Erik Kessels

Happy Birthday to Erik Kessels, who turns 60 today. 

Erik Kessels and Scanner | Archive Land

Erik Kessels and Scanner 

Archive Land

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Self-published, 2019

12 x 14.5 x 2.5 cm.

Edition of 200 signed and numbered copies

A boxed edition consisting of a set of cards by Kessels and an audio cassette by Robin Rimbaud, who produces music and sound under the name Scanner. 

"Archive Land opened at the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne in May 2019, as part of the Artist Meets Archive series for the Photoszene Festival. Like many museums the MAKK holds a wealth of materials that are hidden away in a dark basement and rarely see the light of day. So, for this special project Dutch artist Erik Kessels was given access to this unique collection and chose images from their photo collection. Reproducing these photographic plates to enormously oversized playing cards he built a huge house of cards, which you could visit inside the museum. 

To accompany this Erik invited Scanner to create a sound installation to translate the archive into sound. He began by thinking about the photos themselves and what music might have been listened to at the time when they were taken. He settled on the work of Beethoven and replayed a very famous sonata of his on the piano, extremely slowly. To this he added all the sounds that might emanate from the photographs themselves, so the ticking of clocks, footsteps, horses, someone coughing, a crowd in the street, church bells, birdsong and more. All of this was then filtered through a kind of sonic lens so that the sounds appear and disappear, as does the music, suggesting a dreamlike quality to the room, moving the past to the present. 

The installation resembled an archetypal dilapidated historical building. Just like an archive, these structures are often hidden away and difficult to access – relics from bygone times. Walking through these motifs ranging from the Middle Ages to the 19th century and letting the mind wander encouraged visitors to perceive these usually hidden visual worlds in a new way. 

The pattern collection of the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts is part of the museum’s comprehensive Graphics Collection that was built up with the founding of the museum in 1888. The pattern collection comprises approx. 25,000 illustrations from the Middle Ages to the 19th century and served as a visual guide to ‘good taste’: photographs, prints or clippings from publications showing primarily handcrafted objects of all types, but also historical buildings, cityscapes, landscapes, interiors, expeditions, botanical motifs or animals. 

Erik Kessels (born 1966 in Roermond, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. He is creative director and head of the KesselsKramer advertising agency in Amsterdam, which he founded together with Johan Kramer in 1995 as a “legendary and unorthodox” communications agency. Since 2000, he has also published the Useful Photography magazine and has edited several books, for example Missing Links (1999), The Instant Men (2000), In almost every picture (2001-2013) and Wonder (2006). www.kesselskramer.com 

Artist Meets Archive was the central exhibition program of this year's Photoszene-Festival in cooperation with Museum Ludwig, MAKK - Museum for Applied Arts Cologne, Kцlnisches Stadtmuseum, Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur,  Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and Rheinisches Bildarchiv at Kaune Contemporary. 

The exhibition was accompanied by playing cards and a music cassette in a special collector's box (200 copies, signed by Erik Kessels and Scanner), available only at the museum box office at the time. These are now the last remaining copies available and will not be reprinted."

Jon Hassell, RIP

My favourite trumpet player - a distinction without competition - died yesterday, at the age of 84. 

Jon Hassell was a musician and composer best known for his "fourth world" music, which has managed to bypass the now-ubiquitous charges of 'cultural appropriation' through sheer rigour and respect. In an essay titled The Debt I Owe To Jon Hassell, Brian Eno wrote “If I had to name one over-riding principle in Jon’s work, it would be that of respect: he looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music.”

Hassell himself decried what he called “the banalisation of the exotic … the herd trampling through the campsites where I delicately and respectfully visited 15 or 20 years ago”.

He was born in Memphis and studied in Germany under Karlheinz Stockhausen, alongside classmates Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, who went on to found the band CAN. He recently described to Billboard magazine an experience taking acid at Schmidt’s house: “I remember being on the floor listening to gagaku Japanese music and watching the fibres of the rug sway with the music.”

When he returned to the USA, he met Terry Riley and performed on his signature work, In C. He later worked with another influential minimalist composer, La Monte Young, joining the Theatre of Eternal Music and studying under Young's mentor Pandit Pran Nath. Nath was an Indian classical singer and master of the Kirana gharana singing style, a process dedicated to just intonation. Hassell applied these vocal techniques to the trumpet. 

Hassell’s debut album Vernal Equinox was released in 1978 and was followed by a collaboration with Eno two years later, Possible Musics/Fourth World, Vol. 1. The recording was was named one of the year's ten best recordings by The New York Times and the Village Voice. 

He subsequently collaborated with a wide range of performers, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Stina Nordenstam (an under-rated Swedish singer whose work I discovered when Hassell played on her excellent second album And She Closed her Eyes), David Toop, Bjork, Flea, Howie B, former classmate Holger Czukay, the Kronos Quartet, artist Walter De Maria, Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, the Talking Heads, and countless others.

He was initially a third collaborator on Brian Eno and David Byrne's influential album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but quit the project early on, disappointed with the results of the early demos. He remained estranged from Byrne, though later became close again with Eno, who started a GoFundMe page for Hassell in April 2020, to help raise money when the composer's health first began to deteriorate. Over a hundred thousand dollars were raised. 

“After a little more than a year of fighting through health complications, Jon died peacefully in the early morning hours of natural causes,” his family wrote in the statement. “He cherished life and leaving this world was a struggle as there was much more he wished to share in music, philosophy, and writing.” 

His fans included filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Chris Marker), visual artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat), composers (Philip Glass: "I recommend all the works of Jon Hassell"), pop stars (Charlie Watts, Pete Townsend, Bono, Ani Di Franco), electronic musicians (808 State, Scanner, Howie B) and other performers.  

Ry Cooder called him "One of the three or four players of wind instruments in the world who can command your attention with one note". Brian Eno described his frequent collaborator as someone who "planted seeds whose fruits are still being gathered”. 

David Bryne, Brian Eno and (an already pulling away?) Jon Hassell

Holiday Recommendations Guest Post #9: Scanner

Ben Rivers
The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
Artangel/Whitworth Art Gallery
128 pp., 18 x 13 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Available from Cornerhouse Books, here, for £15.00.

"British filmmaker Ben Rivers creates dark, frequently unsettling films, drawn from real life and his inventive mind, often like casting spells onto the screen. Mysterious, caught in the debris between the lived and the imagined, his work remains in your mind long after you’ve experienced his films. British arts curators Artangel recently presented his new work in the former BBC Television Centre in London, accompanied by this beautiful publication, The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers."


http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2015/the_two_eyes_are_not_brothers

"Since 2000, Cabinet Magazine has been a continued source of compelling information, teaching you about things you never thought it necessary to even know about, with theme based issues on Catastrophe, Inverted Languages, Weather, Animals, Evil, Flight, Doubles, Chance, Ruins and so on.
Treat yourself to a subscription and enjoy days of sudden illumination and clarity. I’ve kept and treasured every copy since the first edition since it’s most definitely a journal worth returning to."

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org




Scanner (British artist Robin Rimbaud) traverses the experimental terrain between sound and space connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings. He scored the hit musical comedy Kirikou & Karaba (2007), Philips Wake-Up Light (2009), The Big Dance in Trafalgar Square for 1000 dancers and the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2012. Committed to working with cutting edge practitioners, he has collaborated with Bryan Ferry, Wayne MacGregor, Mike Kelley, Michael Nyman, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson and Hussein Chalayan.
www.scannerdot.com