DICK EL DEMASIADO

9 June 2020

I am (was) an eager devotee and student of dub. I thought a lot about it. Lee Perry of course, then I saw two excellent hours-long shows of Jah Shaka (his CDs sound polished but his live shows were crocodiles, totally massive). 

Then I was lucky to see a show by Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar, on a festival on a sunday afternoon, and they just did the following: two kids came up (theirs) and they took over the bass and drums, and Sly and Robbie – their fathers – left the stage! This was followed by Prince Far I, with Adrian Sherwood at the sterring wheel, well…

Dub is about how to navigate the wait and the fruit of patience (the waiting). It is not about the excellence of individuals and isn’t a vehicle to create a star. It is the orchestration of events or, if not, coping with the accidental ones. It is about humour and teasing, it is about substraction, diversion (diverting), distortion and re-interpretation. Dub is a sister of sculpture, it is you, discovering the concept of the play in dimensions, the malleability in the layers and channels, it has many sizes. It is the succesful transformation of knobs into trampolines.

To really be able to work on it you need a good mixing-console with several “sends” so you can pass stuff through effects as capriciously as you want to. I have quite some weird stuff in that vein, but not such an old school mixing console. Later on the hip started making dubstep, which was a full-of-plugins polished dubby-groove for the nightclub. I didn’t like it. No juice. Rational hipness.

15 june 2020

Dick!
i am delighted but not really surprised that we share a deep love and fascination for dub. i went to a Jah Shaka sound system in Brixton London in 1982 when i was 18 years old. i still have a headache from that volume.
man. your fucking bones disintegrated in that sound.

the only sound i ever heard in all my life that was louder than Jah Shaka was Merzbow when he performed at the Graan Silo in Amsterdam in 1988 (i think, or 89) – jesus christ, it was like the walls of Jericho were falling down. a truly terrifying experience. I only found out years later when I worked with Masami that he always wore medical ear plugs to his concerts and therefore never went deaf.
i think most of his fans went deaf.
which was kind of the point really.
an end point.
Aryan

15 June 2020

Yes, Loudness has its limits. I also remember the following sonic thing. In the early 70s we went to a concert of synths, not a rock one (which embraces Fast Notes and a lot of “Portamento”)… but the Concrete-Music kind, the Edgard Varèse heritage. High bleeps, sweeping white noise, etc. They were playing on Synthis… which were kind of CIA suitcases. I suppose there was a lot of inaudible but still physically perceivable sound in the highs and the lows. We went back home by bicycle that night, both my wife and I, a 40 minutes ride. And as we got home and got off our bikes our knees folded, nearly dropping us to the ground. We had been “over-vibrated” by the sub and oversonics and hadn’t shaken that off.

Music: My approach to it for this work on the cumbias and distorting it, stems from when I made the backing-tracks for the IBW-performances. It is the method of inversion: it is either High content with Low form or High form with Low content. The rougher the performance, the silly-er the music, to unbalance the whole and leave an askew impression of it all. And the more complicated the content in our performances, the more danceable the beats, so nobody would leave. That was like an unconscious recipe that amused me, and I would make that stuff naïvely some days before each performance, doodling sounds. A strategy, you could call it. Then when I decided I was going to distort this neglected/forgotten folkloric style, cumbia, SEEMINGLY similar to reggae and dub, I thought: I am going to cram them with the weirdest but strongest, harshest texts. Then I am going to make it easy for them to listen to, and then again I am going to, etc…. I was designing a recipe to distort and manipulate. If you check the CDs they have somehow, each CD, a rhythm between easygoing and harsh. I love that. And it is so effective.

I am all in for the mesmerizing of common somnambulists. That’s why I can’t stand Spotify and the continuous flush of appealing triviality: it takes away your possibility of hypnotising the person that is listening. You can’t do the “Muhammad Ali hit – sting like a butterfly, dance like a bee”! And yes, especially women like the music very much. They seem less defensive towards crazy sounds, they don’t perceive strange sounds – and the person who creates them – as an enemy.

