Every week musicians meet up in Amsterdam to freely improvise music in various squats around town. In the last years, electronic equipment has come into the genre a lot. "Kraakgeluiden" is a wonderful documentary of these events – setting improvised music again into the place and light it deserves (and has taken itself out of recently). Any combination of instruments and almost every sound-genre imaginable is available on this CD somewhere, from the purely percussive impro to almost dancelike straight-rhythms (back than an absolute no-no in the genre) and a lot of samplers, noises, big-ass bass-waves, sax-squeaks and a lot of stuff you wouldn’t expect.

Improvised music has always been about finding form in chaos or finding chaos in form, whatever suits your fancy. Sometimes, just when you’ve given up all hope on something, suddenly a spark sets a flame and you find all the fun and energy you’ve missed, again. Fortunately, I am not talking about something really really important, but only about something as serious as improvised music. Except from pure noise-freak-outs and mellow ambient-soundscapes, I had all but given up on improvised music. More and more the artists seemed to get immersed into themselves, drifted apart, wallowing in their own universes without trying to find those cosmic connections to their co-artists or audience which enables the energy to flow freely and made improvised music such an important genre in the first place. It seems as if the artists got more and more interested solely in producing new sounds or noises than producing new music with these new sounds, and all the connections and links got lost. Maybe I was just getting more and more conservative, but then again I found myself preferring to listen to the random noise of the street outside or an underground station or any public place than to the plink and plunk of improvised music. How conservative is that? Now, the CD documenting the “Kraakgeluiden” gives me new hope.

Kraakgeluiden coming from the Dutch words "kraken" meaning either to squat or to crackle and "geluid" meaning sound – is a series of improvised music started by musicians in Amsterdam which has taken the genre out of the academic classrooms and over-theorized studios into squats and in front of dedicated audiences. People who go to squats in winter to listen to improvised music, have to be dedicated, but this time around they were rewarded for their bravery. Which is also true, of course, for the musicians. From 1999 to 2003 concerts happened in three different squats around Amsterdam, including many many musicians both from Amsterdam and passing through, and basically every kind of instrument imaginable.

The main aspect of this CD is the inclusion of electronic music via laptops, samplers, etc. into improvised music, which makes the sounds and dynamics really exciting, gives them new twists and visions. Laptops do act differently than traditional instruments, especially if you try to handle them like real instruments. Samplers were built to bring new timings and new layers of sound into music. Finally, the possibility to play around with enduring and lasting sounds in one singular waveform or to provide a steady humming sound is very much like removing walls from the place you are playing in. Of course, there is still some of the old plink and plunk, especially by the traditional instruments, but the electronic instruments push them into new ways and directions.

Lately the Kraakgeluiden has established so-called "Werkplaats" (which means, I guess, "workplace"), which are 3-day residencies by musicians and that provides them with the place, time and ability to really dive into the music. They have the time to solve technical problems with hardware, software, amplifications and whatever, when playing together before the big event. There, some people can also work on musical ideas beforehand and set out to play live with a plan – which is not a contradiction in improvised music, believe me. Noone expects free improvised music to be perfect anyway. Sometimes even those going completely awry can proof to be the most interesting to some people, because after all improvised music is as muchabout the thinking process as about the music itself.

This CD shows the vast variety of sounds and music produced at the Kraakgeluiden events, which of course will range, according to subjective likes and dislikes, from really interesting to downright boring and back again, but refer to the sentence before, for further food for thought. Maybe the path for the future of improvised music would have to be, to not only let the music be improvised, but also improvise the setting, the place, the time and the audience. A group of musicians would gather with a collection of the gear they might need at someone’s place, wait around until they all feel it is time to get into the bus, drive around the town and decide on a place to play on spot and then just do it. Yeah, I see the troubles with authority, but maybe in the course of some festival which is important for the city council and some common sense of the artists, like not playing in front of a hospital at three in the morning, this should be made possible. Documentation on video and CD should be provided.