I got email from Geert-Jan from Staalplaat:
The Yokomono 3 / Staalplaat album is out!
It is locked-groove record like the previous Yokomono albums, but the other side is now different. There are two grooves(!) on that side and two works crossing each other. These are Mika Vainio's piece and my composition
Nordic Prince. One of these tracks (groove) is normal, but the second track is grooved opposite way, from center to outer zone. So every 1.8 second the grooves will cross each other and at these crossroad points the needle might accidentally take which direction it like.
The original idea was that
Staalplaat Soundsystem will play the album in their Yokomono concert at
Avanto festival's opening night, November 18th 2005. Unfortunately the company which promised to print the record couldn't make it in a given time, so it took almost two months to finish the project. If I understood correctly, this is the first record ever made this way, meaning that two grooves works like this and needle makes chance-mixes of both tracks... More here:
http://www.staalplaat.com/
http://www.staalplaat.org/pdf/sss_yokomono_doku_1205.pdf
http://www.avantofestival.com/2005/main.php?ln=en&sub=4&pg=staalplaat
Staalplaat Sound System
The "YOKOMONO" concept
The present setup consists of 10 vinyl killers - toy car record players, each customised with its own fm transmitter. The sound will come through a set of radios that receive the signal transmitted by the vinyl killers. You might think Yokomono is just a DJ set with 10 turntables, and in a way that is correct, but in many more ways Yokomono is completely different. First of all: each killer is mono and has poor sound quality, but much more Yokomono is very hard to handle, you can not really select a track or make it stop when you want to, it is more putting the needle down blindfolded. The real difference starts when you realise each killer runs on batteries, meaning the speed is unstable and it will slow down during the concert, the fact that the batteries run out will not only effect the speed but it will effect the fm frequency that the killer is transmitting, too, making Yokomono unstable on different levels. The fact, that we transmit with 10 fm transmitters at the same time means that each transmitter is effecting the other. These interferences and the unstable media that are transmitting makes the whole set unpredictable and hard to control, making Yokomono unique and adventurous.
Yokomono 03 - 12" lock groove record (2005)
This is the third Staalplaat Soundsystem Yokomono loop LP compiled on the ocassion of the Avanto Festival 2005 in Helsinki. The theme: Helsinki and its environmental sounds. Mika Vainio, one half of Pan Sonic, was commissioned to produce a seven-minute composition. Petri Kuljuntausta from Helsinki was, in turn, asked to provide a composition of an equal length responding to Vainio's piece. The sound material to be used for the compositions, field recordings from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s made at the Hietalahti shipyard in Helsinki, was discovered in the special effects archive of YLE Finnish Broadcasting Company. These sounds have a personal dimension for both composers: Vainio spent part of his childhood living near the dockyard, while Kuljuntausta has used sounds recorded from inside ships' hulls as material for his earlier works. Side two of the record presents Alexei Borisov, Andrey Kiritchenko, Blixa Bargeld, Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Jason Forrest, Main, Merzbow, Staalplaat Soundsystem, Un Caddie Renversé Dans l'Herbe and Zbigniew Karkowski with five loops from each featured artist and their own sound environment. Avanto is the co-producer of this unique release.
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Vinyl Killers With FM Antennas
Two years ago in Avanto, the Dutch-German sound art project Staalplaat Soundsystem gave a live performance called
Avantilator – composed for 100 office fans. Some things do not change in such a short while, and we can still endorse our blurb of that time: "Within the current mood of worshipping the latest technology in media art, Staalplaat Soundsystem provides a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the 100-year tradition of noise-making machines and junk art, in which "mad" inventors and various kinds of artists operating in the margins of the art world meet."
