Gijs Gieskes’ creations bridge the divide between innovative modules in Eurorack format and stand-alone art-gallery installations. Fuelled by barely tamed electricity and informed by a high-tech junk yard aesthetic, they seem to possess a life of their own, like a new breed of insect androids. Some of them are electro-mechanical-acoustic and some are purely electronic. In action, they exude the kind of clumsy and lonely autonomous machine helplessness you get from a Survival Research Laboratories video (if less violent) or something like the film Der Lauf der Dinge by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Gieskes breaks down common household items or toys and interfaces them with the rest of your Eurorack modules: a toy speech-recorder; a clock (no, a real alarm-clock); hard-disk motors; an hourglass interacting with a laser beam. His ‘VU-Perc(ussion)’ module is a good example of his aesthetic packed into a compact product: the needle of an old-fashioned VU-meter is triggered by external gates to jam into a copper strip welded on to a piezo-microphone element and amplified. Each one assembled by hand, they are all different, and plugged in and amped, they will make the acoustics of your entire Eurorack case come alive with a resounding thunk! Suffice it to say he has an instantly recognizable aesthetic that is all his own.
The music on this record is rather old, first appearing on a self-published CD-R: “When I made these recordings I didn’t make as many machines myself. Now I often build a device and record a track with it. Then I start on the next machine. The recordings are mostly demos now, but I do record them as a finished track, so they have to be beautiful on their own as well, without necessarily knowing where the sound came from.
“For the recordings of DUF I experimented a lot, and always tried to get the most out of what I had. My favourite music at the time was Shizuo, but I also listen to Aphex Twin a lot, and related music. Also a lot of music my friends were buying, People Like Us, Lucky Kitchen, The Residents via my father, and just pop music. I bought a lot of records at flea markets, to sample, but in the end I did very little with that.
“Now I am mostly inspired by the things already around me, the things I am working on at the moment. These can be anything, anything with a story, and luckily nearly everything does have a story.”
