan Fund.
Fortwachter 1, Vijfhuizen (NH)
www.kunstfort.nl
Tue–Sun 13–17 (Mon / Thu closed)
Check website for Holidays

Cloacinae video online

Just uploaded on Vimeo (above) and on Youku (here): an impression of the two live performances of Serge Onnen, Erika Sprey, TUNG Chao Ming and myself. The full show lasted one hour, we performed it two times on one evening in Taipei Artist Village.

Serge Onnen compiled the sewer inspection videosequence seen in the middle screen of the clip and he designed the chinese shadowpuppets, which were hand-carved by Tian Xiang in China.  The one-hour inspection video was the starting point, to this was added live-shadowplaying by Serge with Erika Sprey.
TUNG Chaoming played the guzheng (Chinese zither), Mark van Tongeren did vocals, sruti box, live-electronics and field-recordings.

Camera by José Fernandes
Made possible with support from MOCA Taipei, Mondriaan Foundation & Taipei Artist Village.

Tung Chao-Ming with guzheng

Tung Chao-Ming with guzheng

Upcoming events

Weekly Voice Yoga Returns to Canjune Training Centre

March 15: Underground Trip (performance)

March 29: Lacking Sound Festival (performance)

Voice workshop for spring 2014: coming up soon

VoiceYoga3

This week Voice Yoga returns to Canjune’s Training Centre. Everyone is welcome to try out Voice Yoga on Thursdays between 10 and twelve. No registration necessary, but please be on time. Next week (March 20) the class will shift to the afternoon, between 14 and 16. Read the details about Voice Yoga in this blogpost.

undergroundtrip

Saturday March 15 you are invited to the performance Underground Trip with Serge Onnen, Erika Sprey (visuals), Tung Chao-Ming and myself (sounds) at Taipei Artist Village. There are two shows, at 19:30 and 21:30, please find the details in my previous blogpost.

Screen shot 2014-03-11 at 10.46.11

Saturday March 29 I am invited to perform at the Lacking Sound Festival, which is one of the more interesting on-going sound events in Taipei. Serge Onnen will join me to provide visuals, and we will explore the theme of mirrors. More details in this post.

Soon I will announce some workshops for this spring season. Come check back here or subscribe to this blog. If you prefer to receive emails write to < info  at  fusica   dot   nl> and you will receive updates every once in a while.

Lacking Sound Festival: March 29

Screen shot 2014-03-11 at 10.46.11

I am excited about this invitation for the Lacking Sound Festival, a mostly-monthly event currently held in the Digital Arts Centre in Taipei, to be precise in the Noise Kitchen. This meeting point for sound-art-buffs is a wonderful space with various ingenious instruments that can be played – reminding me more of a Museum of Musical Machines in the Netherlands than a 21st century Digital Arts site. Anyway, I have invited Serge Onnen to join me in creating something analog that sounds and feels digital  (and quite different from the Cloacinae sound-shadow-video performance we do/did the 15th of March). Both of us favor the kind of old-fashioned manual-vocal-labour forms of artistic expression, but then, we do use computers, digital recorders and the occasional effects apparatus to manipulate our creations. So here is the press-blurb:

Mirroring
Mark van Tongeren (sound) and Serge Onnen (image) dissect our everyday perception, enlarging our ordinary vision and audition to include the unseen and unheard. Mirrors, opposites and negatives of our everyday sense world.

Mark van Tongeren is currently fascinated by the voice as an instrument producing numbers, namely, the strict numerical ratios of overtones. When this is made audible through the technique of overtone singing, the voice almost loses its human identity: its sounds seem like pure sine waves. Digits, that is, whole numbers or whole-number ratios could be considered the DNA of our voice. In this installment of his theme The Digital & The Vocal, Mark offers an electro-acoustic performance where the distinctions between the digital and the vocal are blurred. Environmental recordings, extended vocal techniques, Jew’s harps and a Kaosspad further link the physical, everyday world with the digital, and the archaic with the hypermodern.
Artist Serge Onnen, currently holding a solo exhibition at MOCA Taipei, simultaneously provides a live visual performance. He will mainly use mirrors: echo’s of images, stretching the reflection, face reality,  double the sight and confront the audience with their image.

vantongeren x onnen

Coming-up in Taipei: Shadow-Sound-Performance

Last Friday evening was the opening of a solo exhibition of visual artist Serge Onnen at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Studio Underground, Taipei.

