Raymond Dijkstra about Raymond Dijkstra

All my work is highly autobiographical, highly subjective and highly emotional. In this sense my work is the complete opposite of that from most musicmakers out of the experimental corner who’s work is mostly without any emotion.

The reason for me making music is to strenghten my connection with life. For me my music is not experimental, simply because it was Never made to experiment.

There is a bit of a problem with most experimental musicians, who are mostly only touching the surface of a subject after which they go beyond to find another experiment. I feel more connected to painters and sculptors who delve deep into the subject and explore it thoroughly, going into every possible direction, to really connect with their world. Even more interesting I find it when one connects with ones own genuine personal world. Just to come home to his self, instead of going out for a journey, what experimenting often is.

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DADAPHON ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

10 Inch vinyl record | Release by Le Souffleur – Year of release : 2003 | Numbered edition of 400 | Collage, concept and execution Raymond Dijkstra. Blank recordsleeves with add on cellotaped collage. Different versions. Some have stamp by Le Souffleur or are signed by the author. The LP is numbered 01 to 400; or is dated in which case they have original (one off) artwork. The photocopied collages consist of cut-up photo’s collaged together with cellotape; after which they have been photocopied again, cut-up with a knife and repaired with cellotape. The collages with handwritten texts and printed texts are assembled from books and manuscripts collected on fleemarkets. Some of the handwritten texts date from 1845, most others are from the 19th century/begin 20th. The recordlabels are red (background) with monochrome gold lettering. Vinyl-record weight: 180 grams. Black vinyl. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 400. All items are individually handmade / all artwork by Raymond Dijkstra

This is a nice 10″ vinyl artifact

by Raymond Dijkstra, according to whom the “Dadaphon” moniker identifies a group…even if this music soundslike a studio creature made by a single entity. The two sides are both very interesting and pretty unpredictable: mostly made of electronic/concrete, sound/noise collages, they remind yours truly of a cross between the older, radical Mnemonists albums and MB (Maurizio Bianchi) in his “industrial” era, but with a distinct mitteleuropean flavour separating this production from the mass of wannabes we’re full of these days. I also loved the “old style” vinyl label – everything helps to make things not easily foreseeable before putting the record on. Looking forward to new works! — Touching Extremes

This is one of the more stranger records

to land on my desk. Under the monniker of Raymond Dijkstra we hail the return of Raymond Dijkstra, who in the past worked as Razoul Uzlu, Ki Sync Pulse and was once a member of Indra Karmuka. By now he has a small discography with as many releases as monnikers. This new 10″, released on his label, sees him return to his Razoul style. Scraping sounds, metal on glass that sort of thing, backed with a variety of drony sounds that have gotten a nice bath of reverb, which occassionally leap into feedback. It’s an odd mixture of sounds that are far away and very nearby. It’s a sound that reminds me of old, very old Merzbow, circa Ecobondage or Disclosure. Strangely continous movements, very raw and minimal, but a strongely captivating sound. Loaded from bottom to top, from deep end to high end, every gap is filled. It unfolds it’s beauty after repeated listening. — FdW (Vital)

– each time Raymond Dijkstra records

it seems to come out under a different name. in the past he has used Ki Sync Pulse and Razoul Üzlü, and now he becomes Dadaphon. the changing names make sense because each project is so different. in this guise, he has created two wonderful pieces of reverberant junk noise. these slow motion pieces (as opposed to the more intense cut ups of Razoul Üzlü) would lead one more to think he was a contemporary of Merzbow, MB and TNB than a contemporary artist. add to this the simple cover with its paste on photocopy collage (each copy different), it looks a genuine artifact from a previous decade, the sort which would be coveted by now. in edition of only 400 numbered copies. — Eric Lanzillotta

Le soufleur our dutch friend

has issued 2 super yummies in his collection. the first being the 10″ of dadaphon which is probably an experimental record that I truly enjoyed. being the baby of raymond dijkstra, known from various disguises like ki sync pulse, razoul uzlu & so this one that has a very nice record label as a parody of old 50’s classical records & simple handmade cover on a white sleeve, is an intense surreal soundscape. often organumesque not in sound but in the perception, well actually raymond’s work reminds me a lot of 80’s groups (that once were amazing and now are retarded) but with very creative and as aforementioned surreal sounding, a thing that am afraid ceases today. a more drone/feedback game here and various sounds coming & going w/ an intensity (on the first side) & more obscurity (on the second) made this 10″ as probably the best work of his I’ve come across to the day. limited to 400 (le soufleur does only limited edition vinyls) so guess you should hurry up. —Absurd

