After a days full off car driving, across half the island, with a very nice guest and two hitchhikers, I was tired but very satisfied. Back in the nice AirB&B I played this on the guitar of the owner of the place. The strings were very high above the frets, but the guitar had a nice mood to it.

Guitar Jam in Iceland after driving up and down to Vík - 2018

Lucien Melvin V3

Saztified

This is likely the track we spend most time on. In fact, the last thing I did for it was to change the pitch of a drum sample. I wanted it to follow a bass line, while to Xavier, the result was sticking out like a sore finger. When I brought up release the track on Spotify, he brought it up: "Only if we fix that drum sample." I caved, changed the sample. And the fact that you won't be able to find that sample, proves Xavier right. 

I played my acoustic double bass, guitar and Turkish saz here. Xavier played lots of drum patterns and brought recordings of sounds he made BEA5. That's basically an analog synthesizer the size of a royal bed room, in the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. All recordings were then cut up, and some rerecorded through analog effects, then cut up again. This is how we made the phasors to play melodies. Were were like surgeons on our own music. 

Too many files open

Were had switched from borrowed hardware samplers to Protools by now, which was offering 8 mono tracks at cd quality at the time. We had to be clever to cramp in all our ideas. There was no automation yet, so each modification became a new file. Our edit intensive method made us hit the limit of max 300 open files in Protools, several times in this project. The number of samples and derivatives is easily over a thousand. 

While one was editing, the other got ideas. Impatiently, we pushed each other to edit faster and faster, as to show off the ideas and get the other to agree with it, who would then edit it again.We were intense.

Szorgir 1997 Saztified (Dave Krooshof And Xavier Van Wersch)

Szorgir 1: Zoneq

In the coming week I'll be linking to the tracks Xavier van Wersch and I made under the bandname Szorgir in the late 1990s. Each track took us lots of nightly hours. Each was a project of at least a week that we emerged ourselves into.

We were enjoying Jungle & Drum'n'bass, contemporary at the time, but we wanted to distance ourself from it's loops & repetitions and simplicity in general. Also, we wanted to incorporatie Arabic music.

Zoneq  (We pronounced it as Zoneck)

The hardware we used for this track was already dated at the time. The central sound is Lebanese vocal, sampled from a cassette using an Akai sampler with only seconds of memory. For the drums, we borrowed a sound canvas for the drums from the EWP of the Royal Conservatory. Xaf had a very old mixer with a tape echo, and a Atari 1040ST control and edit it all. It was mixed down onto a cassette, that we later digitized and mastered.

Even though the hardware was limited in what you could do with it and how bright it could sound, our signature dense sound is there from the start. Including synths that sound like voices and voices filtered to sound like synths, Dave-iant basses and Xafian drumrolls.

Szorgir 1996 Zoneq (Dave Krooshof And Xavier Van Wersch)

Guitar improvisation in Iceland after a day of driving up and down to Vík

Flowtype Live In Doornroosje 1996

Recorded with one microphone by Marc Schots


Op een krib in de Waal staat een boom van een vent
en hij kijkt naar het gras aan de overkant.
Zijn hond was nog maar een maand of zes
toen zijn vrouw haar vond aan de waterkant

Nu aait hij zijn hond met zijn linker hand
en zakt daartoe een beetje door één knie
Hij staat stevig in de wind,
maar door melancholie staat hij net zo scheef als het riet.

Dave Krooshof - Krib In De Waal 1996

In 1996 we, Thijs Scheele, Daan Van West, Yuri Weseman, Xavier van Wersch and I, locked ourselves into Xavier's place where we stayed the entirety of the autumn vacation.

We borrowed a pile of gear from the Staff Ewp Den Haag of the Royal Conservatory, like the soundcanvas and the Waldorf, and added pretty much every bit of gear that we owned ourselves. The mixer was Xavier's very old Italian desk with a tape delay on top of it. Yuri brought his PC. It was quite new that PC's were fast enough to edit sound on.

We spend day and night making music, for over a week. What is left of that today, is a VHS tape, and a cassette with this track on it. I guess we could not manipulate the PC and record onto it at the same time. I recently digitized this tape and I just mastered it.

We had met only months before this. We had only just started Sonology. Yet I can recognize the contribution of each of us, even 23 years later.

Blauwe Aanslag Jungle

Ik heb in een vleugel gezongen, geschreeuwd, gegild. Alles opgenomen. Daarna mijn stem er uit geknipt. Dus je hoort... indemen [knip] uitklank van de piano: Alleen de intentie en het gevolg, je hoort niet de actie zelf.

Elke attack, scherper of zachter, is het gevolg van de crossfade die ik heb gemaakt.

Dave Krooshof - Stephen DiRado - Voor NTR Focus 22 Januari 2020

Dave Krooshof - Stemafdruk In Vleugelsnaren Radio Edit Voor NTR

Sonology, works in the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. Some instruments are home made.

Krooshof

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