This cassette is a solo effort by Hungarian musician and Industrial music protagonist Kósa Vince. Kósa played in the pioneering Hungarian industrial group Art Deco (posted a long time ago on the blog) as well as in the industrial group BP. Service. On this cassette he plays the music to the play A Görög (The Greek) written by English actor and playwright Steven Berkoff that was premiered in 1980 in London and performed in the Radnóti Theatre in Budapest in 1994. The Greek was a modern interpretation of the well-known ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. The tragedy that also inspired Freud in his work to develop his concept of the Oedipus complex.
The music on the tape consists of two long pieces. The first side starts with rhythm based industrial in combination with collaged music taken from classical music. Later the music transitions into a subaquatic dark ambient soundscape. The B-side is a slightly more interesting affair, where Kósa fully embraces a synthetic tribal ambient sound even ending up in some 90's beats. Nevertheless it still holds on to darker atmospheres.
A Görög reminds me of the 1983 piece Neveleiland by Dutch home-tapers De Fabriek. Furthermore, the music is really in similar realms as the Hungarian avant-garde album Private Exits by composer Tibor Szemző or Hungarian composer László Hortobágyi and his electro-acoustic music built on Indian cosmologies.
A rare cassette, often mistaken for a screenplay or spoken word. Great music and soundscapes from the early nineties and another piece of the Hungarian experimental music puzzle. Lots of Hungarian cassettes still to come to the blog!
Bewegingstheater (Movement Theatre) was a Dutch theatre group and Amsterdam based theatre school that was active from 1964 to 2005. In their existence they created 126 theatre productions. They worked with architecture, dance, music and poetry. In the late sixties and early seventies Bewth created numerous plays in which their happening-like plays were combined with psychedelic music and poetry.
The musical development started with voice experiments by the actors and were later replaced by compositions and music of the time like Pink Floyd and Arthur Brown. As the architectural element was introduced in the plays, more and more own music started to be created by some of the members, most importantly by: Peter Klencke, Walter Jaffé, Victoria Varekamp and Flip van de Pol. You can get an impression of a Bewth play in the late sixties by clicking here and here. This was a play called Bosche Bollen (1968), it starts with a still of The Garden Of Earthly Delights by Dutch medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosche Bollen are the famous patisserie chocolate ballsconnected to the city of 's-Hertogenbosch in the south of The Netherlands, also the birth city of Hieronymus Bosch.
In 1972 the record Over De Dauw Van Dit Land (On The Dew Of This Land) was realized. The greater part of the music was created by Peter Klencke. From 1968 to 1974 he used country and blues slide guitar and a saxophone to create improvised sound imagery that corresponded with the movement of the actors. Also he composed music to the poetry of Bewth-member Ben Zwaal that was recited during plays. The music from this period was compiled on Over De Dauw Van Dit Land. The record was only sold during performances.
The music and poetry on this record have a distinct feeling of the Dutch countryside, in as much as that exists within the mostly urban landscape of Holland. The fragile cardboard cover shows a person in what I think is a boerenkool field. A vegetable that is eaten in Holland in the winter and which traditionally needs a night of frost over it to be eaten (frost and dew, important in alchemy, paganism.. it's all somewhere in that realm isn't it?). Most of the poetry and the song titles deal with nature in its purest form, very much in a pagan fairytale sense. Also one of the songs has a Frisian title, embedding this marginalized language and culture of the Netherlands in the record.
The Bewegingstheater later went on doing many other performances including in the streets of Dutch cities (like in Middelburg on the picture above). Eventually, the company evolved out of its hippie character while focussing more and more on the relation between theatre and architecture until seazing its activities in 2005. This is one of the most amazing hidden seventies records from Holland and we can only hope there is much more musical material still in archives. This could have easily been on the NWW-List. All images I used are courtesy of Peter Klencke and Bewth. De Kikker (The Frog)
een zonnebloem / a sunflower beloofde / promised de sloot / the creek haar kromming te vergeven / to forgive its curve
en de sloot / and the creek huilde zo / cried so
de groene kikker / the green frog was de kasteelman / was the castle owner de hoogste van de sloot / the highest of the creek altijd slapende / always asleep op luchtige schalen / on breezy scales vol wijdblad / on wide leaves en zonder het minste / and without the least ooievaargevaar / stork danger
de zonnebloem / the sunflower kende ze allemaal / knew them all en lachte soms / and sometimes laughed als het zomer was / when it was summer
Waste of Time was an Amsterdam based Theatre collective of mime artists. They originated in 1974 and created about fifteen productions until 1985. Already in 1974 they used multimedia like music, visual arts and film to accompany the mime playing. Usually plays involved no speech, no story and no moral. Not coincidentally their work seemed to reflect on the powerlessness of communication and human loneliness. Waste of Time used to perform a lot in Belgian cities and small places because they prefered the light-spiritedness of the audience in contrast with the more elitist Amsterdam in-crowd theatre audience. The mime group can be viewed as an early example of innovative Dutch performance art.
