Free Arts Lab photoshoot

This afternoon Jeroen, Petter and I had a photoshoot for Free Arts Lab. The shoot was done by Nausikäa de Blaauw, who already made some great live photos during our concert at the Pletterij, last year.
 

We were allowed to make photographs at "De Hallen", an arts gallery in the centre of Haarlem.
This location offered excellent opportunities for making some nice and surprising compositions.
Although the gallery is closed for public on Mondays, we were allowed to access all rooms, exposition areas, and also the roof.

So we had all freedom to pose.

We already got an impression from the results from the camera's display, but I am really excited and looking forward to see the full resolution final results. Photos will be shared as soon as there is made a selection.

Groove's New Year's Party - free audio download

As you already could have read, I participated on Groove New Year's Party, at Theatre De Enck in Oirschot, on January 11.

A free download containing the first 36 minutes of the jamsession can be obtained from the Groove Unlimited website.

The registration consists of the unedited stereomix, and therefor also contains mistakes and some mixing issues. But it definitely gives a good impression of the performance and the atmosphere.

It is great to hear things sounded a lot better and more organised than I had in mind when being on stage.
 

About the downloadable audio track:

The track contains announcements and introduction of the musicians by Ron Boots, who didn't join the musicians, but took care of the live front of house mixing.

Featuring musicians (in order of appearance):

0:00 - 0:43 - Introduction by Ron Boots

0:43 - 6:35 - Intro by Eric van der Heijden, René Splinter and Harold van der Heijden

6:35 - 14:45 - Introduction of the other musicians: Jeffrey Haster (Synthex), René de Bakker (Beyond Berlin), Martin Peters (Beyond Berlin), Remy Stroomer, Bas Broekhuis, Frank Dorittke (F.D. Project), and start of Sequence 1 (by René de Bakker)

14:45 - 25:35 - Sequence 2 (by me)

25:35 - 36:15 -  Sequence 3 (by Jeffrey Haster)

I think there is potential to give continuation to this project. We'll see...

For now: enjoy listening!

Schallwelle Preisverleihung 2015

Yesterday, it was time again for the annual Schallwelle Preisverleihung, at the familiar location of the Zeiss Planetarium in Bochum, Germany. As part of the tradition, I went there again with Michel van Osenbruggen (Synth.nl).
Before, in between and after the ceremony, there always is enough opportunity to meet up with people, friends and fellow-musicians.

The evening consisted of three parts: the first part featured an excellent performance by Picture Palace music and the first part of the Awards ceremony. The second part consisted of a nice concert by René Splinter and friends and the distribution of the remaining Awards. And the third and final part was dedicated to the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was addressed to Edgar Froese. Due to Edgar's recent passing, this year's ceremony had emotional accents.

My band Free Arts Lab was on the pre-nomination list, but didn't reach the final selection of nominees, unfortunately.
See the entire list of winners and nominees here: http://www.schallwelle-preis.de/

I already did it in person yesterday, but again: Congratulations to all winners!

Then I also met up with Wolfram Spyra, and discussed about the "Planet of the Arps".
I wrote and recorded the first version of this ambient piece back in 2010, and performed it for the first time in 2012, as solo-concert on the same location as yesterday's Schallwelle Preisverleihung. From the very beginning of the evolution of this piece I had in mind that this should be a collaboration with Wolfram Spyra. Then, last year, at the Ruins of Brederode, Wolfram and his girlfriend (and half of Moon & Melody) Roksana Vikaluk, and me performed an excerpt of this piece, fully improvised, using elements from the original piece.
Although we made satisfying recordings of this performance, and this piece definitely might be worth sharing it with the world, I still feel the need to rework and release the entire original one-hour piece (instead of only the half of it, which we did so far). So hopefully there will finally be an opportunity to work on this somewhere this year!

Me, Thorsten Quaeschning and Eric van der Heijden.

And last but not least, we have a picture of three handsome long-haired men!

Free Arts Lab weekend sessions

Although we are having rehearsing sessions with Free Arts Lab on a very regular base, there was need to work on our music in a different ambiance, on a different location. So last weekend Jeroen, Petter and I moved our equipment to a cottage, and locked ourselves for three days to create new music and discuss and work on the content and setup of Free Arts Lab's performances.

Besides the serious stuff there also was enough time for good conversations, a lot of fun, nice dinners and the necessary relaxation.

We transformed the living room of the cottage into a rehearsing studio, and we tried to create the ultimate atmosphere in which we would be able to optimally create new music. The evenings / nights were most productive, so we actually started to play around 22:00 at earliest.

We improvised a lot, alternated with tracks from our current set.
During the improvisations, the first moment it was Petter who started / joined in with an arpeggio, loops, chords, effects or ambient sounds, and another moment I started / joined in a track with pads, effects or arpeggios / sequences. Jeroen joined in with various drums, percussive sounds and structures. Besides the new music that was created during improvisations, we also worked on new prepared material.