 

Cloacinae openi

Cloacinae opening at MOCA Taipei

CLOACINAE – Goddess of the Sewers offers a selection of works by Onnen from the last ten years, including animation videos, phenakistiscopes, wallpaper, and a large shadow/sound installation made for the MOCA exhibition.

On March 15 we will do a shadow/sound performance at Taipei Artist Village. For this we will use a video compiled by Serge from inspection videos of sewers around the world. Nowadays everywhere cameras are led through sewer systems and other inaccessible places to look for obstacles or solve problems. Some of these videos have a certain kind of beauty of their own, and Serge made a good selection of those. Add to that live shadow play by Onnen and Erika Sprey, and sounds by Chao-Ming Tung and myself… and you have an unexpected visual-auditory-hallucinatory tour in the underground, there where the metro does not go. (get a preview on Serge’s blog)

We do the show two times, starting at 19:30 and 21:30 (not 22:30 as stated before), duration is one hour.

Free entrance!

Please take note! The exhibition is taking place in the underground (Zhongshan Metro Mall, Near R9 exit), the performance is not. It is in Taipei Artist Village, No. 7, Beiping East Road, 10 minutes walk from Taipei Main Station.

歐瑟之 與 溫馬克 2012年四月七日星期六在北京雜家的演出

敬告諸君:本週六,我將和老朋友歐瑟之一起在北京演出。歐瑟之目前在北京做駐村藝術家,持續他環繞”影子”這個主題的各種創作,我倆隸屬的歐貝克實驗樂團,也在他的影響下做了不少有關”影子”的演出。既是寄居於北京心臟地區的胡同,歐瑟之自然也把握機會浸淫在中國傳統的皮影藝術中。

過去幾個禮拜,我和歐瑟之藉著skype跨越兩岸,各自從台灣和北京交流這次演出的構思,我也已經看過演出中會用到的圖像、畫作與燈光道具,表演中甚至會出現傳統工匠依歐瑟之設計所特製的皮影戲,而那延續幾百年的半透明乾皮偶,想當然耳會在歐瑟之的筆下顯現不同的風情。

至於我的部分,則是召集了眾多好夥伴 : 各種樂器、發聲物件、以及老字號的第二代聲音特效器。雖然從荷蘭運回台北造成一些損傷,但他們卻能跟我的歌聲共奏一曲 ”和諧的亂彈 ”。如果你對這種新和音感到好奇,可以點擊此處先聽為快。

我們的劇目叫 “ 釘恩鍍恩”,這是荷蘭語,意為 “ 幹活兒 “。在那一個鐘頭的時間裡,雜家坐落的那個古意盎然小寺院,將被我們轉化為一個既寫實又超現實的新奇空間。

眼下只能言盡於此。

如果你恰巧人在北京,不妨過來瞧瞧。

Zajia Lab announce

http://www.douban.com/event/16197356/

http://wwww.onnen.com

http://www.oorbeek.net

Onnen/van Tongeren @ ZaJialab, Beijing, 7•apr•2012

Proudly presenting: this Saturday’s performance in Beijing, together with my old friend, artist Serge Onnen. Serge currently resides in Beijing where he is producing the follow-up of his extensive work on shadow/performance, much of which was done with the collective Oorbeek that we are both part of. With a residency in a hutong in the heart of Bejing, Serge is now immersing himself in the ancient art of shadowplay in China.

During the past few weeks we have exchanged ideas about our ZaJialab performance from our respective homes in Beijing and Taiwan. Through skype, Serge has shown me sketches and drawings of objects he will use, and several of his new lamps and lighting set-ups. He has even enlisted the help of some traditional puppetmakers to realise his own designs in the slightly transparent, dried leather that has been used for centuries.

I have dug out the remainder of my musical instruments and sound objects, and an old companion, the second-generation Korg Kaoss Pad (the first generation gave up many years ago). After a break due to moving, it is exciting to find out that my instruments, voice and Kaoss Pad are capable—again—to create a nicely organised chaos when all used together.

The title of our performance is Dingen Doen, which is Dutch for ‘doing things.’ For an hour or so, we are going to transform the small, atmospheric temple that nowadays is ZaJialab into a place that is both real—and surreal.

That’s all we can say for now!

Come and check us out if you happen to be around.

For details:

http://www.douban.com/event/16197356/