The music on this private seven inch single is made by Mike Floothuis and Jaap Lindijer. Much to my surprise I came to the conclusion that these musicians were also part of one of the Netherlands' most obscure and mysterious bands called Danger. Danger released an album in 1973 which was comprised of two side-long tracks of improvisation music (a record very high on my wantlist). It was recorded in the studio of The Hague's music venue Paard van Troje. The music is a strange combination of organ, synths, saxophone and no drums at all. It has a Soft Machine-ish feel, but also brings to mind the impossible to find release by the Dutch band Ellufant, many experimental Krautrockgroups and almost anything on the NWW-List. But all without drums. Very mysterious stuff, I don't own the Danger album but I might upload it to Youtube.
Back to the music on here: Floothuis and Lindijer created this music for Waste of Time's 1982 play called Zwischenfall. It's repetitive Casio-fueled minimalist synth music that tends to get weirder every second. I can imagine this music in combination with the mime-acting in the play. Very cool stuff, reminds me of some of the DIY Dutch eighties Zimbo cassettes and certain parts of Venezuelan electronic musician Angel Rada (the analogy makes no sense context-wise ofcourse).
After this first record I posted a while ago, here is the second Dutch private pressing of this freaky Japanese acid drenched, political activist theatre outfit. Actually the recording for this album, which came out one year later after Story Of Eight Dogs, was made during a performance in London, but was only released in The Netherlands in limited quantities. More information about Tokyo Kid Brothers in the previous post.
The music consists again of some real communal psychedelic jams combined with cheerful songs and a lot of humor. Through this stance the Tokyo Kid Brothers are also able to express their criticism on certain things in society. Unfortunately, unlike their early Japanese releases, most songs are cut off quite early which doesn't allow them to get into real long jams, but it's nevertheless really enjoyable. You really get a sense of a community feeling during the play, because they always interact with the audience. Also during the first couple of songs a baby is crying throughout the recording.
Some of the highlights on the album consist, among others, of Motorbike in which they mix a song in Japanese with yelling "Motorbike". In another song called Jumping Song, one of the Japanese girls is "looking for the monkeys" and tells people they look like a monkey in a very playful manner. The most psychedelic jam is Goeika. Other songs are about Mao, socialism or have hippie titles like Budist Trip. Ofcourse part of the NWW-List.
This vinyl is a private pressing of the recording of the play “The Story of Eight Dogs” by Japanese
musical theatre group Tokyo Kid Brothers. In 1971 they played the "The Story
of Eight Dogs" for five weeks at the Shaffy Theatre in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands. This record came out in very limited quantities in Holland during their period
of performing in Amsterdam.
These
NWW-listers stand in a similar tradition as other counter-cultural musical theatre outfits
like the American Living Theatre or Théâtre Du Chêne Noir from France. Tokyo Kid Brothers
was founded by Yutaka Higashi in 1968 and made some very weird recordings during
the early seventies like the albums “Throw away the books let’s go into the streets” and "Golden Bat" from 1971. Those are being regarded as two of the most important cornerstones of Japanese freak-out psychedelia from the seventies. They should reissue that stuff on vinyl. Tokyo Kid Brothers' early sound was reminiscent of other Japanese acid fuelled
underground groups like J.A. Seazer and Food Brain, but also brings to mind
some of the more free-form krautrock bands like Amon Düül and Faust. During
that era The Tokyo Kid Brothers performed quite often outside of Japan, like New York and
Amsterdam.
This recording
has some great seventies underground jams combined with intense Japanese vocals.
Also the difference between audience and actors at times becomes blurry when
they involve the audience and try to teach them about Japanese language
characters and so on in a subversive and playful manner. All with a great Japanese
English accent.
My copy is
not in the best shape as you can see and is quite crackly. It might have had
an insert, but I don’t have it. The record doesn’t list titles of the songs, which doesn’t
really matter, because it was meant as a play. Anyway this is crazily rare if
you’d ask me and absolutely essential to all Japanese psych-heads and NWW-list
fans.
“The history of eight dogs is the story of the
Japanese young generation in reality and illusion. We came to Holland: Exodus
from Japan!”
