- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
Conceptualistics represent musical attitude, interpretation of music, compositional approach, maybe even philosophical views that are translated into musical creation. This category is the in-between of the personal and the material, and relates strongly to the interaction of both. It comprehends all relevant information used in the creation of music, excluding the actual sounding material. Especially for composers a conceptual idea like the form of the composition, or technique to structure time and sound in a certain way, is in many cases considered a very important element of the music although it is not directly to be traced back in the materials that are sounding. Something similar exists for a performing musician that works on the interpretation of a piece: he considers playing techniques, rhythms and melodies as instrumental means to express an idea he found in the music, and that idea becomes the underlying basis for the musical conception. Hence, this interpretation influences the actual sounding result that would be a materialistic. In this underlying interpretation the border between personalistics and conceptualistics is very thin. Still they are essentially different in character. An association that is triggered by music, or an anecdote of something that happened during a performance can be a vivid element in the musical memory, but much broader related to someone’s personal life and strongly thriving on co-incidence. On the contrary, conceptualistics are not events that happen to a musician, but that the musician makes happen. They represent the views and tools used in the actual creative process of music making.
The kibibyte is a collection of one thousand and twenty four 7 second sound extracts that we diligently cut from the recordings of Ookoi's live performances and interventions between the summers of 2004 and 2006. They are brought together on a DVD-format in a way that makes the DVD play them live every time over and over again, because their order is randomly chosen. On our ‘Tafelmuziek CD’ the tracks were assembled from dislocated parts, all lifted from recordings we did in residency at Ameland in may 2004. You might compare them to Daniel Spoerri's tableaux pièges, in which one of many possible configurations or 'states' of an ongoing meal at a table has been ‘fixed’: frozen for once and for all. Now '1024' is one step beyond: here the constituent parts keep shifting, giving rise to a music that continuously re-assembles itself into different states, as different projections of one large 'meta-table'. It was a puzzle and a technical challenge to stick these one thousand and twenty four sound bytes onto a DVD in such a way that playing it back would result in an ever changing and never ending patchwork of sounds, picked as if at random out of 'the bag' ... We used some devious calculative trickery, to produce unpredictable playback in most though unfortunately not all players, jumping between and inside tracks. 1024, mind you, is tough on your playback head, which is continuously being sent surfing from one side to the other. The cheapest players somehow seem to give the most satisfactory results.
- Harold Schellinx about Ookoi’s kibibytes
Harold summarizes some interrelated conceptualistics – different aspects that shape the musical structure and form a conceptual basis for the idea. The elements in this description that are materialistic are the 1024 sound recordings and surprisingly the quality of the DVD players, that according to Harold’s example have quite an influence on the actual sounding result. I emphasize once more the distinction with the concepts of freezing, meta-tables and digital formatting which are essential ideas in the musical creation, but only secondary influencing the sounding reality. They are not sound in themselves.
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