Unnoted Sessions

The third and final chapter of the Beetsterzwaag sessions was going to take place during the opening of the concluding exhibition of the DOGtime four.ten.five.eleven new.art.education project. It was a bit uneasy to perform for the last time between the various art works created by the group. Even they seemed to belong more to the space they were in then to themselves, archeological remains of past times, undermining our search for the here and now.

It was out of this state that jam 054 arose, moody landscapes of delay guitar and thick keys over heavy bass grooves; progressive rock depicting our ambiguous presence and that of the visitors. During the jam weird timing errors were noticeable, causing for frustrating resyncing problems while performing and in the recordings afterwards; something which later appeared to happen in almost all jams of that day.

After a short break in a Chinese restaurant instruments were exchanged, forgotten knowledge put back into practice and we went off for some over-the-top love song with a morbid side note. It seemed almost like a self-seductive prayer, with the same lyrics repeated endlessly and amplified by Lucky’s basic delay guitar and IC’s contrasting evolving bass grooves. Then at four fifth of the jam we broke out the love trance and arrived at the Japanese broadcast organization all in the blink of an eye; it can be that simple.

Having tasted this new kind of energy Hans continued his grooves on bass and Lucky on guitar with further exploration on the Asian community and its culinary heritage. It turned into an exciting experiment with Santhesizer pushing it even further into the unknown, as he had never played keys before; talented indeed.

The last jam that can’t remain unnoted is jam 060, a schizophrenic multilingual ballad with strong guitar parts that takes of in English on beauty and fragility and crashes in German with broken relationship. Along what lines does inspiration flow, Lucky? The schizophrenity is further enhanced by Lucky’s recurring out of scale bass note in the first quarter of the jam. The overall sound quality is a bit doggy unfortunately as the guitar track had to be recovered via the vocal mics.

Beetsterzwaag was a unique experience and showed many new directions for the project to investigate. To be continued.