Additional Information.

The story behind the name “Clogsontronics”.

Störung had released a single under the label “Störung Records”. I thought that label name had a limited impact, so with plans from both Störung and Ensemble Pittoresque to bring an album out, I started, as I often did in these situations, to work out a strategy at home in Wolphaartsdijk. It didn’t take long before finding the concept as it has been done many times by artists in the past: Individual artists with similar style and philosophy that formed a group or movement under a specific name.
The name had to make clear that it concerned Dutch artists making a techno-pop/electro-pop style of music. Walking to the supermarket to do some shopping’s, I remembered that Richard and I, while walking, often produced shifting rhythm patterns by individually striking one clog against the other. The link was clear; clogs are generally associated with Holland, clogs and electronics = Clogsontronics. Eugenius and I decided to continue the combination of letters and numbers, to specify the records (the SG ...), that were used for their single.

Cold Wave?

The music of Ensemble Pittoresque has been labeled with different names throughout the decades. We called it techno-pop ourselves at the time and later one of the names became minimal wave and they are all fine with me with one exception: “cold wave”. Although the lyrics Richard and I wrote together were to some extend Dadaistic (Building Brains, Maître Satori and partly Ash Grey as Sunday), the lyrics I wrote alone were all personal and I can’t really understand what there is “cold” about that, but maybe I’m missing the point somewhere.

“Hosumuku Collectief”.

Along with the re-release of the “For this is Past” album came two “Hosumuku Collectief” stickers. I already wrote on my August 2008 contribution that these stickers had nothing to do with Ensemble Pittoresque. Clogsontronics then, trying to disguise their blunder, called it “the never established art collective”. That’s pretty vague, so let me explain a little about what it had to do with. Hosumuku stands for Ho=Hollands (dutch) su=surrealistisch (surrealistic) mu=muzikaal (musical) ku=kunst (art) and Collectief means collective. The youth club “Tent” in Wassenaar wanted to encourage creative activities. There were already sometimes jam-sessions organized and it seemed the manager of that club a good idea to organize them more frequent and on a somewhat larger scale. So I suggested the name Hosumuku Collectief (of which the fun part was that it sounded Japanese) and a classmate of mine at the art academy designed the sticker. That sticker was made to promote the idea but the initiative lived only a short life.

The initiator.

Apart from the nasty things Ton wrote me in our e-mail correspondence following the re-release of “For This is Past”, he did wrote some nice and sensible things as well, showing the better part himself. In the “About me” part on the right side of this blog I described myself, amongst other things, as the “founder of Ensemble Pittoresque” which in a strict sense of the word isn’t the case. That always felt a bit uncomfortable and to stay on a somewhat more modest side I decided to change that into a description he gave. Because I do not want to be accused of a wrong translation, I hereby give the original Dutch text: “Ensemble Pittoresque en met name de demo en For This Is Past is het produkt van een band.
Die band had niet een echte leider maar wel een initiator. De man die het initiatief nam was Paulus Wieland. Paulus Wieland is de man die het overgrote deel aan ideeen en composities (in de traditioneele betekenis van het woord) heeft aangeleverd. Onbetwist heeft Paulus Wieland de meeste tijd gedurende bovengenoemde periode in de band gestoken".

My biggest fan.

After the concert we did at Meagher Goet, Belgium a girl approached me and said that for her the “For this is Past” album was the music to play on rainy Sunday afternoons, which really hit me because all the songs I wrote alone were written during rainy Sunday afternoons. What more recognition could a musician possibly want? Later that year I visited her together with a friend of mine and I remember drinking numerous different Belgium beers in a pub with the fully written name of DNA.

Frequenz - as on the release itself.

As it was too inconvenient for Ton and Richard to do so “The Art of Being” album contained no composer credits. On the re-release of the “For This is Past” album they changed 4 out of the 10 composer credits (you can read why that was done on my August 2008 contribution). It is not unlikely that something similar will happen or already has happened with the info they give about the “Frequenz” album (on their site or somewhere else), so I will give you the information as it is printed on the rear side of the album cover here.

SIDE ONE
URBAN CATASTROPHY 4.25
SOUND IT IS 2.44
FREQUENZ 2.29
MY BABY IS A WAITRESS 2.51
SLEEPWALKING 4.17
TRAIN GRANDE VITESSE* 3.30

SIDE TWO
THE MOUTHSHUT 4.44
PROGRAM 3.19
PRESIDENNEKIE 3.33
SEVERAL SUNSETS 3.50
SHIFT 17 2.44

RICHARD NEUMÖLLER
voice soundtracks drumcomputer guitar

ED VAN HOVEN
bass crashcymbal

PAULUS WIELAND
guitar synthesizer

MARION PRINZ
synthesizer voice

LE BIQUO
synthesizer trumpet

ALL COMPOSITIONS BY ENSEMBLE PITTORESQUE EXCEPT* WHICH WAS COMPOSED PERFORMED AND RECORDED BY KEES TAZELAAR AT THE INSTITUTE OF SONOLOGIE, UTRECHT. BAGPIPE ON THE MOUTHSHUT PLAYED BY GIPO. RECORDED DIRECT ON MASTERTAPE AT SOCIAMEDIA, THE HAGUE, DURING FEBR./MARCH ’84. MASTERTAPE MANIPULATIONS AT THE WILLEKES HOMESTUDIO. COVER ART AND DESIGN BY PETER VAN WIJLAND TIEMAN. PRODUCED AND ENGINEERED BY TON WILLEKES. INFORMATION AND MANAGEMENT: (here a telephone number follows that is no longer connected with that particular person-PW).