söndag 14 Jun 2009, 17:57

Five years ago Coach Bertels went to an event around Claude Vivier at the Westergasfabriek during the famous Holland Festival. It was a huge success and Bertels really liked it, modern opera and a great visual spectacle. Last year Coach went to see the Karlheinz Stockhausen tribute during the festival with Midair Condo and Matmos, that was also great. This year the Holland Festival has an event that interested Bertels immediately: Three nights dedicated to the live and work of Edgard Varèse. First a symposium about the man and his most famous work (From a Dutch point of view); the Poem Electronique live at the Phillips Pavilion at the World Expo in Brussels 1958, the architecture of Le Corbusier, the technique of Phillips and the music of Edgard Varèse was a real blast in a whole lot of ways.

Day one: The Symposium:
After the Scanner gig in The Hague, Coach Bertels came home around one o clock in the morning and quickly jumped into his nest, because the next day Bertels had to go to Arnhem for work and preventing traffic horrors Coach like to leave early. So at six in the morning the clockradio began spreading the news and Coach got out, got ready had breakfast and went for the hour and a half ride eastwards. The meeting was good after four hours Bertels and his colleagues had lunch. After lunch Coach quickly left and decided to make a stop at Feedback Utrecht to buy the Rode PG2 Pistol grip, he wants so badly. Getting into the city of Utrecht was easy, around two o clock it is relatively calm in the streets, but as Bertels found out that the pistol grip he wanted was not in store and he spent the detour for nothing, he became a bit irritated and wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible, only to find this to be very hard due to all kind of one-way difficulties. But Bertels can’t be fooled that easy! Backing up into traffic, violating one-way restrictions and floating free on buss lanes, Bertels managed to get out of town without being chased by coppers. Ariving at Bertels Cube around four in the afternoon, it was time for relaxation and some drinks. At five Coach got ready for the Amsterdam evening and mounted his bicycle for a nice ride to the station. At the station the bike was parked properly and Coach got his ticket for the Capitol train ride. At A’dam Central, Bertels enjoyed pizza with a whiskey-coke beverage. Coach went under the ground for the three minute metro ride to the cultural area, walked along the Hortus Botanicus, the Desmedt Studios and to a little nice café at the corner opposite The Plantage where the substitute of Bertels’s favourite TV show was broadcasted live at that very moment. A nice beer and a whole lot to see on these streets at a nice evening like this. After the drink Coach walked a hundred metres and arrived at Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. Coach was just at the gate as a car pulled up with Holland Festival stickers all over it, out came a tall wild white hair organising dude asking the ticket girl to help him with Japanese professor Chou Wen-chung who was in a wheel chair (escalator accident the day before) and had to be brought inside for the symposium. The professor was taken care of and Bertels walked inside the Zoological Garden, immediately Bertels saw himself confronted with huge camels, lamas and some sort of normal looking cow with abnormal huge horns (sticking out three meters each). Coach got himself a coffee and sat outside on the terraces looking straight at the animals. An old man and a young woman came over and asked Bertels if the other seats at the table were free, yes they were, so they sat down and started ignoring Coach immediately. The old one was kind of nervous and seemed to know everything about tonight’s subject: Edgard Varèse, the girl seemed thirty-five or so in Bertels mind and could be the daughter. She had a young look but wrinkled face, something of a exiting combination. Her dark long hair and big blue eyes were a pleasure to watch. Bertels hates to be ignored, so he asked the old dude why he knew so much about Varèse, then it came out that he was friends with the tall wild white hair organiser dude and had heard all the stuff from him. After that Bertels was again ignored. Suddenly everybody streamed to the entrance of the room where the event would take place, the doors opened and all got into a strange round room with a ceiling like half a sphere. Normally the night skies are projected on this great ceiling, but tonight it will be somewhat more chaotic. The chairs were all place in circles and they were positioned backwards like dentist chairs, so that one can look up without having a neck injury or just to fall asleep (which some elder folks did). Lieven Bertels (not related) is a bold guy who was host this evening and he introduced the crowd to Kees Tazelaar, Malcolm MacDonald, Jana Machalett and Olivia Mattis. The Poem Electronique was composed especially for the 1958 World Expo, it was meant to be a journey from ape to the present (1958) and the future. With it came all sorts of theories, artist’s scenes and movements that affected the whole project and made it what we still remember today. The Fourth Dimension is such a theory; hypercube, hyper prism, and other X-files stuff. Kees Tazelaar worked five years on this project and interviewed several people who were in the project back then. Finally he managed to reconstruct the entire Poem Electronique with all the original light schemes and projections that made the 1958 experience so darn interesting. The Poem has become four dimensional again for the first time after fifty years, and Coach Bertels was one of the first to witness this great moment! First the full 4D reconstruction was shown with 5.2 digital surround, what a great experience, imagine something like this just five decades ago! The original show in the Phillips Pavilion was a technical wonder for that time, the audio system consisted of 325 speakers, supplemented by 25 bass speakers and aligned in 52 sound routes. All this had to be perfectly in balance, so the 15 track control tape had perforations in it to align perfectly with the light and film control tapes with the same perforations. After the exhilarating eight minutes (The original length), Malcolm and Olivia held very interesting lectures on the project, the technique and impact on the press. Especially the way Olivia read the news article “Varèse Concert ends in Riot” was really cool. As a bonus the poem was shown once more and with all the extra information it really started to live. Afterwards questions from the public were answered and the discussion immediately went to the clash of movements during the period Edgard Varèse started to become known. The end of the first night, and Bertels got back to the station right away. The train was ready and transported Coach to his Cube. A good night’s rest, for the two evenings to come.