Dr. Klangendum

– Polletje Pallieter by Sylvie De Pauw, Bart Maris and the X Static Tics. 52.39′
A WORM/Klangendum/Concertzender production. Thanks to BesteBuren.
– Het Heeft Geregend Maar Nu Is Het Droog by the X Static Tics 5.43′
jingles bij the Dokter himself.
INFO:
The past year, Dr Klangendum has, together with WORM, made some  four radio productions which found themselves in the radio play tradition somewhere between Stockhausen and the family Doorsnee. All radio plays have been broadcast after the summer – Ergo Phizmiz, Martijn Comes and Stefano Gianotti – and can still be played back on the website of the Concertzender – see Dr Klangendum 109, 110 and 119. We end the financial year with a Belgian/Dutch collaboration: the duos Sylvie De Pauw & Bar Maris and Henk Bakker & Lukas Simonis (the X Static Tics). The subject too has a similar hybrid nature.
What is it?
A radio broadcast/radio play musical with text from Pallieter by the Belgian writer Felix Timmermans and from Polletje Piekhaar by Willem van Iependaal, who’s from Rotterdam.
Why?
The group finds it interesting to compare these two contemporaries; what they have in common is a way of life (of freedom and the poetry of everyday existence) and a way with language that still has an original and musical slant to it.
It’s actually a meeting between two dialects (with added literary accents); the pre-World War I Flemish dialect and the Rotterdam underworld ‘slang’ of the interbellum period. Both dialects – if we may call them that – contain a very vital core that can be called innocent, even naive and still holds a tragic nature because they both reflect a way of life that is about to be strangled. Pallieter ends with the main character setting forth into the world with a caravan. Of course, it’s purely fiction but the inevitable thought urges itself upon us that the Pallieter family does not await a very fun and certainly not a very freedom-loving future at the dawn of the outbreak of the Great War (1913/1914). Things are no different with Polletje Piekhaar: an entire culture is described which only a couple years later will be completely sweeped from the face of the earth by Hitler’s Heinkels; Rotterdam would nevermore become the city it once was.
Why!
In the past year, the X Static Tics have made a lot of radio work that can also be performed live, and in collaboration with the Poetry International Festival they made a couple of ‘live radio plays’ together with some poets. These poets also joined the live performance and they were Ursula Andkjaer Olsen (DEN), Yan Jun (CHIN), Michèle Métail (FR), Martin Gambarotta (ARG) and Saskia de Jong (NL). What was fascinating about working with poetic texts was mainly the space for an aural landscape that the words created, larded with music snippets that could carry just as much abstraction as the spoken word. This again contributed to an equal share, both quantitative and contentwise, of text and sound. The Polletje Pallieter Project demands a somewhat more supporting (more "figurative") sound image but still leaves plenty of room for improvisation and imagination.
The X Static Tics found in Maris & De Pauw a Belgian duo just as versatile as they are; from the solemn songs to the reconstructed sound story. For several years, this duo has been creating their own sound world on the edge of classic and improvisation with this peculiar set of instruments of trumpet and voice (supplemented with electronics).
Their latest production about the life of Maria Nys (wife of Aldous Huxley and a girl from the region of Eeklo, Belgium) will premiere on 5 June 2015. This production is a collaboration between three musicians from Eeklo: Sander de Winne, Hans van Oost and Hendrik Braeckman.
Polletje Pallieter is the logical next collaboration revolving around music and language.