Outside a number of cassette and CD-R releases

the fifth “proper” one by Dutch artist Raymond Dijkstra, whose work (including three releases with Indra Karmuka for German labels Drone & Radical Rendezvous and Poland’s Ignis) began in the mid-’90s. The two pieces here comprise scrunched-up electronics, barely discernible analogue skewering, hallucinatory textures and fragmented signals from a lost civilisation that’re, together, poised with a purpose rarely glimpsed in such realms these days. Very nice. Limited to 400 copies, pressed on heavy vinyl and packaged in handmade covers incorporating an individual piece of exclusive (photocopied) artwork by Dijkstra himself on a new label dedicated to vinyl only releases of a surrealistic, psychedelic or “outsider” nature. — Adverse Effect

listen to Dadaphon | Raymond Dijkstra

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DE GELOFTE ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP in red velours hardcover box with debossed black and debossed gold print | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2008 | Numbered and signed | Edition bound in cloth-linen 50 copies. With inlay. | Concept and design Raymond Dijkstra. Translation: “The vow” Red velours hardcover box with debossed black and debossed gold print on front and debossed gold print on side. Inside the box a fine (newspaper-)paper inlay with black image; and the LP-cover with stamp of the publisher Le souffleur and stamped number 01-50. The inside of the box is signed by the author. Size of the box: 32 – 32 – 1,5 cm. Total weight: 750 grams. Vinyl-record weight: 120 grams. Black vinyl. Handstamped recordlabels. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 50. Concept, design Raymond Dijkstra. All items are individually handmade under supervision of Raymond Dijkstra.

  listen to De Gelofte | Raymond Dijkstra

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DE GEDACHTE ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP in red velours hardcover box with debossed black and debossed gold print | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2008 | Numbered and signed | Edition bound in cloth-linen 50 copies. With inlay. | Concept and design Raymond Dijkstra. Translation: “The thought” Red velours hardcover box with debossed black and debossed gold print on front and debossed gold print on side. Inside the box a fine (newspaper-)paper inlay with black image; and the LP-cover with stamp of the publisher Le souffleur and stamped number 01-50. The inside of the box is signed by the author. Size of the box: 32 – 32 – 1,5 cm. Total weight: 750 grams. Vinyl-record weight: 120 grams. Black vinyl. Handstamped recordlabels. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 50. Concept, design Raymond Dijkstra. All items are individually handmade under supervision of Raymond Dijkstra

Of course I don’t like using swear words

but I do use them, usually English ones. ‘Fucking Hell’ is what escaped my mouth when I opened the latest box by Le Souffleur, the label that almost entirely releases the music of its owner Raymond Dijkstra. Two identical carton boxes (which were, oddly enough, called ‘cassettes’ in the days of classical music) of which the top lid has red velvet with gold print. Inside athin piece of paper with the same information and design. One record is called ‘De Gedachte’ (‘the thought’) and one is ‘De Gelofte’ (‘the vow’). That’s about as far as details go these two records. Like with his previous works, there is a strong similarity between these two new records, and with the previous releases, but there is an important difference too. Dijkstra moves glass over glass, while a sort of harmonium plays sparse notes. That is the same as before, but the harmonium playing seems to be lesser than on the previous records. It places an accent and nothing much else. The glass-on-glass is also more sparse and there is a total lack of sound effects – before it was an old ‘space echo’ machine, here it’s entirely gone. I must say that these perhaps minor changes sound like ‘nothing’ to you, but for me it marks some essential differences. This is almost total acoustic music, of carefully scraping, scratching and touching of surfaces. Like before there are great similarities between the two records now available, but I don’t think, in an Organum twist or turn, Dijkstra is playing the same piece twice, like a strict repeat. More over, I think he actually does play the same piece twice, but that he executes the two pieces in slightly different ways – just as a classical piece of music is never the same thing twice. Panta Rhei is what moves Dijkstra – everything flows. His music is like a river. It seems the same, but it never really is. Another two, great pieces of vinyl, and a very consistent oeuvre is built here. — FdW (Vital)

listen to De Gedachte | Raymond Dijkstra

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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LA PHILOSOPHIE DES CHIOTTES ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

One sided LP | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2004 | Edition of 200. Translation: “Philosophie of the shithouse” LP and cardboard in plastic sleeve. LP-innercover with stamp of the publisher Le souffleur. Vinyl-record weight: 140 grams. Black vinyl. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 200.