The works by Staalplaat Soundsystem (
Geert-Jan Hobijn and
Carsten Stabenow) are usually brilliant in their simplicity, the first impression leaving no room for technological mystification. This is exemplified by such installations-cum-live performances as
Composition for 8 Refrigerators (and we are not talking of compact little ice-boxes here, but full-size chest freezers),
Composition for 104 Washing Machines as well as
Avantilator, which even a child understands immediately – sometimes, in fact, even better than adults. "All these installations were made with the same low tech working philosophy, making an installation look so simple that you think 'I can do that'. What we do is to forget the very specific tasks they are made for, and see what they can do; dance, sing, kick, very oft I have the feeling it is telling me what its wants to do", Geert-Jan Hobijn has written.
What matters also, of course, is the sounding end result, which, like Staalplaat's roots reaching back to the early 1980s, has a distinctive industrial inclination to it.
SSS's most popular piece has been, despite all of the above, a series of performances entitled
Yokomono, whose technical realisation is complex enough to warrant a lengthy elaboration. Its basic idea is to use a performance setup consisting of so many unpredictable technical components that it is, in practical terms, impossible to control the whole system. Avanto is now staging the premiere of the latest incarnation in the series,
Yokomono 03.
The
yokomono are Japanese electronic toys, battery-powered miniature cars, with a record player's needle on the underside and a small speaker inside. SSS employs a fleet of ten
yokomono cars retrofitted with small FM radio transmitters inside them and with antennas on their roofs. The sounds transmitted by the tiny cars are received by ten battery radios – in flaming red, like the cars. The vinyl records are placed on a table, and the miniature cars are set to drive in a circle on them. One of the uncertainty factors is that the cars are battery-powered: the batteries don't last for very long, and, eventually, the speed of the cars as well as the frequencies of the radio transmitters begin to fluctuate, resulting in the transmitters skipping from one frequency to another. Another factor is the shoddiness of the cars' cheap styluses; SSS calls them "vinyl killers".
The confusion is confounded by the nature of the records the vinyl killers are playing. For "DJ gigs" like this, SSS has released two Yokomono vinyl records featuring their favourite artists – pioneers of experimental music like Phill Niblock and Charlemagne Palestine, as well as names familiar from Avanto such as Ilpo Väisänen of Pan Sonic, Radian, Goodiepal, Fennesz, and Carl-Michael von Hausswolff. Each of the artists was asked to produce five sound loops of exactly 1.8 seconds. This is the duration of one revolution of a long-playing vinyl record. Moreover, the records have been pressed using locked groove technique, i.e. the needle of the turntable, or in this case of the toy car, will lock endlessly on one single 1.8-second groove of the record.
For the Avanto Nightclub, SSS decided to compile a thematic
Yokomono vinyl release. The theme: Helsinki and its environmental sounds. The other half of Pan Sonic,
Mika Vainio, a resident of Berlin like SSS, was commissioned to produce a seven-minute composition.
Petri Kuljuntausta from Helsinki was, in turn, asked to provide a composition of an equal length responding to Vainio's piece. The sound material to be used for the compositions, field recordings from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s made at the Hietalahti shipyard in Helsinki, was discovered in the special effects archive of YLE Finnish Broadcasting Company. These sounds have a personal dimension for both composers: Vainio spent a part of his childhood living near the dockyard, while Kuljuntausta has used sounds recorded from inside ships' hulls as material for his earlier works.
Yokomono 03 will be pressed using an even more exotic method than the previous ones. The grooves holding the two compositions by Vainio and Kuljuntausta cross with each other for their entire duration. What this amounts to is that every 1.8 seconds, the needle may skip from Vainio's piece to Kuljuntausta's composition and vice versa – for as long as the batteries last.
The other side of the record features the traditional loops of 1.8 seconds, commissioned from
Blixa Bargeld, Merzbow, Main, Alexei Borisov, Donna Summer, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Andrey Kiritchenko, Zbigniew Karkowski, Un Caddie Renversé Dans l'Herbe and
Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, with five loops from each featured artist and their own sound environments. Avanto is the co-producer of this unique release, which will be on sale at the festival venues!
