focus: default #15 - 27.06.2024 with Rie Nakajima & Pierre Berthet, Kapotte Muziek, free version, and Boris de Klerk & Finn Borath
In this focus newsletter, we would like to share with you more information on the artists set to perform at default#15.
For default#15 we are delighted to host a duo performance by Rie Nakajima & Pierre Berthet, who for the past ten years have been developing a practice that exists between sculpture and sound under the project name ‘Dead Plants & Living Objects’, a special performance by the Dutch underground improvisation group Kapotte Muziek (consisting of Frans de Waard, Peter Duimelinks, and Roel Meelkop) on their 40th anniversary year, free version – a project by Hilde Wollenstein exploring urban environmentalism and diy multi-channel music –, as well as Boris de Klerk & Finn Borath with an in situ performance ‘Chamber Piece #3’, focusing on the sound of the basement’s fluorescent lighting (co-presented by The Grey Space in the Middle, as part of the BAU AIR The Grey Space in the Middle residency program).
The event is taking place on 27.06 in The Grey Space in the Middle, Paviljoensgracht 20, The Hague. Doors open at 19:30, concerts start at 20:00:
20.00 Finn Borath & Boris de Klerk (basement)
20.50 free version (basement)
21.40 Rie Nakajima & Pierre Berthet (gallery)
22.40 Kapotte Muziek (basement)
You can purchase your tickets before the event here and at the entrance of the venue on the day of the event. The ticket price* is €12.5 (student) / €15 (general).
*in case your current financial situation does not allow you to visit the event, but you are keen on coming, you can mail to defaultdenhaag@gmail.com and we can find a solution
Rie Nakajima & Pierre Berthet: Dead Plants & Living Objects
Tin cans, whistles, locomotive suspension springs,
porcelain bowls, compressor top bells, ping pong balls,
agave dry leaves, sponges, steel wires, branches,
paper foils, plastic bags, silver papers, pink gloves,
piano, balloons, buckets, feathers, water, scraps, pebbles,
flower pots, guitar, metal tubes, paulownia tree seeds, pearls,
bamboo sticks, logs, bones, stones, filter queens...
Rie Nakajima & Pierre Berthet in their ten-year-long collaborative practice have been creating various ways to vibrate things so that their acoustic shadows dance around: invisible air volumes reshape constantly, move in the space, enter in the most secret places and inside ourselves. Eventually encouraging things to produce sounds and resonate by various means: to hit, caress, shake, beat, scrape, scratch, claw, boil, clap, rattle, rock, throw, move, magnetize, clamp, cook, pinch, galvanize, motorize, bow, blow, pluck, heath up, let flow, freeze,
drop, drip, connect, roll, mix, extend, sing…
Rie Nakajima is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds in indoor and outdoor spaces using a combination of motorized devices and daily objects. Her work involves both installation and performance formats. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. Throughout her career she has collaborated with such artists as Phill Niblock, Pierre Berthet, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, miki yui, hans.w.koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop, Takahiro Kawaguchi, and Akira Sakata. Rie is also a member of ‘O Yama O’ – the experimental group that explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations with folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime.
Pierre Berthet is a Belgian sound artist, performer and musician. Berthet studied percussion at the Brussels Conservatory and spent a lot of time – over a period of two years – in a bell tower, playing the carillon and listening to the sounds of the environment. His practice has also been shaped by a long-term involvement in Arnold Dreyblatt’s ensemble ‘Orchestra of Excited Strings’. Currently he designs and builds sound objects and installations working with such materials as steel, plastic, water, forces like magnetic fields, and mechanisms such as inverted vacuum cleaners and motorized dry plants. His work takes the form of indoor and outdoor sound and visual installations, which, adapted to the place where they are exhibited, also comprise materials for live performance. Besides his solo performance practice, he performs in duos and has collaborated with such artists as Brigida Romano, Frédéric Le Junter, Rie Nakajima.
