for upcomming events please look here: http://www.staalplaat.org/site/about/timeline/

Yokomono at alt.gallery from 28 february - 5 April, as part of the AV Festival in Newcastle 2008.

This is the first UK presentation of the award winning sound art installation Yokomono by Staalplaat Soundsystem. The installation is inspired by the experience of driving in a car close to the Funkturm (Radio and TV Tower) in Berlin, passing quickly in and out of different radio signals.

Yokomono consists of four toy car record players and a corresponding set of FM radios. The cars, known as vinyl killers, have been customized with wireless FM transmitters. As they spin around the vinyl, they transmit their signal to the radios which are tuned to a special Yokomono frequency.

By arranging the radios in groups it is possible to explore the architectural dimensions of the gallery space. Some radios are also mounted on a miniature train, literally driving through the interfering frequencies. An unstable sonic space is created as the vinyl killers run on batteries that will slow down during the installation, but not necessarily at the same rate.

Described as an ‘eclectic mix of techno culture and sound art installation’, Staalplaat Soundsystem use radio technology in a playful way to create a unique and adventurous installation.

http://www.directions.jp/airartlog/aal025/

Staalplaat soundsystem and Lola have met during a 5 moth art in public space resicentie at the Zuidas in Amsterdam, a brand new banking quarter.
It was in this period that we have spend long discussions on sound in public space, from simple practical solutions like wind driven percussion instruments that visitors can use to compose, to fundamental working principals.
It was there where we were impressed by the working similarities and contrast between our disciplines.
Besides the obvious differences there are many similarities between sound art and architecture in arranging and composing public space
Working with function, material and volume but from a different perspective to the same problem.

In Composed City we want to show the direct relationship between public space and sound and place it in a broad perspective -historical, present-day, theory and praxis- by means of lectures, presentations and workshops dealing with public space in the city, approached from the view of sound art as well as landscape architecture resulting in a sound art work in public space. Composed city will take place in the preparation of the Berlin festival Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation in May and June.

Program
During the lectures a broad overall view is given on the position of sound and public space, historical and practical, then we’ll slowly focus on the points where sound art and landscape architecture interact. In practice: the first lectures begin with a historical overview of the entire field, the lectures on the present will be more focused on sound art in public space, and the presented artist will be specialized on a field were the architectural and public conditions of the space is a elementary part of their work. We have invited Mark Bain - Edwin van de Heide, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Carsten Nicolai.

The workshops will focus on the praxis and deal with artistic concepts and practical obstacles on the road to realization of a composition with urban facts. The workshops will result in a sound art composition - spatial as well as sonic - that reveals, emphasizes and uses the sounds of the urban landscape were in contact with local architects to select lacerations that will be the turned in to a urban instrument.

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staalplaat soundsystem together with akuvido played a sonic wargame sessions at clubtransmediale 2008.

… In a quadrophonic arena the battle for audibility is raging. While the referee keeps an ear out, musical gladiators engage in combat with an arsenal of electronic weaponry. Sonic Espionage, in-Filtration, Atonal Behaviour and Hostile Overdubs, it’s an ear for an ear…

Sonic Wargame, created by Dutch sound artist Xavier van Wersch, is a musical game for four players, or four teams of players and a referee. The players are positioned on platforms in the corners of the space. Each player has a game console and a loudspeaker, while the audience can move freely around within the set-up. Sonic Wargame is a hybrid between a living installation and an interactive performance.

On the 2nd oktober we took part in an evening of musikprotokoll feturing the FM3 Buddha Machine with our own interpretation of the little box:

[…] City space, mobility, changing and attributing new definitions to situations and places form a set of ideas the organizers of Passengers Festival in Warsaw on 6-13th October focus on. Warsaw will be given a new train line, but also there will arrive a group of international artists, passengers of the city who will transform its scenery for a short period of time.
For the organizers of the festival a tram is both a source of inspiration, symbol of this enterprise, as well as a mobile platform to present art. […]

The performances of the passengers festival took place at a very nice old tram repair hall wich is still in use for that purpose.
YOKOMONO was fitting very well in this surrounding.