Another thing. My Argentinian band was/is fantastic, and me, as the old guy, with these wild musicians around me, that juxtaposition has got a certain appeal. Then one day, I got a mail from somebody: Thanks, Dick, your concert made me find a girlfriend (and he sent me the picture of him kissing in the audience). In the next show another couple was demonstratively kissing while I played… and over there another one, and from then on, all my shows had young people kissing. It hadn’t been like that before. It was as if suddenly I had gained some kind of unobtrusive presence. I think before I was like competition to the guys in the audience (as rock laws persist: the singer on stage is the stallion), but I had lost the petit-glamour of the stallion singer by becoming ancient. A really beautiful discovery.

Music has given me so much whereas I don’t consider myself a musician. I build something with music.

Thanks for your wonderful appreciations, amigo.
Dick

Synthi AKS (a CIA murder-suitcase with AK in its name)

24 April 2024 12:15

Lieve Dick
it’s always so great to hear from you
and although you describe yourself as “70”
i have this to say:

immediately when i first met you i had the sense that you were one of those rare people who exists entirely outside of what we call “the times”, that you were not contemporaneous with your physical contemporaries at all but, like Einstein’s massive solar bodies, you created a magnetic force around yourself with your immense charisma that literally shaped time so that you were always in your own time, regardless of what time it was in the world they still think of as “real”, the people who follow dates and timelines and chronologies. so in essence what i am getting at is that you are one of those people who never grows up, you just are. the isness of you always is, it was not much different when you were 5, just this huge emanating force that tells its own time. and all your work, be it in physical sculptures with mass and density, or the time sculptures that wear the guerilla outfits of musical genres (cumbia, dub, electro) is the result of of this telling the time, Dick’s Time.
anyway
i would love to hear more from you about your relationship to
1. Jah Shaka
2. dub
3. Prince Far I
4. cumbia
5. time
6. Dick Verdult

Friday 26 April 2024 03:27

Whole lot a shakin’ goin’ on.
Thanks for your beautiful definition and impression of me. Recognnizing that element in me means friendship. It is true, I have kept my own rhythm and never pressured things, since I was enjoying whatever surrounded me, and twisting it into something that would surprise me. Moving around encompasses learning how to wait and not letting it make you feel like you lost something. I think all this moving around from early on in my life made me a nomadic soul, with the capacity to stay afloat amidst disoriented or boring people. These permanent dispacements I went through as a child had a bad thing “I had to judge people very quickly” and – had a good thing too: “I needed to give myself to the ones I was attracted to, fully”. Life is a short fast race, a gamble, you are the jockey too, and each horse is fun.

I moved 20 times during my first 20 years. Not because of panic, which makes me very privileged. Most people are fugitives by this condition. But well, in my case, I would be teleported from one language to the other, one hemisphere to the other, one season to the other, one school to another. In my first 20 years I never had a friend for longer than two years. So by that time, with such a rhythm, you have learned to come into whatever situation or environment with the attitude of an icebreaker and just watch whether the results of your presence are good. It is a very difficult journey too, personally, because you have on one hand a certain egoism – you need to protect yourself and feed your needs in your displacements – but at the same time you are aware that time is only of value if spent sincerely and completely invested in the moment and in the people you share that moment with. It is a beautiful excercise, but not easy. It has a deep nucleus of solitude, not because you are alone, but because you are the only one feeling that exercise of balancing. I like to write these things, so thanks for the attention and the beautiful thoughts and appreciation.

Today I just finished a radio programme I make every once in a while, called Radio Devaluacion (today more than yesterday, tomorrow more than today). It is really strange and funny, it is like a collage of dialogues, anecdotes, opinions, so-called publicity, morality lessons and of course nothing but my own music tracks. I conceive these tracks as an intent of dialogue, “I speak to the person listening” and I don’t prioritise the music side, I just use it as a sidekick, which makes it more disturbing.

