Talking about Possibilities is a long essay on music, sound and noise. It is divided in five parts: Letter to a Young Friend, Daddy Cool, The Man at the Airport, Café Chantant and Utopian Thoughts. Some aspects of futurism, trumpism and political hooliganism are hinted at. Noise as a genre and life-style gets discussed. You can read about the social turmoil in the years before the first world war.

This essay is not aimed at scholars or academics, far from that. People who like to collect and oftentimes read books on sound can consider this essay as a larger footnote. They will encounter familiar names. I have tried to find a different approach towards the discussion on music, sound and noise. I think that the days of noise as a genre are numbered. It is time for something else, for the same old new. Talking about Possibilities attempts to tell you why.

-Rinus Van Alebeek

Dear L,

Thanks for opening the pages of your thesis on the electromagnetic tape.

We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight
against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.

Cedrik Fermont wrote a book, together with Dimitri della Faille, about noise in south-east Asia: Not your World Music. The content of the book is based on their many travels in the region and their encounters.

The book The Bad Bohemian has a long subtitle: The extraordinary life of Jaroslav Hašek, author of the good soldier Švejk. The book is written by Sir Cecil Parrott. It was published in 1978.

Music, that is the law. Music is the maintenance of the law. And sound, sound is the collective effort to define freedom.

After a long interval a new edition of staalzine, born from a simple idea of exchange. Send a postcard or a gift to Anne-F Jacques in Montreal, and you get one of her Crustacés Tapes in return.

The first thing I found out on the day before, was that David Bowie had died. I read it first in a tweet by a friend and then went to a newspaper site. The shock announced by my friend’s message came to full expression when I read the news article.

On the day itself it was sunny again. January was well on its way and, still, there was no sign of winter. It was warm in the morning sun. I put my table and chair outside and had breakfast on the terrace. The winds had cleaned the horizon. The coastline of Sicily appeared in full gloom and Mount Etna rose majestically above it, even more beautiful now that the top was covered by snow.

I met Anne-F Jacques for the first time in Berlin. It was the Winter of 2009. She had come over to play the CTM-festival. I can’t recall the exact reason why she wanted to meet me. Maybe it had something to do with the ‚das kleine field recordings festival,’ that I organised around that time in unusual bars, that I spotted during my bicycle rides.