The coming time we will sort out the many material of last weekend's recording sessions. We soon hope to share new stuff with you, during our upcoming concerts, or on our upcoming EP-release (although no concrete date scheduled yet).

Edgar Froese

In 2008, on April 13th to be precisely, I did a performance at the E-Day Festival.
The festival was turned into Edgar Froese Day, because of the headlining electronic music legend.

Edgar Froese and his band in concert @ E-Day 2008 (c) Brian (pogofish).

This specific year I actually saw him perform twice. His only solo performance ever at the TU Eindhoven, and his appearance with Tangerine Dream at the Night of the Prog Festival at the Loreley amphitheatre.

Ron Boots & Friends did the first concert on this Edgar Froese Day. Ron, who also organises the E-Live and E-Day festivals on annual base and managed to book Tangerine Dream's front man for a 2,5 hours concert, must have experienced this edition as one of the highlights as organiser. In between this day's concerts I did mine. Besides the integral presentation of my new album "This Is Not The End", I also did an interpretation of Edgar's "Maroubra Bay".

After my performance I got to meet Edgar Froese in person. Because he was preparing for his concert, I spoke to him shortly and had the opportunity to let him autograph my "Aqua" cd. A special, but funny moment. A camera was recording, and without knowing each other he introduced me in front of the camera as his biggest fan from New Zealand. Which in fact I am not.

Edgar Froese @ E-Day 2008
(c) Brian (pogofish).

Although I lost interest in Edgar's and Tangerine Dream's output after 1990 (with a couple of exceptions), I can say the period before (1967-1990) did make a lot of sense to me, and indeed was groundbreaking for the overall evolution of (electronic) music. As well as he was a source of inspiration for my own musical development. And I can only agree with everyone who says he was, without any doubt, one of the most important pioneers of the electronic music genre.
And to learn about the prospect of a collaboration between Edgar Froese and one of my other heroes, Jean Michel Jarre (to probably see the light later this year) also makes me very exciting.

I didn't listen much to Tangerine Dream recently, but unconsciously I did play "Goblin's Club" (one of the albums after the 90's which could only catch me partially), last Tuesday. Which was Edgar's final day as living legend.
It once more did me realise that also legends aren't invincible.
May he live on in memories. Rest in peace.

Groove New Year's Party

Last Sunday I participated on Groove New Year's Party, at Theatre De Enck in Oirschot. The same location as where the annual E-Day and E-Live festivals are being held.

 In 2012 I also joined a previous edition of Ron Boots' new year's concert, where a lot of Friends played along on the host's music, but this time the concept was slightly different.

The first part of the afternoon started around 13:30 and lasted approximately 75 minutes.
For this part Ron invited some Friends to join him on stage. Besides the usual suspects (and members from the band Morpheusz), Eric (keys and flute) and Harold van der Heijden (drums) and Frank Dorittke (guitar), there were introduced some fellow musicians from the electronic music scene. Bas Broekhuis on percussion, and on keys: René Splinter, Martin Peters, René de Bakker, Jeffrey Haster, and me.

At the beginning all where introduced one by one to enter the stage. Jeffrey starting with the first effects, joined by the others as soon as they entered the stage.

Ron Boots took care of the main mix, so he didn't play along with us during the first set.
This first part consisted of 100% improvisation. Actually Ron prepared a track to improvise on, but he decided to offer room for all other musicians to do their thing in the first place. Martin, Jeffrey and I also prepared some sequences / arpeggios, on which everyone could improvise. This was the core of the first part of the afternoon session, which didn't leave time for Ron's track.
The session was a challenge, because we never played together in this combination.

From time to time it was hard for myself to judge what this first part of the show sounded like. There were moments that I couldn't hear myself very clear, which resulted into some out of key chords and notes (but it could easily be that this wasn't noticed by the audience). And sometimes it took quite some effort to hear who was playing what. Simply too much to hear. Not unexpected when keeping in mind the large amount of musicians (10!) on stage.
The first half was concluded with a new track by René Splinter and Eric van der Heijden, dedicated to special guest and 'mother of the EM-scene' Sylvia Sommerfeld.

Then a break followed. People also had the opportunity to buy cd's from the various present musicians.

The second part of the afternoon was done by Ron Boots, Eric and Harold van der Heijden and Frank Dorittke, who delivered an excellent and decent performance. Playing music from Morpheusz, Eric van der Heijden, and Ron Boots, including the respected opening track from his "Acoustic Shadows". And Frank Dorittke performed a great Pink Floyd collage.
After approximately 75 minutes, Ron once again invited all musicians on stage for an encore. For the second time everyone on stage improvised on the sequencer by Martin Peters.
I think this piece worked out fairly nice.
Here you can see an audience video recording (by Yolande).

