LOOKING FOR THAT BEAUTIFUL DETAIL

Demonstration of my new instrument: the Yourock Guitar with Wii mote & Nunchuck attached.

In November 2011 I stayed at the Center for Experimental Music & Intermedia (CEMI), part of the Composition Studies of the University of North Texas in Denton TX, as a visiting composer. The residency was made possible with the support of the Netherland-America Foundation
and the Fonds Podiumkunsten

I had access to a great studio, equipped with a beautiful surround sound setup, being able to work undisturbed on my new setup. I recently bought a Yourock Midi guitar to control my ever changing setup consisting of LiSa,  a Nord Micro Modular  and Ableton Live. Even though it feels like a plastic toy guitar it turns out to be pretty cool controlling midi notes and cc data with it, especially since I did play guitar at some point in my life. I experimented with attaching a Wii mote and Nunchuck (data conversion by JunXion) to the guitar, enabling me to send more midi CC information when rocking out.

I concluded my stay in Denton with a concert with the new setup, performing my piece Amanda (originally made for this performance) in a surround sound installation an my composition Cosmological Flight in a 8 channel version.

Afterwards it was my great pleasure to visit New Orleans

My gracious hosts Dana Jessen and Mike Straus at a microbrewery, the day after our performance at the Blue Nile.

Wave Field Synthesis is a technique for distributing sound through space in a realistic way. It is based on the Huygens principle, applied to sound. The WFS system from the Game of Life foundation is the only portable system in the world, consisting of 192 speakers set up in a square of say 10 by 10 meters. Amazingly, it is possible to move the sounds outside the square of speakers, as if they come from 50 meters away. The interface for the system is very capable of working with sounds algorithmically or draw movements with a mouse or pen, registering the speed of movement, thus enabling a very precise and organic way of composing.

The inspiration for Cosmological Flight, my first piece for the system, is the way painters Jackson Pollock and Kazemir Malevich used space. The recording here is a stereo mix, not representative for the actual piece. Panning is simulating the spacial design a bit (listen with your headphones). The graphic descritptions below of the piece gives an idea of the spacial development (opens in a new tab).

Cosmological Flight by Vinkepeezer

To get an idea of the complexity this is a screen print of the editor showing the design around 4 minutes in the piece.

It was first performed at The Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht on September 11th, the week after in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen (see pictures below), and on september 23rd – 24th at Todays ARt festival in Den Haag. The next schedule performance is at the Wavefields Festival, december 2nd at OT 301 in Amsterdam, along with some other great works by Kees Tazelaar, Ji Youn Kang, Arthur Sauer and Funckarma. Don’t miss it, this is really something special.

Cosmological Flight was commissioned by the Fonds Podiumkunsten.

My friend Ties Mellema programmed the Uitgast festival last summer, a music festival in the nature park Flevoland in Lelystad. It had a great program, with a fantastic performance of the Ploctones and a performance of Schonbergs’ magnificent Verklarte Nacht. He invited me and composer Bart de Vrees to produce a soundwalk on august 20th through the park. The soundwalk was inspired by the Planets from Gustav Holst. Bart took fragments of the Planets and rearranged them for musicians to be performed on the way. The soundwalk ended with my cacaphonic, 8-turntable”live remix” of the piece.

Short clip from a broadcast by omroep Flevoland (in Dutch):

Yes we slept in a Swifterband- village

Interviews: Toos Sax van der Weijden, editing: Ivo Bol

Drive-in performance about life in Escamp

Life Cinema was an art-performance project made by Toos Sax van der Weijden, Arianne de Vos Burchart, Ivo Bol and Mike Reinierse, in collaboration with inhabitants of the Escamp neighbourhood in The Hague. It was performed October 29 and 30 2010. The performance took place in a flat at the compound of the Haga Hopspital. The lights in the flat and movements of the performers were linked with the soundtrack that was broadcasted by a radio frequency, and could be heard and seen by the audience members in their car. Life Cinema was produced by Koorenhuis.

Drive-in voorstelling over levens in Escamp

Life Cinema aan de Leyweg was een drive-in voorstelling voor en door bewoners van Escamp en medewerkers van het Haga Ziekenhuis. Vanuit je auto kon je op 29 en 30 oktober 2010 kijken naar 66 kamers van de zusterflat op het Haga-terrein. Achter elk raam gebeurde iets. Tegelijkertijd luisterde je naar de autoradio waarop de bijbehorende geluiden en verhalen uit de wijk te horen zijn.

