nckn.music.

There is a small town in Belgium, called Neerpelt, where they have this wonderful place: Klankenbos, which translates to “Soundforest”. Initiated by musica.be, they invite sound-artists to contribute installations to the forest. So visitors can go around and experience sound in new ways.

Just to give an example: there is a glass-cube in the forest, which you can only access through an underground tunnel. Being there, it isolates you from the environmental forest-sounds to bring awareness to what you normally don’t take attention to. The concept is inspired by John Cage’s famous piece 4:33, which is basically 4 minutes and 33 seconds of  musical silence.

Another one: A giant flute. In fact so big, that you can go into it. You close the big steel-door behind you and a huge fan starts “blowing” air on the opening of the flute. The created sound is of such a low frequency (maybe around 20-30Hz) that you literally stand inside of the wave and physically feel how the sound goes through your body. Impressive.

There are many more installations, so if you happen to be around that area, it is definetely worth a visit! Check their website: musica.be or flip through the Klankenbos Info-PDF.

There is a small wooden cottage called RadioForest, which was initially created to broadcast the moods of the wood. Now it is a place for workshops and several installations. For example, they have soundscapes being played within the wooden walls of the building. You have to approach with your ear to listen to soundscapes evolving around the topic of “forest”.

This is where Dåbermann comes into place: we were invited to contribute such a soundscape to the collection. Instead of just delivering it, we went to Klankenbos to have an improvised session right in that setting. Besides of some instruments, we used just sounds we collected earlier in the forest.

You can find some pictures of our performance at their webpage.

It was a very nice experience, these are the kinds of places we Dåbermen like. So if you happen to be in Klankenbos next time, you will probably listen to our Radioforest Soundscape there. Enjoy!

(If you don’t want to take on the travel cost, download the file and listen at home

Actually this is a repost taken from our Dåberlog. Feel free to subscribe/follow over there.

There is a small town in Belgium, called Neerpelt, where they have this wonderful place: Klankenbos, which translates to "Soundforest". Initiated by musica.be, they invite sound-artists to contribute installations to the forest. So visitors can go around and experience sound in new ways. Just to give an example: there is a glass-cube in the forest, ...

Tonight we released our second Dåbermix. It is pretty different from the first one, more calm. We don’t speak about what music we should do. It just comes out naturally, so this is where we were during the last 3 months of 2009. Happy listening!

Tonight we released our second Dåbermix. It is pretty different from the first one, more calm. We don't speak about what music we should do. It just comes out naturally, so this is where we were during the last 3 months of 2009. Happy listening!

I am a little proud of this one. Yesterday we released our first Dåbermann-Mix. Give it a listen and download here:

“Now wait!”, you might ask. “What is Dåbermann? Who is ‘we’? And why proud?”

Okay, I’ll do some clarification:

We, that are Chris, Hamer and me.  We met earlier this year to mess with 3 laptops using Ableton. The only thing we knew was, that we have a great overlap in musical interest. Didn’t know what will happen when we start out a jam, also didn’t expect anything. Dåbermann was born.

After the first session we were really surprised. In a positive way. Right from the first minute – it seemed – we had found our sound and roles for each one. Also interesting to see how 3 approaches to Ableton melt down in one atmosphere. Chris, with his trackpad-rocking chaos-style, does all the groove and beat. Hamer is most likely the guy who does strings and ambiences. I focussed so far on live-sampling: playing guitar, sometimes trumpet, a bit voice and making general noises.

Improvising with Ableton is really another paradigm than improvising in a band. While in a band, there is just the moment, you always act “now”. With Ableton, it’s like you create a big and heavy ball and give it a push, so it starts rolling on its own. Once in a move you can start change its colour or shape, give it a little more movement or make it pause. But it is still that big monster being hard to handle, since it’s the child of three computers.

After the first sessions we had plenty of material. Several hours. And we didn’t really know what to do now. Make tracks from it? No we couldn’t. No way to reproduce the sounds. They got lost on the way. So we decided to chop up the sessions and glue them together in a digestable way. So out of 3 hours of improvised Dåbermann-sessions emerged 32 minutes of Dåbermix.

And this is one of the reasons I’m really proud of this: the source material is improvised and still it sounds great (in my ears). This is the inversion of the usual process of producing tracks. Normally you have an idea, and shape it until you like it. The actual work you do is pushing boxes on a grid in a program. Not very musical. This time we just jammed out. And it worked.
I once again felt what’s so great about making music with other people: the outcome is always more than the sum of its elements.

It is most likely, that you will hear more of us in the future. We plan more sessions, but also performing live someday. So stay tuned…

PS. Actually, all three of us don’t like dogs. There are exceptions, but you know in this ever-going “dogs vs. cats”-fight, cats will always win. Find us on Soundcloud and MySpace.

I am a little proud of this one. Yesterday we released our first Dåbermann-Mix. Give it a listen and download here: "Now wait!", you might ask. "What is Dåbermann? Who is 'we'? And why proud?" Okay, I'll do some clarification: We, that are Chris, Hamer and me.  We met earlier this year to mess with 3 laptops using Ableton. ...