Raymond Dijkstra is a veteran Dutch sound artist

and his Le Souffleur label has released a handful of his own works on vinyl both solo and in collaboration with Timo van Luijk as Asra. This is a one-sided LP that comes in a plastic sleeve with a printed white card insert which is slightly smaller than the record. The insert has the title of the record printed in block letters, and nothing more. The record labels add no more information other that the artist’s name. This all adds to the mystery. “La Philosophie des Chiottes” apparently translates as “Philosophy of the Toilet”– though I’m not sure I can guess at how that might apply to the composition. The piece is a sparse mix of closely-mic’ed scratches and scrapes, faint electric cable hum, subtle feedback whistles and a recurring “organ-like” sequence. There is some delay and possibly some other effects at play but the sounds that dominate are the raw scratchy microphone sounds, which remain prominent throughout. The sound that I identify as “feedback whistles” rises in volume as the mix progresses, but the overall feel of the track is very balanced- the sounds flow at a constant pace and rarely rise to any level which might even remotely be considered as “loud”. I’m reminded of the work of Ralf Wehowsky and late P16 D4- subtle and mysterious electroacoustic music (heavy on the acoustic element) that follows a logic of its own. The organ-like sequence (perhaps a harmonium) becomes a bit freer as the track passes the halfway point, as the effects and delay seem to acquire a bit more intensity. The whole track dissolves into near-silence as it winds down to the finish, leaving nothing but the ambient hiss of an empty room. Or, at least that is what it sounds like to me. Fans of the work of Wehowsky and related Selektion label artists should investigate Djikstra’s work. — Angbase

For people like Raymond Dijkstra

content is more important than apparence. His new LP is comes in an plastic bag with the title printed on the cover and nothing else. Also the label has no other information. Dijkstra played music as Ky Sync Pulse, Asra (with Af Ursin), Razoul Uzlu aswell as his own name. I always find it hard to draw out the differences between these names, if they are there at all. It’s a pity that for whatever reason this LP has only one side of music, and me thinks it’s also one piece on the side that contains the music. It starts out with the close miked recordings of objects and surfaces, but as the piece continues the close miked recordings are fed through a line of delay effects, some reverb and small electronic backdrops start to occur. A bit of drone, but it’s hardly continuous. Soundwise Dijkstra comes close to Merzbow’s late 80s period: scraping metal, disjointed organ/drone sounds, with just a little bit of electronic sounds. These days one could compare his music with Seth Nehil, MNortham or Yannick Dauby. A pity that’s only one half of a record. — FdW (Vital)

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DIE SONNE ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP in linen hardcover box with debossed and gold print | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2007 | Numbered and signed | Edition bound in cloth-linen 100 copies. | Concept, design, handmade covers Raymond Dijkstra | (Translation: “Die Sonne”- Middle dutch (old dutch) for “The Sun”) Linen hardcover box with debossed and debossed gold print. The box is opened by sliding out a cardboard innercover attached to a wooden spine. The spine is attached to the innercover by a piece of linen, with the text “DIE SONNE RAYMOND DIJKSTRA” on the side of the spine. Inside the innercover sits the LP-cover with autograph by the author and stamp of the publisher Le Souffleur. The LP-cover is numbered with a stamp 01 to 100. Size of the box: 32 – 32 – 1,4 cm. Total weight: 900 grams. Vinyl-record weight: 180 grams. Black vinyl. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 100. Concept, design Raymond Dijkstra. All items are individually handmade by Raymond Dijkstra

Die Sonne (2007) is another work for harmonium and musique concrete. Compared with its predecessors, what is missing is the relentless, virulent stream of consciousness. This is instead a fragmented experience of austere dissonant chamber music. The overall effect is far less powerful.

Raymond Dijkstra

calls himself a “sculptor, painter, drawer and composer of acoustic music”. We already met him several times through the years, both with solo releases and under the Dadaphon alias. He clearly prefers vinyl to make his sounds heard, and in this particular case the two albums are interesting items as artistic objects in themselves, contained as they are in a linen hardcover box with debossed gold print on total black. The music, in both records, is made of a few elements, and apparently is totally improvised. The most evident sound is a shrieking, frictional rubbing of strings and/or metals – like a wrecked violin or a creaking door’s noise, but not quite. It’s incessant, uneasy, anarchic and unclassifiable. At times, the source is treated with echo and other effects but just so slightly, in order for the whole to be “spaced out” a bit. In the background, something like an electric organ or a harmonium continuously arpeggiates in unpredictable ways, similar to a crazed sequencer. But its volume in the mix is so low that one just feels that presence. Both albums feature a pretty long first side and a very short second side, in a sort of symmetry. On “Die Sonne” we read “In memoriam Jacoba Francisca Josephine Dijkstra-Nettekoven”; this seems to be the only real difference in these practically twin records. With Raymond Dijkstra, you get exactly what you see and hear; that’s not bad amidst a lot of people whose hollow words hide a total absence of anything meaningful. — Touching Extremes

 listen to Die Sonne | Raymond Dijkstra

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DIE WILLE ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP in linen hardcover box with debossed and gold print | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2007 | Numbered and signed | Edition bound in cloth-linen 100 copies. | Concept, design, handmade covers Raymond Dijkstra | (Translation: “Die Wille”- Middle dutch (old dutch) for “The Will”) Linen hardcover box with debossed and debossed gold print. The box is opened by sliding out a cardboard innercover attached to a wooden spine. The spine is attached to the innercover by a piece of linen, with the text “DIE WILLE RAYMOND DIJKSTRA” on the side of the spine. Inside the innercover sits the LP-cover with autograph by the author and stamp of the publisher Le Souffleur. The LP-cover is numbered with a stamp 01 to 100. Size of the box: 32 – 32 – 1,4 cm. Total weight: 900 grams. Vinyl-record weight: 180 grams. Black vinyl. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 100. Concept, design Raymond Dijkstra. All items are individually handmade by Raymond Dijkstra

Here we see two LP records, Die Sonne and Die Wille.

