Harold Schellinx (Maastricht, the Netherlands) is an artist, writer, improvisor and creator of unusual and original musics. As a member of The Young Lions and several other post-punk bands in the Amsterdam of the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was among the initiating forces of the dutch ‘Ultra’ movement (the purely dutch version of what has become known as ‘post-punk experimental pop music’). He was co-founder, editor and London correspondent of the dutch modern music magazine ‘Vinyl’, while pursuing (in Holland, Belgium and the UK) a range of widely acclaimed musical projects. These include ‘Commuters’ – a collaboration with German singer Dagmar Krause (Slapp Happy/Henry? Cow), ‘Signs & Symptoms’ – with Peter Mertens, and a series of ‘pop fictions’ (Bogdan Wlosik, Agonie Ajournée …) – written and produced together with Ronald Heiloo.
Schellinx studied formal music and computer assisted composition with Gotfried Michael Koenig at the Institute of Sonology (Utrecht University), and mathematics and its foundations at the University of Amsterdam (PhD 1994).
Since 2000 his musical work growingly has become based on his ‘sonic diary’, an audio cassette archive of monophonic recordings made of his (and others’) everyday activities, always with a lapel microphone and a dictaphone walkman. The ‘sonic diary’ covers a period of over 30 years
Schellinx’ current activities include : • the Amsterdam based eclectic media duo ‘ookoi’, who over the past four, five years have been assembling a collection of sound- and other media works conceived of as the continuous re-arrangement and transformation of extracts from ookoi’s growing library of live and field recordings; ookoi’s work, situated somewhere between performance-art and concert, between theater and music, between visual and sound art, has been published on CD, DVD, in the form of a DDD (Digital Data Dump), through audio web streams, as well as through a series of podcasts (audio) and vodcasts (audio/video). • the Paris based quarted ‘Diktat’, in whose performances electroacoustic improvisation with dictaphones and lo-fi field recordings is set to meet free improvisation on traditional acoustic instruments (double bass, saxophone); • the online ‘found tapes exhibition’, which meticulously records in ‘blog format’, the efforts and results of restauring the audio tape debris that he is picking up from the streets through which he passes since early 2002. He documents his and related work online since 2002 in the ‘soundblog’. He is editor-in-chief of Raudio, a collection of 24/7 audio webstreams hosted by the Amsterdam based artists collective PARK4DTV.
Schellinx is living and working in Paris (France) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
http://soundblog.net
http://raudio.nl
appearance at Tuned City
das kleine field recordings festival / 04.07.08