Second volume of kantoor, a collaboration of Petrichor with Staaltape.

Featured are artists from all over the world who incorporate found tapes in their practice. Invited to share their fascination for this sound storage medium, they provide the listener, each in their own language, with an insight into their own personal collections and into the horizons of this sound practice niche. Whether found on flea markets, in the trash, in old archives or simply by accident, the recorded material had to be selected according to each artist’s curatorial idea, provided that the pieces were not manipulated nor modified. The recorded material presented in Kantoor goes back as far as the mid 1950s and ranges from family memories to answering machines, religious speeches, astrological séances, poetry declamations and children playing.

The cassettes were dubbed at home on re-used C90 tapes, and the zine presents texts and collages that contextualize the recordings and their history or expand their content to create other stories. The artists have each contributed here in their own way with sound pieces, short essays and stories, simple explanations or lists, pictures and photographs.

Here is what Rinus van Alebeek writes about it:

“I sent out precise guidelines to each contributor:
Go through your found tapes/found recordings.
Think of exhibition.
Choose the pieces.
Think how they go together, contradict eachother and/or follow the idea of chance in relation to eachother.
Think of the length, how different lengths go with each other.
Don’t change the sound, low volume is low volume, big volume is big volume.

What I need is more of archival, or archeological character.
No layers, no fade-in/fade-out layers, no variation in pitch, unless it is caused by the quality of the tape itself.
(You get me in trouble if you play the tape over a found tape machine that causes pitch differences by itself)
You could leave out the breaks, or make a break of a second or two seconds between the different pieces.
You can include fragments of found music tapes as well.
Basically it has to be
fragment – fragment – fragment and so on.
You can vary in length of fragments”

Kantoor 2 has contributions by Marcin Barski, Kristoffer Raasted, Roman Voronovsky, Mark Vernon, Giada dalla Bontà and Rinus van Alebeek. Whether found on markets, in suitcases, on attics or in the garbage all these recordings have one thing in common, they offer a glimpse into a past not long gone. The listener to these tapes will be astounded on how near an audible past is to present life. It is like eavesdropping on your neighbour or on the people at the table next to you, with this exception that the sounds and people you hear will never be reproduced or be the same again.

Published in 2019 in an edition of 60.