These two foreboding slabs of extreme electro-acoustic art were sent to me by Raymond Dijkstra, who calls himself Le Souffleur for his sound-art endeavours. At time of writing I must confess I have not managed to sit through any one of these four sides in their entirety, as I find the music incredibly bleak, tense, and angst-inducing. Both these records are filled with strangely non-musical scrapes and squeaks as of something produced by some badly-oiled machinery, all set against a recurring backdrop of extremely discordant chords played on the harmonium. Some delicate and judicious use of electronic echo enhances the scrapes every so often, spinning them off into abstracted realms of controlled gestural noise. These are not especially loud or obnoxious records; indeed, their quietness and restraint borders on the clinical. Rarely have I encountered something that fills me with such a sense of isolation and dread; impersonal, cold, almost terrifying, these records present bleak statements about the unknowable nature of a vacant and meaningless universe.

As you may have gathered, Le Souffleur’s records may not be exactly to my taste. However, I still think the man’s work deserves your time and investigation, and this for two reasons.

(1) He clearly believes whole-heartedly in what he is doing, to the extent that having crafted the work he funds it completely by himself, and for all I know he even runs the mail order business to sell the work through his website. His fierce dedication to creating a quality art-statement product is amply reflected in the sumptuous production values for these records. Just look at them. Casebound in black linen, embossed in gold and in blind, with elaborate cardboard mounts for the records which include rolled spines with gold lettering. Each artefact is individually numbered, and the paper sleeve is signed with a soft pencil by the artist. These are more like luxury edition art books than record albums. (See here for some intriguing pictures). There’s also his insistence on the utter superiority of vinyl as a representation format, which aligns him with American Scott Foust (another electronic loner whose name often appears alongside the word ‘uncompromising’).

(2) Le Souffleur, like all good dedicated artists, has created a hermetic universe all of his own. The fact that I can’t readily apprehend its dimensions is more to my detriment than to his. These two records are just two key statements from a larger cosmology, one ruled by a very particular choice of words (the titles are in a language called Middle Dutch, or old Dutch) and precise symbols as esoteric as anything you’ll find in an Alchemist’s engraved handbook. The mystery is simply deepened by the inexplicable and, in places, haunting sounds that can be heard should you purchase one of these limited-edition artefacts from another world. — Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)

 listen to Die Wille | Raymond Dijkstra

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DE HAMER ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP | Release by Le Souffleur – Year of release: 2008 | Numbered 50 copies | Handwritten recordlabels, | autograph | Some with drawing. Translation: “The hammer” LP plus fine (newspaper-)paper inlay with black image; handwritten numbered 1-50. Vinyl-record weight: 120 grams. Black vinyl. Handwritten recordlabels. Some with handdrawings. Some with autograph. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 50. Artwork Raymond Dijkstra.

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)

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DE LARF ~ RAYMOND DIJKSTRA

LP | Release by Le Souffleur | Year of release: 2008 | Numbered 50 copies | Handwritten recordlabels, autograph | Some with drawing.Translation: “The maggot” LP plus fine (newspaper-)paper inlay with black image; handwritten numbered 1-50. Vinyl-record weight: 120 grams. Black vinyl. Handwritten recordlabels. Some with handdrawings. Some with autograph. 33 Rpm. Limited edition of 50. Artwork Raymond Dijkstra.

Here, on two new records Dijkstra continues

to explore his own sound empire a bit further, with again subtle differences. ‘De Hamer’ seems to be richer in sound than ‘De Larf’ for instance, which is more sparse. Whereas ‘De Hamer’ seems to be having organ/harmonium sounds, ‘De Larf’ has small points of silence and the sounds are more stereo separated. In both works the glass sounds are again the leading instrument. ‘De Larf’ is the more minimal record and asks more from the listener than ‘De Hamer’, as this is a highly concentrated play on sound versus silence, or silence and sound. True Dijkstra fans, and count me in, will love this total outsider music, free of any pressure or need for a change and will love the building of this extended catalogue of sound. For those who think ‘heard one, heard all’, these two records may bring nothing else, but then surely you didn’t pay enough attention. I think they are great.  — FdW (Vital)

LP version (incl. shipment cost world-wide)