CD – Futura Resistenza

Suzana Lașcu, Robert Kroos and Reinier van Houdt have worked on recordings of old pinball machines – largely from the museum in Rotterdam dedicated to this pre-Internet hobby – transforming them into various musical textures. It is not insignificant that the project took shape during the months of the pandemic, when the museum was closed and silent, daily life suspended and out of its usual rhythm. Recorded in two sessions at L’Aology Sonia Studios, the name chosen by the trio, linx, recalls a type of game described by Roger Caillois – a practice that generates dizziness and intoxication, especially when exposed to uncontrollable external forces. In this case, however, sound control, although pursued with unconventional modes, is manifested through instrumental abilities. Chance and skill coexist in pinball – here the recordings have been reworked into sound collages through cut-up techniques and specific processes, giving life to 28 samples used as starting points for what the authors have as defined game piece. The selected samples highlight the paths of the ball within the machines, with particular attention to the way it hits, deflects and bounces between elements. The sound design reacts to these movements, translating the logic of pinball into a musical dimension where order and disorder intertwine, creating structures that maintain an internal consistency while allowing the unpredictability of the starting materials to emerge. This tension between control and randomness harkens directly back to the aesthetics of Fluxus and other experimental experiences that have made chance and discontinuity a creative principle. The music of Flipperen oscillates between moments of rarity and denser passages, assembling sound fragments in a collage logic that alternates abrupt drops and subtle progressions. Rounding out the project is the cover artwork, which reproduces a 1973 work by Dutch situationist artist Jaqueline de Jong. It again alludes to pinball and the ‘ruin of existence’ as a space in which time bends, and forms remain in constant change, an idea that fully intertwines with the sound poetics of this release. Flipperen does not limit itself to recovering the mechanical sound of a vintage object but reinserts it in a musical context that amplifies its expressive potentialities. It is a work that reflects on the nature of chance, on the possibility of building forms from the unexpected, and that invites listening to music as an open process, made of deviations and bounces, like a ball in a pinball machine.

 

linx – Flipperen