It’s been a busy few months. Busy, in my mind, means that everything you do has a purpose and a preferred outcome. One of the reasons I love jamming on the modular is the lack of purpose and the unexpected twists and turns that arise. Nothing patched and nothing planned. Playing with bits and pieces. Some already there in some modules memory, some spontaneously created from scratch. A freeform road to nowhere.

I’m the proud owner of a Revox B77 MkII reel-to-reel tape recorder. This is the first piece I recorded on this magical machine.

So I did my first live performance at STRP Biennial 2017 as part of an excellent group of artists from Modulab Eindhoven. It was exceptional to perform at the impressive industrial Klokgebouw where the exhibition takes place. A delightful day with a great sense of community and shared passion for weird noises, noodles, and knob wiggling.

This day taught me many things, especially on authenticity, camaraderie, and dignity.

Take your pick…

Working my way towards playing a live set at STRP Bienal Eindhoven 2017 on the 26th of March.

STRP has grown into the largest event for creative technology in the Netherlands over the course of eight editions, with almost 30,000 visitors in ten days in 2015.

Characteristic is the mix of creativity and technology, which is typical for Eindhoven. Apart from that, STRP produces and presents more and more new work and new concerts by legendary performance pioneers, young choreographers, visionary authors and upcoming hybrid artists.

More info: https://strp.nl/en/

I met SONICrider at the Bizarre Sound Creatures exposition 2016 in Eindhoven. After shaking hands, we briefly speak on making music and how to keep building tension in a live set. His impressive hardware rig, always lit in green, shows signs of an intense musical life before modular became a thing again. And I must say, after getting to know him a little, he’s still the punk he was back in the eighties.

We got together last Friday to jam with our modular systems.

Here’s what our journey turned out to be.

We all need interaction with feedback, constantly, to prevent ourselves from going mad or unnaturally out of touch. This episode is all about the sonification of electromagnetic fields in and around the house. Listening to sound we maybe rather ignore. That and a healthy amount of mind altering feedback.

It was here days ago, and it hasn’t become anything better now than it was back then. Most musicians know that perpetual motion of tempering with every little detail in their work. It’s a daunting task that doesn’t add much to the quality or experience of a piece. Creating this podcast every other week forces me to stop, listen and let go. What a great way to learn and grow. Just get on with it.

Happy new year!

Happy Holidays!

In many respects, this was a year of extremes. Profoundly striving for change or guarding against it. But we’re not that important. If anything, we need to relearn how to listen and to acknowledge that we are far from isolated from our fellow men. After all, we travel through space on the same piece of rock. To absolutely nowhere.

The UnlikeNoise Podcast is an unrestricted exploration within the realm of ambient sound art. All soundscapes, field recordings, music, particles, and grains are created, developed, recorded and composed by Leon van Bokhorst.