Happy Metal performed by Staalplaat Soundsystem.
July 2 & 3, 2004 at the State X/New Forms Festival in The Hague, Holland.
A composition for The Hague.
Staalplaat Soundsystem, a first contact with Geert-Jan Hobijn, wild ideas galore.
A sound art installation, household articles combined with techno culture, a collection of past performances and installations?
Let's do it! Preparations get started, ambassies are consulted, power units, cables and money arranged.
Trucks and containers hired to be filled up with stacks of vacuumcleaners, taperecorders, ventilators, washing machines, turntables and kitchen utensils. Loads of it....
The Vrije Academie, everything positioned neatly, clusters of horns, bells, tubes, rotating and pumping mechanical parts. Moaning engines, spastic mixers and grinders bathing in colored lights, a kinetic wonderworld of musical weirdness.
An event of almost mythical proportions and a great start for the 2004
edition of State X/New Forms!
Jan Borchers

Over a long time Staalplaat has created many different mechanical orchestras using all sorts of consumer electronics and having learned how to control them and use them to compose. Previous highlights of Staalplaat Soundsystem performances include the very peculiar "Composition for Eight Refrigerators", performed at the German garage festival, and "Sweet Sissy and the Ballroom Hiss", performed at the Belgian Vooruit Geluid festival.
The latter starred 12 large floor polishers, making their characteristic noises and dancing like ravers on their own in the middle of a hall usually reserved for raves and rock concerts. On the balcony and the stage we had placed smaller gadgets such as coffee machines and food mixers, which, directed by us, commented with their own noises on what was going on the dance floor. Or the installation for 60 vacuum cleaners and 2 cement mixers, performed at the ENCI Cement factory in Maastricht, and the piece called "Avantilator" for one hundred office fans in Helsinki. For "floating islands" - our most recent project, a big swimming orchestra for the opening of the new Dutch embassy in Berlin - we have made a new relay box capable of switching 48 separate channels.
Our warehouse and basement is full of machines waiting for a new challenge, we are ready and would like to merge it all in to one big monster show named Happy Metal.
For the "stateX-new forms"  festival The Staalplaat Soundsystem monster show hase created in "de vrije academie" what we called "musique korrekt" using all our self-built and customised everyday tools, translating them into the new contexts of a monster orchestra. Instruments such as 120 flute-playing vacuum cleaners 6 pogo dancing tumble dryers, 100 table ventilators, 4 drumming jig saws, 200 radios plus a frenetic choir of 24 prepared kitchen mixers and more are connected so that they can be controlled by sound sources, using customised light organs and relay systems. The 4-arm-turntable together with some other soundfeeds (cd-players, additional turntables, etc.), will be the heart of the installation. We, and other invited guest turntablists, will play it all day. Reinterpreting a modern tradition of sound installation, the Staalplaat Soundsystem aims to use Fluxus elements, mechanical and constructive elements of sound art combined with the dynamics of the DJ culture. Every event is tailored to fit its environment. Give the Staalplaat Soundsystem an interesting or challenging space to work with and the space gets transformed into an immersive environment with many of the characteristics of the world of experimental music and performance in which Staalplaat has always been one of the vectors.

Within the current mood of worshipping the latest technology in media art, Staalplaat Soundsystem provides a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the 100-year tradition of noise-making machines and junk art, in which "mad" inventors and various kinds of artists operating in the margins of the art world meet. Anton Nikkilä /Avanto festival

Staalplaat Soundsystem were Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL), Carlo Crovato (UK) Wessel Westerveld (NL) Radboud Mens (NL) Jorg Monker (NL) and Martijn Grunwald (NL)

original concept

video of the show