Bo Wielders

#7 BREAK

15/04/2023

after Alto Fuero, before Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker at KRAAK fest

A three-figured assembly with the sound of twenty tall vocals.
Holding high
Holding heat
Holding the hustle of another evening
BREAK’s presence is a continuation of their friendship and their dishwashing career.
We can still hear them co-existing in late nights.
Rubbing dirt,
full stoves,
wine sipping guests and workers,
clicks of cash.
Forty-four
Forty-seven?
Four-eight-nine-one
Ping
Ping
Thank you, goodnight
Hundred and two
Hundred and ten?
Five-five-three-two
Ping
Ping
Thank you, goodnight
The voices are never smooth,
but always tangibly uttered.
They touch the skin of the listener from a distance.
And carry everyone,
including themselves,
more than occasionally past old electronics.
Fives scolded screams,
shoulder taps,
some bounces,
then drums that turn this day into another.
One whisper is eating the screams of the exterior.
Come come come,
a hat on your top-thinking and image-ego.
Come come come,
a hat on your top-thinking and image-ego.
Come come come,
a hat on your top-thinking and image-ego.
Thwarted by time, scrupulous in its essence.
Then the end is marked by a nose flute.
Likelier to never not think about them again, than to forget it all.

#6 The Mattress Fish

by Yanbing Wu, with additions by Bo Wielders
07/03/2023

I have finished dissecting a mattress fish that has been stranded on the floor for a week. She was a double mattress fish and now the bed frame holds a new mattress fish.

[one harpist enters]

This old mattress fish has been here longer than expected; I bought her from the last tenant of the previous room I lived in, and she moved into this room with me, sometimes I wonder how many people sleep on her before. The mattress fish is so soft that sleeping on her is like falling into melting butter, slowly the border between my body and her is disappearing. But her body started to collapse in the middle and was unable to support my back fully, I woke up every day with pain in back that was becoming unbearable. She is like a slice of bread that has been hollowed out in the middle and is falling off, the resting place becomes impossible to rest on anymore.

[two drummers and three vocalists enter]

Because she could not be easily moved downstairs by myself, also as a large piece of rubbish, I have to call someone to collect her. I didn’t want to call and I didn’t want to ask a friend to help, so I abandon her to a constant shelf of time. On another day, I found a reason to keep her longer, and that was the joy of jumping on her in the morning, which became a habitual action. I think of how I loved to jump on the sofa when I was a child, the brown leather sofa, soft and squishy, like a brown sugar mantou.

[the harpist exits, one trombonist and four trumpetists enter]

Dissecting is a difficult process – I starting with the belly, the fat clings to the meat in a sticky way. Opened a little, inside is fish egg filled with compression springs bones. Open it more and the air flows out, some already formed to tiny fish that remind me of cuttlefish bones. I remember that every time my mother prepare the cuttlefish dish, she would leave the bones, which were said to be used as herbal medicine, but I never saw her do anything with them, they just remained in the corner and one day they disappeared, I don’t know if they were thrown away or the bones dissolved into the air or were eaten bit by bit by the cockroaches hiding in the kitchen.

[two of the vocalists exit]

Everything of her made me feel disgusting, the touch, the smell, still lingering on my hands. All the action was slicing, cutting, chopping, slashing ......

Finally, I put her into one after one black plastic bag, tied up and ready to go in the bin.

[everyone exits]

#3 four friends planning to play a song called 'the second baby attack'

07/02/2023

- Okay, let’s start. Let’s start with this and then we start with this and then we start the drums and then you come in. Right?
- Right
- One, two, three, four, we gonna play it now?
- Who is singing? Who is singing?
- Okay, who is starting? I’m I’m just singing baby
- Uhh
- Uhh, for, in the beginning I guess
- So, I will start it off real softly, and then B. will come in with the bass and then M. will come in with the beat and then you come in with your baby. And then it slowly gradually gets uhhh
- But, everybody should
- Lasers
- Should contribute to the story, cause I can’t do it on my own
- Yeah yeah yeah, but we need to start off somewhere first
- Okay, okay, I will start with just baby
- Baby
- And then we slowly start BAAby
- Yeah, yeah like like first it should sound sweet and soft, until you realize that the babies are the enemy
- Okay, okay, let’s go
- The second baby attackkk
- Yes, you can start with that, once, once I have enough babies
- All the babies together
- No, I’m not sure about that time
- Get ready guys, get ready, get ready, I’m gonna get one round first
…
- You better
…
- I fucked it up
- No, no, continue
- We are gonna fuck it up any way
…

#2 Yalbum: oral shapes by juli

18/11/2022

We feel the persistence in how, in each song, beginning with the opening one called Consistency in what, Ritual of what, juli is held back from expanding those ideas onto something that would allow the listener a moment to focus, for some sort of selectiveness. The only consistency you can find, which is far from the music trance, are the word-notes she leaves us in form of the lyrics saying “NEVER DO THIS AGAIN. REMEMBER HOW LONG EVERYTHING TAKES,” “NEVER AGAIN.” The way they are dropped here and there gives the feeling of no intention to make them easily retraceable, “at hand” to when someone needs them.

As we get closer to end of the album, there is one before the last song called Stitched linen. We can hear an unfading rubbing of the softly textured materials over an artificial voice reading a line of repetitions: cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, split, cut off. Rejecting the first impression of being commanded in some algorithmically driven game, with the overall warmth of sound, something clicks when we consider an option that it’s just a poor translation of a rich array of synonyms for something close to the word cut.

The light sounding materials gain weight in the closing song winter, bedding, cocooning. The heavy mass of sound hangs and swings, like one big skin of the linen into which all the clothing tends to crawl during the laundry. I assume juli’s wish for the final song was to walk us outside, let us hear how that difference sounds to her. Unaware of being inside throughout the whole album, it shocks us how much one’s guts speak side by side the easily approachable vocabulary.

#1 Steve's Aunt by Jenny

17/11/2022

If the sound of an album would live somewhere, the sound of Steve’s Aunt would live in the outskirts of a big town. Somewhere between concrete houses and factories. Here, multi-instrumentalist Jenny gives us synth-screamers and dualisms. She gives us paralyzing freedom and acceptable imprisonment. She gives us urban fetishism in the form of a tree.

The high hot energy from the first part of the album begins to doubt itself. The doubt turns into silence. The synth-screamers don’t know what to say anymore. Or they just don’t want to talk. Jenny herself seems to be exhausted of making sound too. But Steve’s Aunt still continues. What is left is a rather empty area with small infrastructural noises.