[…] Built with the aid of cutting-edge architectural and technological means as the ideal concert hall, free of inherent noise: The Helmut-List-Halle is an almost perfect white cube for music. For the opening of steirischer herbst, Staalplaat Soundsystem will for the first time use the hall not as a flawless shell for music but rather play the hall itself as an instrument – in a duet with the noises that surround it and that are usually locked out. […]

Commissioned by Steirischer Herbst and musikprotokoll 2007 (Curators: Susanna Niedermayr/Christian Scheib) we have produced a new version of our Architone project for the official festival opening on the 20th September 2007. Plus a 2nd show on the 21st September.

Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL), Carsten Stabenow (D), Carlo Crovato (GB), Olaf Matthes (D) and Jens Alexander Ewald (D)
special guests:
BMB.con Justin Bennett (GB), Roelf Toxopeus (NL) and Mark Bain (US)

A short video of the second performance:
http://www.staalplaat.org/video/closed_enough.mov
some more impressions from the opening of steirischer herbst can be found here:
official festival doku by Timm Ringewald (min 6:30-9:30)

the soundartist Wolfgang Dorninger made some binaural recordings and wrote a small review: part 1 and part 2.

Some reviews can be found here:
http://oe1.orf.at/highlights/109119.html
http://www.diepresse.com/home/kultur/news/331516/index.do

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From 26th - 28th we did a workshop on the topic “how to play a building” and presented the results together with the students as a lead-in to the musikprotokoll week with a concert on the 2nd October. This show was also featuring special guest FM3.

Later on the 2nd October we played together with our friends FM3 a Buddha Boxing set at the Generalmusikdirektion.
For some video of this very funny evening please have a look at nine lives of buddha

On the 3rd October we have done the last Architone performance - for this we invited Goodiepal, Owl Project and our workshop students to play the building together with us.

“Made In Taiwan” invites people to play with a complex mechanical sound orchestra, installed in the museum by using their mobile phones. The students have made a mechanical orchestra consists of modified, hacked, changed and customised, electronic household devices like vacuum cleaners playing flute, organ and brass, rattling kitchen mixers, buzzing ventilators, and humming refrigerators. In order to wake up the installation and start the orchestra, passers-by dial a telephone number. The call opens the door of the fridge, revealing a “mobile-phone robot person”. When they start pressing the buttons, the various modified household appliances come to live and begin to make a noise: the funny electrical music of recycled everyday objects. The main interest of the Staalplaat workshop is to involve passers-by in such a process of interaction and communication. Their method for achieving this is turning normal simple things around and upside down, by changing their function, by radical recontextualization and reconfiguration. Always with a lot of humour, in order to make ensure enjoyment for the audience.

Made In Taiwan workshop/installation at MOCA Taipei

The Yokomono-installation is built from around two hundred radios. As each killer will play its own record – each one is locked groove record made by Staalplaat for the installation – it opens up a separate audio stream. It thereby generates and controls a multi-channel sound system. By arranging the radios in groups it becomes possible to explore the architectural dimensions of the space. Some radios are tuned to the same frequency, and here Staalplaat uses small battery operated radios on sets of the train models to map the transmission in the space, for it will drive through the interfering frequencies.
The Yokomono set-up in the MOCA is a combinationof the live concert version and the installation version, it will be played live by members of Staalplaat Soundsystem.
Soon images of the installation, and live set of the Staalplaat soundsystem participation in ZONE V2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei will be posted here.

Yokomono performance at MOCA Taipei

The idea for ‘Yokomono White’ was made for the Avanto festival in Helsinki but never realized nor tested.
“Yokomono white” is just old turntables with paper tubes (for children when they go the first time to school) and a pin
this is a experimental version live tested on stage in conjunction with Hassan Khan.

The piano sections included in this performance were composed and recorded a couple of months ago in podgorica by Hassan Khan. These simple compositions were interested in structure and architecture- the way a proposition is stated and developed. The recording was done behind the firewall of the national theater whose wooden floor and extremely high ceilings provided excellent natural reverb. Segments from these recordings are rearranged to provide a structure for a live improvisation session using live feedbacking mixers, a battery of filters in conjunction with staalplaat soundsystems’s vinyl loops library and turntables.

Hassan Khan works with image, sound, text, music and concept. His album tabla dubb has just been released on the 100COPIES label. Khan lives and works in Cairo, Egypt.