Here are the answers to your 5 Questions:

1. Jah Shaka

Jah Shaka is the pipeline to dance-hypnosis. I saw his performances twice.

The one in England: He was playing in the crevice of a bend in an open concrete stairway, it was a one day dub-event in the Jamaican neighbourhood Brixton, London. I had gone to London with some friends to meet Mad Professor. But then the next day we ended in this festival, the Professor would play there, with his son, and many others, like the South African Lucky Dube who got shot. The whole festival took place in a kind of ancient cinema or vaudeville theatre, the biggest hall was like the palate of a whale. It was very peculiar that bands bands were playing in the differenct halls, but the most frenetic dancers were all gathered in a corner of the stairs . And there he was, a small old man, thin like a grasshopper with two wooden cases full of vinyl-singles, and an amplifier with two knobs. One knob was to filter out everything and just maintain the very high frequencies, the other knob was the full blast bass.

Every single single would end with just the highend filter, leaving the sound of rythmic squirreling. A silence would follow, he would flip the single out of the record-player, and replace it with another, all the while saying some three words with a lot of delay… by that time he would have the next one on the matt of the player, all handled with one hand, since the other one had the mic. The single would start on the highfilter, leaving everybody in suspense wondering when was he going to blast in the bass? This, his simple decision, was the matter of much humour and soul. Then the wildly cheering gathering would dance again. Mostly men, as happy as hell, with smiles directed to the roof, that is, internal smiles. All the other bands could just perform without me, this is where I was going to stay for three hours at a stretch.

The Amsterdam Paradiso one: He was with a big crew and many many bassboxes. But they arrived late, so, while the hour of performance had begun he appeared, his record player, his crates with vinyl-singles, his little alarm-effectbox… and he would start playing with one wooden Bassbox, then two, then cables were being thrown in, and other bassboxes came in, and it was a whole bungalow of bassboxes and tweeters being built incessantly till halfway his 3 hour concert. It was so refreshing to see a good range of priorities building up. And he had his cap on, which made him look like a Parisian taxidriver of the sixties. And he danced, and he danced towards the sky, again, like a grasshopper that asks God if he is accomplishing the purpose of his being, but secretly knowing the answer.

2. dub

Although nowadays there exists quite some dub, whether they are following traditon or experimenting, it more often sounds to me mellow, easy and template-style. The original idea – what the masters did with their playful discoveries of naiveté – remains wonderful. Yes, Perry, Yes U-roy, Yes Prince Far I, Yes Jah Shaka. Not wanting to forget The Chemist (Peter), who made some very mechanical, interesting dub.

What beauty do I see in it?

– Humour.
There is some kind of law in music-making and art, that when new tools appear, the great minds play with it, and often in such a way, that it dwarfs all the echoing of it in later times. I think this is the case with dub and its sound experiments, as well as, for instance (in the visual arts) in the internet-art sector.

If you combine bright spirits with monotony you get humor. Humor that sabotages. Dub chooses the hand of monotony and the mind of the Vesuvius. When to pull out and silence a keyboard? Halfway the melody ? Or let’s just have them listen once to the melodic line and then we silence it right before the end of the second cycle? Should we put a delay on the snare in accordance with the rhyhtm ? Or better step out of it and let it go, only correcting it when it gets out of hand. It is all a tease-game, pull and push, give and take away, cat and mouse, dog and bone. If the dancer dances in complicity with this idea, then it is a bomb of humour.

– whimsical knob-twisting & wire-bending of sound design.

Mad Professor had a little Akai sampler in his hands, he had just bought it, and was inspecting it. That’s when he told me:

You see, you have to discover what the (Japanese) engineer wanted you to do with this particular machine, so that you then can do other things with it.

The wonderful point of the first dub is how technology got on an island and inspired various low-tech sound-engineers to experiment with transistor-possibilities, completely out of the “academia.” Of course I am ver well aware of all the spiritual aspects embedded in Dub. But you don’t need to be an ethereal insider to appreciate the beauty, the peace and the gentle push-forward dub-music exhales.

