It cricks, crackles 'n' rattles!

Playing time, double contextual scraps.

Wednesday night with a bunch friends, we organised a grouphug freakfolk session at casa Sebcatlitter, which went on waaaay deep into the night. Waking up hours later at 6.30am for another day of corporate slavery with the damocles realm of sleep deprivation; not recommended must say. Rewind, the livingroom was turned into an instrument mine field with chunks & pieces loitered everywhere. It was nearly like a Fonal concert setting, errr except that we made more mess with drinks n food. What to pick, what to play of this scattered array; we had music boxes, xylophones, melodica's, african lamellaphones (or better known as thumb piano's), kiddie keyboards, cheapo accordeons, various guitar shapes, shakers, drumming pads, bird & frog sound tools and an amazing sounding Botswana bush bow-slash-violin, was that all? -pfew-
Fair play to Wouter for bringing most bags of instruments including his old mechanical tape recorder for making grainy looping drones, which really coloured the acoustic sound.
We played a few hours and recorded most of it, will put mp3's links of some session pieces on here soon after filtering the grit from the chissle. Thank Mark, Gijs, Ellen, Wouter, Maarten, Iris, Merel and Daniel for coming out to play. Below some pics taken by Mark and Iris, thx too!






















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Just heard about a pretty nifty electronical instrument; the *Cracklebox* (ta, Rory!)
"The Cracklebox was probably the first commercialy available portable selfpowered alternative 'keyboard' analog audio synthesizer with inbuilt loudspeaker" Old skool glitch, wowza! :)


Apparently this device was created in the 70's and has been recently revived by the good people at Amsterdam based Steim and the German Sonig label. It's really no surprise that Jan Werner (part of electrofrizzy outfit Mouse on Mars) is the connection here, being the programmer at Steim and owner of Sonig at the same time. Various artists are using this device nowadays and had seen it used before at a MoM show which tickled my curiosity. And curiousity indeed kills this cat slowly, especially when this device can be purchased for next to nothing* (*only applies ro addicst of musical gadgets I reckon) at Steim's online shop. Just play kids, play!