Locatie: Het parkeerterrein voor de woonflat van het Haga Ziekenhuis tussen de Florence Nightingaleweg en Prof.Dr. A. Verjaalweg.

Concept en begeleiding: theatermaker/regisseur Toos Sax van der Weijden, choreografe Arianne de Vos Burchart, geluidskunstenaar Ivo Bol en lichtkunstenaar Mike Reinierse. Productie: Koorenhuis

Met dank aan: Fonds 1818, medewerkers van het Haga Ziekenhuis, bewoners van de woonflat, bewoners en vrijwilligers van de wijk Escamp en Leyenburg in het bijzonder, stichting Mooi.

On February 3rd 2007 Paul Glazier and I presented an installation / performance at the Stedelijk Museum near Central Station in Amsterdam, as part of the Radio Rietveld series. Paul presented a composition that is made out of 100 layers of a Nana Mouskouri song and I mixed 10 different versions of The Planets from Gustav Holst.

The Planets remixed from Ivo Bol on Vimeo.

The Planets is often dissed by snobs but I think it is a wonderful work. I mixed the 10 different versions by hand, using the 10 needles of the record players, running around to keep all of them in the same loop. (check out the QT video made by Paul at the top of this page).

In August 2006 I presented an installation at the performance festival Noorderzon in Groningen, together with artist Miriam Reeders. We totally rebuild a caravan into a multi-sensory experience. One person at the time can visit the caravan and nose around through the objects displayed inside. Miriam wrote a lot of things, some amazing stories and thoughts, she laid out old photo albums, created various small installations and objects, like a “smell box” which contained various nostalgic smells. The caravan is filled with sensors, walking around, opening cabinets or touching objects result in sound and light changes. The idea was originated by Miriam, who makes really cool installations like “The dream Operator” in which dreams are being transformed into animations. The idea for Memory Scan was to allow the visitors to stroll around in the mind of a person with Alzheimer’s Disease, in which old memories are still vividly projected, mixed with confused and puzzling information about the day-to day present.

The first stage of our research was done at the Grand Theatre in Groningen, which produced this project. We continued our work during a residency at STEIM, an organisation commited to develop new media instruments for artists. You can see Benjamin Scheers with the so called JunXion Bo which he build for us there. The JunXion Box is developed by STEIM, you can plug analogue switches and triggers in the box, which can be translated into MIDI or OSC with the JunXion software. This allowed us to place pressure sensors underneath the floor and switches behind the cabinets and drawers inside the caravan.

When someone opens a drawer or just walks around in the caravan MIDI commands are generated by the JunXion system, sending MIDI data to the light system or to LiSa, a soundprocessing software also developed by STEIM. As you can see in one of the pictures it resulted in a crazy amount of cables going in and out the caravan, into the JunXion Box, then into the computer and into various mixers and amplifiers, sending sound back to various speakers in and underneath the caravan.

The way that the system was set up the visitor inside the caravan was triggering all the light and sound changes, as an independent system without me touching any buttons or faders. I am generally interested in creating semi-autonomous systems for generating sound events, in this case the challenge was to create an interesting sound and light environment. Also we were determined not to allow the technique to dominate the atmosphere but to draw the visitor into the beautiful setting which Miriam created with her collection of found objects, old photos, drawings, animations and stories.

The experience was different everytime, depending on which cabinet was opened first, with a certain ratio of predictability build in in the beginning. Some triggers were setup to change the function of all the other triggers, so the result was not always the same. To give you an idea: when a person would open a cabinet the phone would start ringing. The phone was usually picked up and the person was asked to read on of the thoughts written on the yellow papers stuck to the ceiling. The voice was recorded and played back later, but which sounds were played or lights were changed after that depended on the level of activity of the visitor and also the order of doing things.

photographie © Pierre BORASCI

See also

http://www.miriamreeders.nl/ (in Dutch)

Miriam Reeders en Ivo Bol: concept

Miriam Reeders: design

Ivo Bol: programming, sounddesign

Elise Griede: advice

Benjamin Scheers: technical support

Tanco Noorlander: technique

Wim Sebo: carpentry

Willem Peter Meeuwissen: voice over

Produced by Grand Theatre and STEIM

Premiere: Noorderzon Festival Groningen Augustus 2006

Sound Installation, 12 May 2004, OT 301 Amsterdam

WOW Remix (MP3)

Click on the link above to hear a remix I made for Janek Schaefers’ Wow Physical Remix project. It was released by Scottish label Diskono in 2000 and again by Consume in 2003.

http://www.audioh.com/releases/wow.html