LP Edition of 200. Includes Digital Download.
Feeding Tube Records is proud to present the first U.S. LP by Dutch experimental artist Jan van den Dobbelsteen. Jan has been releasing music, non-music and kinda-music on his Cosmic Volume label since 1978. Often these works are connected to visual exhibits or installations, but they also work as standalone sound events.
We had been tracking Jan’s work for a good long while, but it was only after Phil Milstein told us he was friends of Jan and his partner, Danielle Lemaire, that our wheels began to spin. (They had sponsored Milstein’s show-and-tell song-poem trip to the Low Countries.) Introductions were made, and here are the most excellent results.
Because van den Dobbelsteen’s conceptual palette is so wide, we approached this project without preconceptions or suggestions. What he came up with was a set of wild pieces for bells of all sorts. The effect is something like a shoebox version of Charlemagne Palestine’s work with carillons, perhaps crossed with one of those records documenting the sounds of mechanical toys.
When pressed for a few words, Jan described it thusly:
Constructing a music machine inspired from musical automata, self playing instruments.
Music boxes, barrel and street-organs, automatic mechanical pneumatic organs.
Self playing ensemble of bells. electromechanical random clicking and tinkle.
No virtuosity or individual genius.
Automated musical bells generates the sounds and motion in the performance and produce richly-textured sounds and jingle while there is no need for a composer or performer.
rinkelen
jingle tinkle jangle chink clang clank
klingelen
jingle tinkle
tingelen
tinkle jingle
rammelen
rattle jingle strum jangle sputter clash
kletteren
clatter clang clank patter rattle jingle
gerinkel
tinkle jingle clank jangle chink clang
klinkklank
jingle
clink chink tinkle jangle ding a ling ring ding
ping chime tintinnabulation
clink chink tinkle ring ding ping ringing chime
jingle bell
toll peal rumble grumble carillion
–JVDD
Could not have said it better myself. A lights-out listen for the ages. “Gerinkel, “ y’all.
-Byron Coley, 2018
