In October 1989 Merzbow visited The Netherlands by invitation of V2 (where I was a volunteer back then) to play three concerts: at V2, one at Ekko in Utrecht and one in Diogenes in Nijmegen. Diogenes was a student club with too much money to burn from last night boozing, so they organized the most crazy events. That particular week they had a perversity festival. The Haters played, Die Form also and an incredible film night which was much rumored about, but in fact not many people saw - I was there. Anyway Merzbow played on tuesday as a duo (Masami Akita & Reiko), since K. Mizutani was to arrive later - he went along to the fourth concert, in Bordeaux. Tuesday was also the day I had my radio programm at the local illegal radio station, Radio Rataplan. Masmai agreed to play a concert with me, as Kapotte Muziek, roughly about forty minutes. Freek Kinkelaar was the engineer, popping in some tapes by Emil Beaulieu and SBOTHI. I played a small cassette recorder, Masami on the sound effects. The picture you see is from the concert, I think it taken by G.X. Jupitter-Larsen. On the left of me is Peter Duimelinks. Reiko was also present, Freek at the controls sat next to Peter, not on the picture. The flyer below is the original - like many you will see on this blog, the original glued one with marks (historical documents only please) and was spread around town. The show was taped, at home, from radio (since the station had no means of recording) by Koen van Oosterhout (Prilius Lacus). The first twenty minutes ended up on side A of 'Documentation/Collaboration', the LP by Merzbow Kapotte Muziek I released soon after. The b-side has further 'recyclings' of side A - recycling being the hot term for what is now called remixing. The tape I took to France, where THU20 played (with me in the line-up) later that week, and was used a backing tape for their concert (released as Merzbow/THU20 LP by Midas Music later)
Unfortunately, for you, I am not offering this as a download, not the LP nor the concert. I still have plans to do a 3CD set with the entire concert recording, the b-side of the LP, the LP 'Continuum' and the cassette we did,plus a few compilation tracks. In the pipeline for years, but it will come, eventually. Both LPs can be found here.
Ah, yes, those were the days! I remember this event well. The picture was taken by me. I took two pictures and I still have the original print of this one somewhere in my dusty, mislocated archives. The performance was bloody loud, but we were young and didn't give a shit about our ears. I remember being impressed and very proud that I was actually present and mixing Merzbow; long gone were the days of rummaging in the margins (sic) for me! I also remember the Perversiteiten festival well; Die Form were very impressive (I took some naughty pictures that night) and I also remember the girl from Christian Death doing a performance spilling a pack of yoghurt on her keyboard. The films are best left unmentioned...
ReplyDeleteFreek Kinkelaar, proud spectator, sometimes actor