Kapotte Muziek
Active since 1984, Kapotte Muziek is one of the most internationally visible improvisation and experimental projects hailing from the Netherlands. The group commenced as a duo of Frans de Waard and Christian Nijs, and operated as such until 1987 when Nijs left. In 1993 a new phase commenced when the group were invited to play a series of concerts in the USA. Initially, this was a tour with the Dutch group of musique concrète enthusiasts – THU20 – in which Kapotte Muziek would play shows with pre-recorded tapes and slides. One by one, the members of THU20 backed out of the tour, leaving only Peter Duimelinks in the end, at which point it was decided to play as a duo under the name Kapotte Muziek. In 1995, the duo became a trio, adding Roel Meelkop (also from THU20) making Kapotte Muziek as a performance group what it is today. The group has played numerous concerts in Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia and Japan since then.
One thing that has stayed constant throughout Kapotte Muziek’s activity is the recycling of sound. It manifests in forms such as – in a concert setting, they would use junk from the streets to make sound with; in the studio, a continuous re-use of sounds would always be present; in their ‘Kapotte Muziek By’ series, a series of records with reworked recordings of Kapotte Muziek by specific composers, the idea of ‘re-use’ would reach further, outside the groups active involvement with the sound material. Over the years Kapotte Muziek has collaborated with projects and artists like Lasse Marhaug, Merzbow, Yeast Culture, Toshiya Tsunoda, Asmus Tietchens, Peter Rehberg, Thurston Moore, and others.
A key aspect of the collective’s activity can be understood by their dialectical relation to the studio process. Until 2004, Kapotte Muziek also released studio recordings by Frans de Waard, although these recordings had very little connection with the live sound. It was decided to stop these studio-based activities, and Kapotte Muziek would exclusively play live. Recordings of concerts would be released, with very minimal editing in most cases, on CD’s, cassettes or vinyl.
A contrasting development was marked by the heavy editing process of a live recording from their 1997 performance at the opening of ‘Klubb Kanin’ in Trondheim, Norway. In the current phase of Kapotte Muziek, constrained cut-up techniques are introduced into the group's music vocabulary, leading to a practice of recycling live recordings from the group's history into material for new releases. After three of such pieces for compilations, an entire album came to life. The result is 'Discon' – a made-up word for 'distilled from concerts' – released via the Irish-based label Krim Kram earlier this year. Each of the 13 pieces is created by cutting, pasting, superimposing, and editing one concert.
After the group went through something of an informal hiatus in 2017 it regrouped on December 30th, 2023 to perform as a trio again. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the group has set out to play more concerts in the upcoming year, including a special show in the Netherlands, at default#15.
free version
Hilde Wollenstein, ‘free version’, composes and performs music for (DIY) multi-channel loudspeaker systems with sampled and field recorded material. Her work is inspired by the ecology of urban environments, realist magic, and youth culture. She categorizes her music as ‘urban folk’ and as such it is primarily focused on the social. ‘free version’ arose from freelancing in underground / self-organized places for music and radio as well as clubs, institutions, academia, and primary schools.
She has created a bank of loops which she mixes live in the context of a performance, using each loudspeaker as a separate source of a loop. To make sound travel, she generally prefers to move a speaker herself rather than turn a knob. Her self-released album ‘right hand - left hand’ is an archive of loops made in 2023, used in the one-hour long radio piece ‘original material played at cashmere radio, berlin’ and several concerts that followed. The collection of loops expands on a day-to-day basis.
Hilde Wollenstein (1997, Culemborg, Netherlands) currently lives in The Hague and Berlin. From 2015 until 2018 she studied classical clarinet at the Conservatory in Utrecht. Since 2018 she studies at The Institute Of Sonology in the Hague, completing the bachelors in 2022, currently following the masters programme.
Co-presented by the Grey Space in the Middle - Boris de Klerk and Finn Borath: Chamber Piece #3
Theater and sound makers Finn Borath and Boris de Klerk have been collaborating on performances and installations since 2019. In early 2023 they began developing a series of works called ‘Chamber Pieces’. In the first installment of the series ‘Black Box: First Movement’ they would set off to compose a piece of music using all the stage technicalities at hand in a theater space. Smoke machines, moving heads and fluorescent lights would become the only sound source in the composition. For their residency at BAU and The Grey Space, Finn and Boris continue their research with a composition for fluorescent lights. They will explore the sound-making, visual and performative potential of lights which often can be found embedded in the ceiling structures of offices, club spaces and galleries.
