//NEWS FROM THE PLANET OF MAAZAK!

(image by christian marclay)

At the moment team maazak is in the process of exchanging soundscraps.
This includes various approaches, such creating ambient nylon sounds, capturing operator voices and phone feedback as well as simple tape recorder noise and proccessing the bits and pieces. Each of us had a week to come up with an idea and to translate and express it through sound and pass the "experiment"to the other.

The next step is for each of us to work with the soundscraps that we have received and re-interpret them by adding to the sound, steering the project into a new direction determined by how we experience what we are given, and thereby completing the "sound piece" as one may refer to it as. What makes this challenging is that the other member will be forced to work with whatever he is presented with, and will therefore be challenging the associations and nature of the given sound through re-inventing it. As we are still currently playing with the swapped sounds and are in the process of de-constructing them,we will keep you posted on further ideas, interests and processes.

Therefore these short update scraps simply serve as a rough recalling of what we've been occupied with and as a rough guideline to explain the direction we are taking this in. So we hope to have experiment maazak-file #0001 (still to be named) complete soon!

//PAUL LAFFOLEY'S FOOT

Recently discovered this artist/architect... If you like Alex Grey and architectural precision - check him out. Among other oddities, he has been painting in a room with no windows for the last 43 years(approximate), founded the Boston Visionary Cell and was recruited by Andy Warhol to watch television for him in the pre-dawn hours, since Warhol wanted someone to watch television for him all hours of the day.

During a CAT scan of his head in 1992, a cylindrical piece of metal 3/8 of an inch long was discovered symmetrically lodged in Paul's brain. It is in the exact middle of his head, in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland.

Having to have his leg amputated due to infection after a fall from a 20 foot ladder, Laffoley commisioned Stan Winston (special effects creator for top films including - Aliens, Predator, Terminator series, Jurassic Park, etc.) to create an anatomically correct, fully functional prosthetic LION'S FOOT, which Mr. Laffoley wears to lectures and special occasions.

Check him out: http://www.laffoleyarchive.com/

//EXAM

We've officially kicked things off... I'm planning to put up a photo or two, tonight or tommorow. Will keep you posted on the first available download, which I think should be rather soon, since we're planning on recording the baby-steps, but will probably be moving on quite soon.

//THE THEATRICS OF MAAZAK

Okay…so this serves as an introduction to our new project operation “Maazak” !Maazak is not a Japanese noise duo or some kind of exotic dish best served raw, but rather the name of a project with the aim of creating audio experiments, or rather experimenting with concepts and sound. Being experiment geeks (no, not in a scientific experilab manner ) , we have decided to start playing with sound in relation to ideas. The output is less likely to be music but can be regarded as more of a sound manifestation, borne out of the “what would it sound like” if”s , and “how could one translate this into sound”.

Maazak is not a kind of duo that makes use of traditional instruments to create sound, but rather attempts to use raw ideas as a catalyst to “make sound”. In other words we are not attempting to create beautiful melodies nor to make your ears bleed. The emphasis is on the raw idea, as without our basic concepts the sounds would simply serve as pointless background audio. The concepts will deal with whatever we encounter and regard as a source for any creative output.

Therefore we are challenged to fuse sound with daily life mundanities, which we scrutinize and re-interpret in our own innovative way. By playing around with the conventional idea of rational sound, as well as with the blurred line between common sounds and the unusual, we are attempting to approach this project with an open mind of “anything goes” if it excites us and if we can translate it into sound. Therefore keep in mind that this project is not a band, it is not sound art but a kind of experimentation or simply a sound project.

On this blog we will place posts on a regular basis and share our raw documentation in the form of mp3’s, images and pdf’s with you or whoever has interest what we are occupying ourselves with.

Keep stopping by.

Team Maazak ( a.k.a Jacques + Maaike)