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).

We performed yokomono on april 25th 2008 at the beautiful goethe institute garden in cairo.
The 100LIVE festival was organised by mahmoud refat the founder of the 100copy label
MUSICIANS: adham hafez, bikya, croce massimo, hassan khan, magdi mostafa, mahmoud refat, ramsi lehner, staalplaat soundsystem, tarek atoui

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.

[…] 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.

“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.

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

We played a YOKOMONO set at the DEAF07 festival in Rotterdam.
“On 14 April V2_ celebrates its 25th birthday with an exceptionally dynamic night. A surprising lineup of groundbreaking artists who have bridged new media, performance, image and sound in the past 25 years will perform. Along with Staalplaat Soundsystem’s “vinyl killers”, Edwin van der Heide’s laser performances and appearances by Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barrière, V2_ will bring you Germany’s Mouse on Mars and Ryoji Ikeda, Japan’s best-known composer of electronic music.” (DEAF website)

An new version of the YOKOMONO installation is running from the 5th of april on at the Gallery Kapelica in Ljubljana / Slovenia wich used to be a liturgical place of the Apprentice Hostel. If you are around you should check their always interesting programme!

On the 10th of May we are going to perform YOKOMONO together with Bas van Koolwijk in Maribor / Slovenia. (check for updates on this)

Invited by the people of Circuit Court we played at the RIAM Festival 2006 in Marseille.

Here you can find an interview made by Radio Grenouville for their INDISCIPLINES series: http://www.grenouille888.org/dyn/IMG/mp3/12_06_Indisciplines_festival_RIAM.mp3

And here you can find a video interview on the YOKOMONO project made by circuitcourt:
http://streaming.circuit-court.org/circuitcourt/riam/03/videos/Stalplaat.mov