For the 2008 edition of the SPOR festival in Aarhus we were invited to play a 24 hour yokomono set (may 9 - 10, 2008).

Music takes place in time. This fact has been investigated and challenged over the years where composers have worked with repetition and ‘endless’ processes, with very long sequences or extremely short ones. But music does not only unfold itself in time. Music also creates time. When musical sounds follow one another they provoke a particular sensation of time. Our experience of musical time depends both on that which sounds, the nature of the sounds and their connection with one another, while at the same time the experience is subjective and influenced by the circumstances in which it is experienced.

SPOR 2008 will explore and place emphasis on precisely these experiences with and over time - both musical time and the time that elapses during the course of a day. The framework for SPOR 2008 is at the same time a social action. The festival concerns itself not only with the relationship between work and listener but also between the listeners themselves. Instead of announced concert-times it will be personal choices as well as the public’s exchanges with one another that generate their flow through the festival. The public is challenged to lay out their own festival route, to go on an expedition of exploration in Musikhuset Aarhus (The Music House) and challenge the natural rhythm of the day - don’t forget your sleeping bag!

SPOR 2008 presents a wealth of orchestral music, performance, sound-installations, video-art and electronic music. Experience, amongst others,  Vienna Vegetable Orchestra (Au),Staalplaat Soundsystem (NL), asamisimasa (N), Rebecca Saunders (UK), Hanna Hartmann (S), Curious Chambers Players (S), Brandon Labelle (US/DK), Carl Emil Carlsen (DK), DYGONG (DK), SCENATET (DK) and Aarhus Symfoniorkester (DK).

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:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYh9pVD96GA[/youtube]

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.

We played a YOKOMONO in Maribor/Slovenia on the 10th of may at 13th International Festival of Computer Arts. http://www.mfru.org

The program “crossings” of this years club transmediale was dedicated to encounters and collaborations between musicians from the Middle East and Western Europe. In times of growing polarization and mutual paranoia, the importance of building cultural bridges of this sort increases. Opportunities for new insight and understanding also increase however, because the palpable urgency of critical times leads to a greater willingness for debate. … (ctm)
The point of departure for the performance together with the electronic musician, Tarek Atoui from Beirut is an as yet unpublished tape, by the 1999 prematurely deceased British musician, Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze.

foto: normbxl