– visual esthetics (no Adobe / Instagram / design).

The covers of the vinyls of early Dub music is way beyond fashion.

There seems to have been no contemporaneity norm, no airbrush, no aesthetic trends. Some lettered with 3-d Superman kind of letters, others had hand drawn letters, others had letters drawn with a thin pencil along a ruler, as a club name of a 14-year old. Then the images: shanty neighbourhood alleys, people on slippers hanging washing out to dry, a girl with a hamburger on the wooden table, a motorcycle with one Firestone wheel and the other a Pirelli, and a child seat on the back. Or a straydog in front of a bassbox. A lot of them with silkscreen or offset of mere black and a second colour. The whole idea of the covers was seemingly a job to get over with as fast as possible because the vinyl needed to get out. This, probably involuntarily, resulted in wonderful Alices through the mirrors.

– leave air in the music

Youth culture usually don’t tolerate air in the music, it has to be full of everything. But Dub succeeded in introducing silence and violent volume drops as elements of well being in music.

– peace

Including it in the music, as well as in the smoke and the patience. Let Babylon Fall, we can wait. Dub does transmit peace. I imagine it is impossible for a firing squad to function if you play them dub loud. They will – at least – wait until the track is finished.

3. Prince Far I

I do have a vinyl of Prince Far I. I don’t know whether he is the central star or whether he is the fruit of a maturing rrecording process with Adrian Sherwood. It is certain Sherwood is a sincere adventurer and a daring and bold mixer. I have seen him mix, It was a joy to see. I like Far I’s music very much and especially how his voice rips into the music, when his voice shoots it’s as if a tractor tire is punctured, the force of compressed air that comes through. It is angry and self-assured.

4. cumbia

As a Dutch child I was raised in Guatemala and later on in Argentina. I learned to read and write in Spanish. Cumbia is the music I heard as an 8 year old in Argentina in the early sixties. It was the music of the housemaid, and she, Marta, was always sweet to me, she represented tenderness. Above all, and already at that age, I despised Argentina’s attempt at trying to look and sound European, with their blonde-washed fake-Pat Boones, which the middle class producers pushed into the youth at the hand of television, a program they had called Club del Clan. I wanted none of that.

1990’s. Then later on, I was amazed by the experiments of Lee Perry with the dub and with his Japanese apparatus, effect pedals and wornout mixing-desk. He was not only a soundman, and a madman, and a self-assured poet, he was also an empiric laboratory with very fructuous results.

1998. With my artgroup, IBW we had gone to Honduras the year after the terrible hurricane Mitch destroyed it, we went to observe and absorb how they were standing up. On our way back a taxi-driver was playing cumbia on a cassette. That’s where it all welded together, my love for dub, my sentiments for the cumbia and Marta, my desire to offer something back to Argentina, for the happiness I had received from that culture. So I started playing with cumbia somewhere in 2000, twisting it. I tried a lot: effects, the peculiar texts, the unusual demagogic tone sometimes, introducing the pedagogic touch of the calypsos, cleaning and silencing of tracks, or smashing in some adornamental instruments, etc. BUT, whatever I did, I never got close to what I thought I was going to end with: finding to a dub approach to cumbia. This sincerely never has succeeded.

And the generation that followed and think they are succeeding in it, are mistaken for a fundamental reason. The nucleus of this problem is that the bass in dub, plays with the listener and his timing, bassguitarists can be very lazy, or can voluntarily suddenly go silenct, or double a note, or suddenly propell everything forward etc… the Jamaican bass is a magician. But the cumbia-bass-guitar needs to be full-on precise in the holding of its bpm! The cumbia-bass is a machine, a whip, a geometrical formula that insists on steadiness. In fact, now that I think of it: Dub has much more of a listener-modus, you start as a listener – and you might dance, maybe. But Cumbia is a dancer’s playground with no listener’s-modus possible.

