Playing-Apart-Together III
March 23, 2022
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Free musical improvisation has many guises. It is also one of the areas in the performing arts where the sanitary measures that were and are being imposed to prevent the ongoing spread of corona virus mutations severely hindered the working artists’ practices, often just short of bringing them to a grinding halt.
Work of musicians in one of these guises, one that is close to my heart and personal practice —the non-academic, speculative (that is how I prefer to call what usually is referred to as ‘experimental’) and ‘underground’ realms of free electro-acoustic improvisation—often depends on a largely informal and ‘unofficial’, yet vast, global network of performance hubs and residency locations. It is a network that facilitates and enables a peripatetic musical practice, a continuous moving from country to country and from city to city, while making just enough money to cover costs and buy some books here and there—along a chain of small, dedicated, venues, as well as participating in specialised festivals and events. Along the way these speculative peripateticists are lodged by locals, friends and artists, that will join them in performance, composition and recording. Being part of this action is very much like being a bee in a busy-busy, joyfully humming and hyper-creative hive. It doesn’t make one rich in the pecuniary sense (far from that), but still it’s amazingly enriching and an awful lot of fun.
Almost all of it, though, came to a sudden stop when, almost two years ago now, corona lockdown measures started ruling our lives.
The ‘unPublic’ sessions, a series of events that I started in 2013 together with Magister Rébus, play a modest role as a ‘hub’ in this global network of ‘Urfolk’ music and musicians.
With unPublic we intend to generate an endlessly evolving patchwork stitched from, now hundreds, later maybe thousands, of improvised electro-acoustic pieces, for the creation of which we have met and performed with (at the moment of this writing) over 160 artists of 28 different nationalities, mostly in Paris, but also in a lot of other places, from Brussel and Amsterdam to Tokyo, Montreal, Taipei and Daebu Island.
When together (coming together—physically—performing together—physically—recording together—physically), along with the travelling and other bodily displacements that were essential to making the unPublics happen, became a no longer do-able adverb, in the long months of strict pandemic lockdown, like many other musicians and performing artists … we sought to replace the ‘physical’ by a ‘virtual’ …
Like in: playing-apart-together…
Paris, December 2021
“iftheskywastornleasttheredbesomenoise” (Yi Sang)
HAROLD SCHELLINX (aka Har$) is a Dutch expat living and working in Paris, France. His endeavours span several decades and cover grounds stretching between areas as divers as research in pure mathematics and the collection and mapping of trashed magnetic audiotape and pacifiers in Western metropolises.
An extensive documentation of Har$’s work of the last 15 years can be found online, at http://harsmedia.com and the related http://soundblog.net. Twitter: http://twitter.com/soundblog
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The non-profit foundation Plus-X-Creative was founded in 2015 by three creatives from the Netherlands: J. Koolen (city council, banjo musician, Rotterdam), H. Kwee (photographer, Amsterdam) and X. Gottenkieny (musician & artist Rotterdam). They met during cultural events and shared the passion to perform and to spread music and art. With this foundation their main aim was to play an active and supporting role in building a platform for creative empowerment.
These are exciting but also challenging times for the creative entrepreneur. Apart from trying to keep up with the fast changing world of technology, we’ve seen the emergence of necessary initiatives such as the ‘Platform for freelance musicians’ and the ‘Fair Practice Code’. Inspired by these positive movements, we want to help stimulate the emancipation of the artist, musician, dancer, performer and many other creatives.. .
We focus on cross-border projects / platforms where different artists and media come together. We seek collaboration with organizations that work with groundbreaking (‘realtime’) software technology.. We invite musicians and artists to explore the possibilities of these platforms and to what extent it enables musicians in developing their professional practice. We challenge artists to experiment and create new work at an accessible level with innovative technology.. Now and in the future, we will be able to reach more places where music and art are less obvious.
On March the 8th we organized a special ‘Mesh it Up!’ edition at the MeshPrintClub. Besides fantastic concerts and performances given by Tinyloops & Monster 3D Incubator and Kanipchen Fit we also had a T-shirt competition! First prize shared winners were Margriet Killian and Juninho Wouter! The designs were printed by Eden Simhony.
