Tour de Force: At the fourth of July, the start of the Tour the France 2015 was launched from Utrecht, the Netherlands, homebase of the Concertzender. Not only the cyclists but also composers, performers and equipment have created some amazing achievements with bicycles.
1/ Grafische Methode Fiets/The Graphic Method Bicycle(1979) – Dick Raaijmakers
On occasion of the publication of ‘Dick Raaymakers Monograph’ in 2007 the work was reconstructed by Bart Visser, Edwin van der Heide and Paul Beuk.
A nude man sitting on a bicycle is pulled forewords extremely slowly by a motorized winch and steel cable at a speed of a fifth of an inch per second on a track some thirty feet long. As he moves, the cyclist is lifted up off the saddle by one of the pedals. This forces him to make a normal dismounting movement. At the same extremely low speed, he must swing his leg over the saddle without touching or leaning on it. The simple maneuver is stretched to half an hour and requires incredible concentration and effort from the performer.
The Graphic Method Bicycle is inspired by the work of the French physiologist and film pioneer Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1903). In 1878 Marey developed a technique which he called "chronophotographic" and described in his work La méthode graphique, to record physical movements in graphic time patterns. For example the fluid, living motion of a cyclist was dissolved into a series of dead, still, but continuous photographic images. In The Graphic Method Bicycle this technique is reversed and stretched out, a motion sequence captured in photography is brought to life.
The 2008 performance is executed by two artists and former students of Dick Raaymakers: Bart Visser and Edwin van der Heide, and is produced with the help of Paul Beuk, Steim and V2_.
2/ Zingende fietsen/Singing Bicycles(1976) – Godfried-Willem Raes
The early 20th-century Futurists preferred to make art in the street than on canvas or in the theater.
So does Godfried-Willem Raes’ ‘2nd Symphony’. Bicycles converted into exciting instruments. The result is a fantastic pedalling, buzzing, howling Singing Bicycle Symphony that will delight you.
An open-air event scored for a minimum of twelve cyclists with their own bicycles. About the performance:
Each bike receives a dynamo – if it doesn’t already have one – to generate its own electricity (6 Volt / 3 Watts);
An impedance-matched loudspeaker (16 to 50 Ohms) is connected to the dynamo. The power rating of the speaker should be at least 3 Watts, corresponding to the average power delivered by the generators.
Each loudspeaker gets a carefully calculated length of tube in order to obtain a specific musical scale;
by cycling at different velocities, (the last cyclist continuously overtakes the whole group), glissandi are produced. At very specific velocities, resonance will occur in the tubes.
By cycling over different surfaces, timbre variation and frequency modulation are obtained. Cobblestones provoke tremolo’s, narrow streets reverberate and echo the sounds.
Every cyclist wears a white overall labelled – in large numbers – with the resonant frequency and the interval ratio (between 1/1 and 1/2) of his or her individual instrument.
The Singing Bicycle Symphony is part of the Logos Ensemble’s permanent repertoire.
3/ De onmogelijke fiets/The impossible bicycle (2015) – Roland Emile Kuit
How to deconstruct a bicycle into sine- and cosine waves? Real-time spectral analysis, FFT, IFFT, spectral blurring, phase and frequency shifts of bicycle sounds are constructing a three dimensional sonic world whereby different algorithms produce a trajectory as a journey in stages.
Radio premiere.
1/ Archive Erwin van der Heide.
2/ Archive Logos.
3/ Archive Roland Kuit.