Now, Cumbia has a long history and is a folkloric music that unites three cultures, it is a symbiosis of Indian (the flutes), black (the percussion) and western, the melodical design.

I started my experimenting versions aiming for an Argentinian audience, where the cumbia was a stigmatised music, considered as music for the trash, for the illiterates, for the plebs. It was looked down on by the media and the velvet people with red wine, taste and education. As I arrived with my emboldened music in Argentina they were just emerging from the great financial crash of 2002. This was the first time in decennia they saw confirmed they were an “under-developed” country, that they weren’t the south-American Europe. And just as they find themselves in that new mental no-man’s-land, a blonde European that speaks in their own particular spanish flies in to say that the music of their servants was the best they had. And I continued, that the stigmatised argentinian version of cumbia, the cumbia villera (villa = slum) contained a wonderful paradox, because, coming from the nucleus of urban misery, it was not angry but on the contrary sounded deliriously happy.

In a different moment they would have kicked me out of the country, but their status-desorientation was my luck, and one of the secrets as to why I succeeded. They weren’t apt to react, to close the door. The anaesthesia of bankruptcy was still on them. I saw that, and judged it propitious to kick in further, harder, deeper. This was certainly a moment were you could pass on a complete different perspective, and so I did, in the numerous radio programs and interviews. The cd’s with my lyrics did the rest.

At that moment Peru had it’s own weird cumbia-music tradition, also plainly for the “people”, and it surely was a very specific strange sound (Chicha), with its distinctive tremolo-guitars, and Mexico had a very popular range, they qualify their cumbia as, musica sonidera and it sounds like a dancetrain. Colombia was all the way different. It had the real masters, since cumbia comes from Colombia. But this was also the reason why they were not able to see other ways of playing it:

Masters that are good musicians but less playful humans won’t let you get away with variations. 

Therefore Colombia came in late in the new era of cumbia. They could not look at their music in other ways than their masters wanted it to be and showed it (off). It took them years to come up with a new tone, and still sounded gently fabricated (to the insider). Historywise we could say that there were just a few initiators of this new cumbia. In Mexico there was Sonidero Nacional that ejected a cumbia on the basis of the accordeon of Celso Piña (Cumbia del Rio). It sounded really good, was very danceable and hip. It was a bridge between social layers.

In Colombia there was an Englishman, Richard Blair, he worked with samplers on cumbia, but to me, merely from a very down-to-earth pragmatic reason. There was little new to its sound, except it kicked in more digitally compressed, and with the practicality of the cut and paste of modernity.

In Chile was a German, Uwe Schmidt, who – full of irony – made cumbia versions of the music of Kraftwerk. This irony was a treasured music for the cool people working with computers, it was a “new era functional music”. Uwe Schmidt is a very good and productive musician with many many identities (ex Atom). His plays with cumbia were a sidepath.

And then there was me.

This all took place in a time frame of two years, more or less. I am convinced, and many with me, that my versions and twists are and were the most radical. In contrast to all the other versions, mine didn’t want to please, they just wanted to convey anarchy and sincerity. I had nothing to lose and had no fantasies of being something pop. I am very aware, and it is sad but also funny to me, that with time I am being written out in the superficial version of the history of cumbia. Every few years another 10 persons appear saying they have already been freaking with cumbia…. “5 years ago”, which should make them the firsts, haha. Then there are the sociology students that write that down and make “papers about urban culture”. It is pretty strange to see that phenomenon of historical misrepresentation as it slides, evolves and contaminates the record through time. I can judge it by first experience, and can only conclude this happens with all worlds.

Contemporary history is written with the ink of mediocrity. And those who create… well, they have no time for territorial-claims.

