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

For Sensoralia – electronic music and visual arts festival – part of the Romaeuropa Festival 2006 we did a new version of YOKOMONO/VIDEO together with Bas van Koolwijk who generated live these extremely beautiful pure abstract expression of whats going on within yokomono.

We did a YOKOMONO performance at the dis-patch festival in Belgrade organised by the people from Belgradyard Sound System in a very nice venue an old cinnema. Of course we went to visit the famous Tesla museum because without Nikola Tesla we would not have YOKOMONO (he invented the basics of radio transmission). The image below shows the famous tesla coil in action and our group with neon tubes induced by the powerfull field transmission. A photo documentation of the festival can be found here.

CHEW-Z was a festival organised by Massimiliano Viel and the people arround the plattform sincronie.

CHEW-Z Colliding HEterophonic Waves was inspired by the book “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” by Philip K. Dick and was dealing with his ideas of perception of reality. Staalplaat Soundsystem was invited to play togethet with the Icarus Ensemble as well as solo parts for this two concert evenings. A YOKOMONO solo part was done but only with records cut especially for this event based on the material of Fausto Romitelli’s “La sabbia del tempo”. We did a analog live remix of this material. We played a MACHINE orchestra solo part and a piece called “Can-D” by Riccardo Nova together with the Icarus Ensemble, Riccardo Nova’s electronic manipulations and our MACHINES.
Compositions by:
Riccardo Nova, Otolab, Fausto Romitelli, Staalplaat Soundsystem, Giovanni Verrando and Massimiliano Viel

Conductor: Giorgio Bernasconi

Icarus Ensemble:
Giovanni Mareggini (flute), Nicola Zuccala’ (clarinet), Andrea Menafra (guit), Marco Pedrazzini (keyboards), Kumi Uchimoto (keyboards), Paolo Ghidoni (violin), Luciano Cavalli (viola), Matteo Malagoli, (violoncello)

SSS = Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL) + Carsten Stabenow (D)

The re:visie festival is part of the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. Under the topic “Pick Up The Pieces” they invited a lot of projects dealing with the single ‘pieces’ of the medium film in different ways. http://www.revisie.org
For re:visie we did a YOKOMONO wireless video set together with Bas van Koolwijk. He was using the input of several little cameras build in the vinyl killers and in the setup and processed those signals. http://www.umatic.nl/info_bas.html

For the first time the YOKOMONO was played within a multi channel spatial soundsystem! For this we worked together with the excellent abiunix system made by komponent lab from denmark. The systems uses many more loudspeakers than a traditional PS-system so that the audience is surrounded by loudspeakers from all angles. With a cunning electronic coupling together of the sound sources present are they fused into a single source whose accumulated characteristics could be manipulated by us. The interaction with the system was directly related to the 10 separate soundsources (vinylkillers). http://ambiunix.komponent.dk/

For our performance at STEIM we added a wireless video component to the normal YOKOMONO setup.
Two very small wireless video cameras build in the cars and two outside the cars within the setup generated video signals. This signals were then digitally remodeled by Bas van Koolwijk, using the interaction of the live audio with the video.

www.steim.org

Our project YOKOMONO got a Honorary Mention Digital Music at this years Ars Electronica Festival. We showed a new version of the Installation wich turned out very nice.

YOKOMONO confronts viewers with a set-up consisting of 4 “vinyl killers” – little toy record players in the form of VW buses, each equipped with a needle and a small VHF transmitter. The “vinyl killers” circle around on specially prepared loop records, whose loops initially contain “digital silence”. The records are manipulated and prepared to create interferences, noises and rhythms, which are transmitted cross-wise by the VHF transmitters on two different frequencies to four groups of radios corresponding to the walls of the room, thus opening up a four-channel space-sound system. Additional radios on a circling toy train move through the different transmitter frequencies, thus permanently altering their sound and making the range and order of the frequencies visible.

The sound is determined by many factors – the wear and tear on the records and the primitive sound transmission (MONO) changes the original “digital silence”, adding mechanical and analog characteristics, while the rotation of the vinyl killers and the movement of the visitors in the room destabilize the VHF transmission to the radios, the transmitters interfere with one another and other transmitting devices such as mobile phones, and the gradually decreasing battery power of the vinyl killers changes the playing speed of the loops. All of this makes YOKOMONO an unstable, incalculable system, in which distortion and erosion, the obliteration and destruction of the sound are part of the concept.

You can read a review made by the german-french arte-TV here:
http://www.arte.tv/de/kunst-musik/kultur-digital/Ars_20Electronica_202006/1316374.html

We also did a yokomono performace at the O.K. center media deck and spontaneously invited our friends chris (wirmachenbunt) and owain for some improvised vj-action. you can see some ‘crappy cellphone cam’ impressions here .

At Raumschiff Zitrone we played a “YOKOMONO unplugged”version.