After around 15 minutes of improvisation, Ron again named and thanked all individual musicians. All stepped forward on the stage. Except for Jeffrey, who played the last notes of the day.

It always is a pleasure and experience to create music with other people. And I totally agree with Ron Boots' conclusion: these kind of events should take place more often.
To gather various musicians with just one purpose: making music. And it would be a great thing to share the magic that is being created with as many listeners as possible. A successful concept that for example could already have been experienced in the past at the legendary Ricochet Gatherings.
Looking forward to the next occasion.

All used photos (except for the first one, which I shot myself, just seconds before we kicked off) were made by André Stooker. Here you can see the entire impression by André Stooker.

2014 / 2015

2014 Has already come to an end, so it's a good time to overview the year.A year in which a lot of bizarre things happened, like three major plane crashes, including the MH17, the ebola outbreak, unneccessary murdering by IS and the Taliban. Situations which are unrealistic and hard to believe and understand. And we also had the unbelievable statements of Geert Wilders, the release of Volkert van der Graaf, the Olympic Wintergames, World Championship Soccer, the first King's Day in the Netherlands. The passing of some musical heroes, like Bobby Womack and Joe Cocker.

And - probably with not quite as much impact as above mentioned facts - here also is an overview of my own (music-related) highlights of 2014:

January 10th
Concert at Theater De Wegwijzer.
The first performance I did together with the formation which resulted into the first version of Free Arts Lab, with Jeroen Hagen (drums and percussion) and Martijn Scholte (bowed guitar).

June 27th
"Chill at the Castle - Electric Edition".
An event I organised at the wonderful location of the Ruins of Brederode in Santpoort-Zuid.
Featuring the second performance by Free Arts Lab, Wolfram Spyra premiering his new album "Staub" and Planet of the Arps (my ambient project, together with Spyra and Roksana Vikaluk.

October
October 4th, Pletterij Debat- en Cultuurcentrum in Haarlem was the location for the first concert by Free Arts Lab version 2.0 (with guitar player Petter Janse, and custom-made visuals by Sietse Bruggeling), as preparation for our gig at the Awakenings All-Dayer, in the U.K., on October 11th. A video report about our trip should be put online early new year.

December
Free Arts Lab has been nominated for the annual Schallwelle Award, as 'Best act international'.
Voting has started and you can also bring out your vote for us on the Schallwelle website until January 31st, 2015.
If you don't have any idea what our music sounds like, you should check out Free Arts Lab's Soundcloud.

Plans for 2015

Free Arts Lab
Main focus will be on Free Arts Lab and performances with this band. If you have any suggestions or possibilities for us to perform, just drop me a mail. A 20-minute compilation of our October concerts can be listened to on Soundcloud.

Collaborations
Throughout the year I started some collaborations with Gert Emmens and C-Jay, and continued recordings for a large project which I mentioned before, but of which I still can't reveal much more at this moment. I really had a lack of time to work more than I wanted on these projects.

Archives
One of the first things to come in 2015 should be the first episode of the release of my archives, in January.
Since a couple of years I already discussed with my post-production and mastering engineer Wouter Bessels about the possibilities to do something with the huge amount of archive recordings.
Within the previous 15+ years of serious music recording, I recorded a lot of new music, experiments, jamsessions, rehearsals and concerts. Just a small selection appeared on the 10 regular albums, 2 released collaborations, and 5 special / limited editions, I released so far. And a nice amount lone tracks is to be found on various samplers / compilations.
Because most of the music is specific for a certain period there's a big chance that most of it will probably never be released. An artist should definitely not release everything that has been recorded.
Besides this, there already is too much crap around. So I won't bother you with those recordings which are not yet finished, tracks which doesn't add anything at all, or contain too much errors, for example. In short: everything that's not good enough in my opinion.

But I always felt the need to release more than I did until date. Even when making selections for official releases, I considered a lot of tracks, which also could easily have made it to these albums. If they had been chosen. But they hadn't, due to fitting with other tracks and the concept and feeling I had in mind for a specific album.

From this point I decided there should be released a large part of my archives. So I recently continued sorting out and digitalize my CD, MD and MC recordings. Financially it is impossible to release all these archives as manufactory pressed cd's. Therefor I decided to offer the
"Archives" series as digital download only. At least for the moment. Exclusively from my own Deserted Island Music webshop, as high quality FLAC and MP3.
The first release will be available from early 2015. From there on it is the intention to add a new episode approximately each 6 months.
At the moment I am working on my webshop to facilitate the downloads. Keep in touch with my social media and this blog for any updates.

And...
Last but not least, rest me to wish you a wonderful and prosperous 2015!