Rounding up about cumbia:
To me, one of the most interesting cumbiamakers is Pablo Lescano, who is the leader of Damas Gratis. His cumbia villera (slum cumbia) was the zenith of abjection in Argentina, but I liked it a lot and kept saying that in interviews in 2003, you should have seen the faces of stupor of velvet journalists and radiomakers. This Pablo Lescano is a bright guy, of course totally doped and circled by his own mafia, but he had a bright mind and experimented with cheap software, public domain stuff to define a new kind of very effective tight beat accompanied with very very silly but effective solos and melodylines, that was already in 2000. Nowadays it is new-chic to dance to Damas Gratis.

I have been in the centre of this hurricane and it is wonderful to have seen how it developed sociologically. In 2002, before I had returned to Argentina with my music, I would visit Argentinian IDM-forums (IDM = intelligent digital music, hahah) on the internet, and they would be talking about me, some exceptions praising me as a discovery, but mostly djs that were disturbed by what I was doing and the mere attempt to revive cumbia…. I took screengrabs of all these dialogues. Then two or three years later, all those talking bad about me and about cumbia, were suddenly Cumbia-djs.

I consider the peak of my cumbia-quest when I went in 2012 to Archangelsk in deep Russia, on the border of the Polar Sea, convinced that I would be able to record Cumbia in the least tropical conditions. It was 24 degrees below zero and the city was facing the Gulag Archipel. In a week I wrangled myself through vague contacts and on the last night I recorded this with a folk-orchestra that had been playing in the nuclear testing-grounds of Nova Zembla the night before:

Nowadays I call my music Celulitis, which seems to describe a physical condition that people want to avoid, but Celulitis shakes and moves in utter joy. I never attempted to become a musician, it just happened as a result of other artwork and working-procedures. So, therefore, I can, and still enjoy moving through the musical terrain completely detached of the brotherhood, the guild, the union, the syndicate, the reading-glasses and hearing-aids of the music-canalisation. It takes two to tango, but only one to make celulitis!

5. time

Time and Geduld^{[1]Geduld means Patience in Dutch.} go hand in hand. I left Argentina when I was 12, and when I was at the University in Paris (the 70’s), overcome with all that was happening in my beloved latin American continent (the violent hail of dictators) I decided that one day I would give something back to that culture. I thought it was going to happen through my filmmaking. I was convinced that I needed to have a lot of experience/content and the matured digestion of it before I was able to realise solid feature films. I thought I’ll wait till my 40s. Meanwhile feeding myself. And then this visit to Honduras happened in ’98 and I turned to cumbia to fabricate a new waterfall of creations, a whole serie of virtual non-existant bands and a non-existent music-style (experimental cumbia) with it’s non-existent festival. And it turned very fertile, and suddenly I was a musician.

Now, following your play of words (Verdult, my name and Geduld, which means patience) I have to clarify my name, because it’s root is far from the word Patience. Verdult comes from Dutch dialect, the region were my ancestors seem to have had their roots (around Bergen op Zoom, south of Netherlands), it is a variation of the curse “verdulleme” which is a friendly way of saying “go to hell, or let me go to hell”, it is family of “damned, or damn”. I am convinced this was the answer when the Napoleonic Administration, occupying the Netherlands, were implementing their census.
question: What’s your name?
answer: Fuck you.

6. Dick Verdult

I do have patience, since I enjoy my time while waiting. But I am an Aries, and walls are an invitation. I am also so fortunate to have been able to nurture my patience and my learning from the Dutch luxurious vacuum of the 80’s till 2000. I have no inclination to linearity. I not only think laterally, I live like that. Like the overflowing river jumping out of bed. By now I make music in my studio, make installations, drawings and have art-shows, have had three novels published in Spanish, am writing a Dutch one, make films. Although the descriptions above sound like having a touch of solitary processes, it is nothing like that. I am very grateful to the many people that surround me, and more even, to those close whom I love. I receive a lot, and I like to give what I can.

There is a wonderful and dedicated film made about, mostly, my way of functioning in these worlds and my interaction with people in common settings. The film is by Luuk Bouwman and you demand it here.