Electronic Circus / Space Art showcase

Saturday, September 22nd, the 5th edition of the Electronic Circus Festival in Gütersloh, Germany, took place.

One day earlier the Circus already started with a pre-dinner with the already arrived musicians and some visitors (approximately 40 people). Like last year it again was a very welcome start of a nice weekend.

After everyone finished meals, my wife Paulien, Michel van Osenbruggen (Synth.nl) and me, had another drink in a so called 'Biergarten'. Don't know why it was called like that, because they only had a pover choice of only two beers.

Saturday we moved towards Die Weberei in Gütersloh, where the festival took place.
On this day there were performing some fine acts, which the Electronic Circus crew described as 'the best line-up up til date'.
Paulien manned the Deserted Island Music stall for the album sales. Here it was also possible to listen excerpts from the album Synth.nl and me are currently working on.

Because I was also involved into the organisation of Dominique Perrier's "Space Art Tribute" album presentation and showcase, I unfortunately only managed to see a part of Ian Boddy and Erik Wollo's concert, which contained some great music! During the day Dominique Perrier gave some interviews, and I also did one with him for www.jeanmicheljarre.nl, which I will be putting online within the coming days.

After Gandalf's concert, it was time to get the last things prepared and doing the final soundcheck for the come-back of the legendary "Space Art".
Having released three albums in between 1977 and 1981, which sold 3 million copies worldwide, the follower-up "Space Art Tribute" was - finally - being released on the day of their first performance ever in Germany.
Although the album must be seen as a new "Space Art" album, the "Tribute" refers to the passing of half of the band's original setting, drummer Roger Rizzitelli, two years ago.

The time schedule of the band's performance (the showcase started at 23:30) seemed no problem for the present audience.
Dominique Perrier (synthesizers), Michel Valy (bass), Alain Pype (drums) and Lilli Lacombe (violin and synths) performed a couple of tracks from the new release, as well as two "oldies". After their 30-minute gig, the audience really went mad, and asked for an encore. And another one! Definitely a blasting performance!

Thanks a lot the Electronic Circus organisation and crew for another great event at Die Weberei. Already looking forward to the next edition again!

The next event will be the E-Live Festival at Theater De Enck in Oirschot, where Space Art will also be present to have their album presentation, as well as another showcase. Official announcement will follow very soon!

Neue Musik aus Zeit und Raum

Saturday September 15th
10:00 Arrival at the Zeiss Planetarium in Bochum, Germany.

Rehearsing

11:00-14:00 Setting up all equipment and sound-checking.
18:30-19:30 Organizing the table for cd-sales, and final sound-check for Bernd Scholl.
19:30 Doors open for the audience.
20:10-21:15 Concert Moonbooter (Bernd Scholl).

He did a very nice concert, presenting his newly released "Cosmophonica", consisting of some great and catchy tracks, mixed into a couple of longer parts.

21:20-:21:30 Final sound-check for my concert.

21:45-22:45 My concert.

Setup



I've chosen to perform my alter-ego project "Planet of the Arps". In the first place because in my opinion this 60-minute-track would suit perfectly with the space concept of the Planetarium. One of the other associations I've had with this project, are the "arps", or galaxies, as collected by Dr. Halton C. Arp, which were reflected into the visuals that could be seen during my part of the evening.

It was my first concert ever at a planetarium, so I have experienced past evening as a very special one.

The performance went very well, and I hope the 180+ audience had a great time too!

Because I was very concentrated, I missed most of the visuals during my performance... Very unfortunate, but I heard Klaus-Dieter Unger did a great job with the visuals.

22:45-23:10 Encore

Bernd Scholl and I prepared the tracks for the encore by means of remixing each other's tracks.

I have added tracks to Moonbooter's "Interstellar Sunset", and Bernd reworked my MMIX a.D.

Above these prepared mixes we did improvisations.

After the show, it was time for more cd-sales and chatting with people.
Continued by packing and loading all equipment into the car, and after this there was finally some time to relax a bit.

I have really had a tremendous time at the planetarium! It was great to see that quite a lot of people gathered to witness yesterday's concerts.
I would like to thank following people:

- Schallwende (Sylvia and Klaus) and Zeiss Planetarium Bochum for making this event possible.
- Klaus-Dieter Unger for his great job concerning the visuals during the evening.
- Bernd "Moonbooter" Scholl, for the pretty cooperation and collaboration.
- All people who where involved into (the organisation and participation of) yesterday evening.
- Paulien Bouw for her support, assistance and album sales.
- All of you who were present yesterday evening. Some of you especially came to see one or both of us, and in a couple of cases you travelled quite some distance. Some of you really had no idea what to expect and were not familiar at all with the things Bernd and I are doing. Anyway, I hope you were satisfied with the package we had to offer, yesterday evening.

Many thanks and see you soon!

Primitives

Yesterday I did another session with Synth.nl (Michel van Osenbruggen) in his Apollo Studio.
Actually there are no sensational details about past evening / night, but resumed: we listened, and we made notes and some adjustments. And it is very nice to know that we more or less still share the same ideas about the direction we want to go into with our project.

In the past weeks I recorded some additional tracks, which Michel integrated into the current mixes. I was very delighted to hear the results of the new versions he has made since our previous session, and it is great to hear the enormous progress the individual tracks have made since the start of our collaboration. When having listened to the tracks after eachother again, it became clear the album is getting shape more and more. Very welcome, because our intention is to create a complete album, and should not just be a collection of tracks.
 
In the meanwhile Michel also did a great job with the preparations of the artwork, and yesterday we also brainstormed about potential track titles. At this moment we have made a selection of nine tracks with a total duration of around 70 minutes, and for now we both agreed about the the album title: "Primitives".

In first instance we set the album release on October 27th, at the E-Live Festival in Oirschot. At this moment it is not yet 100% certain if we are really going to manage this, but we are definitely on the right track. More concrete information should be available by the end of this month, after we have had some more sessions.