"All you left us with was a pile of books, yer cunts."
This 8’00” piece is mainly composed out of audio files from image to sound-software. Some of the original sketches of the ‘New Babylon’ project of Constant Nieuwenhuys were the visible input. Next to the rough data swaps of ‘raw’ files in between photo editing software and audio editing software, the app ‘Virtual ANS’ is used. Based upon the principles of the ANS photo-electric instrument that Sovjet engineer Evgeny Murzin developed in between 1937 and 1957, the ‘Virtual ANS’ transforms the slopes, structures, pixels, surfaces and lines of a drawing or photograph into a drone soundscape.
This translation through the means of old and new technology refers to some extent to the expectations of a better life for human kind in a future that one expects – and expected - to be the plain result of all the steps in the tech revolution. That progress not only benefits, is already a certainty provided from the past.
Paul Devens
Composition and navigation: Suzana Lașcu
Cover art: based on an image by Constant Nieuwenhuys
A sound walk meant to further unsettle the perception of an already unsettling space.
Partially against the notion of preventing documentation out of privacy concerns, this piece dwells on the artificiality and superficiality of an otherwise monotonous building complex, that is New Babylon.
Recorded in 3D entirely underground in the Upper Gallery, Peak Cavern, Castleton, Derbyshire, UK.
double-W are Phil Wolstenholme and Dominika Wroblewska. Two artists from visual backgrounds, approaching sound.
Section 28 / NEAMC perform a graphic score made from stolen pieces of "New Babylon Den Haag" made in 1964 by Constant.
The collaged shapes define the "spaces for play" for the musicians.
More Section 28 at https://neamc-gus.bandcamp.com/
An endless composition played by Ensemble Callenbach. W.Weston 2021
An excerpt from one of Constant's own soundtracks for New Babylon (c. 1968) with kind permission of Fondation Constant.
Privacy Notice from New Babylon.
All text from the website www.newbabylon.nl
Sounds from covertly recorded electromagnetic fields.
https://newsystems.bandcamp.com/album/footnotes-to-new-babylon
Cicada Jubilee
Field recording; Cicadas of Unknown Brood, North America
Debts are canceled in New Babylon and you are free to join the ecstatic swarms in their cicada games.
The Cicada and the Ant
La Fontaine’s Fables, 17th C. France
Cicada, having sung her song
All summer long,
Found herself without a crumb
When winter winds did come.
Not a scrap was there to find
Of fly or earthworm, any kind.
Hungry, she ran off to cry
To neighbor Ant, and specify:
Asking for a loan of grist,
A seed or two so she’d subsist
Just until the coming spring.
She said, "I’ll pay you everything
Before fall, my word as animal,
Interest and principal."
Well, no hasty lender is the Ant;
It’s her finest virtue by a lot.
"And what did you do when it was hot?"
She then asked this mendicant.
"To all comers, night and day,
I sang. I hope you don’t mind."
"You sang?" Why, my joy is unconfined.
Now dance the winter away."
Image: Code of Hammurabi, legal text from “Old Babylon” that periodically forgave debts. Engraved sculpture, Louvre Museum.
Simple Minds - New Gold Dream
The Ruts - Babylon's Burning
The Fall - It's The New Thing
Gregory Isaacs - Babylon Too Rough
Sex Pistols - New York
5 Seconds Of Summer - Babylon
The Adverts - New Church
Matthijn Buwalda - Babylon
Section 25 - New Horizon
Radical Dance Faction - Babylon
Swans - New Mind
Current 93 - The Descent Of Long Satan and Babylon
The Cramps - New Kind Of Kick
Aphrodite's Child - Babylon
The Damned - New Rose
A.I.Z - La Bête 666
Nicole Campau - New Fashion
The Black Dog feat. Ofra Haza - Babylon (Hammurabi)
Pink Industry - New beginnings
Meat Beat Manifesto - Radio Babylon
Mark Foggo - New Shoes
Boney M - Rivers of Babylon
Oppenheimer Analysis - New Mexico
Natacha Atlas - Diaspora
Depeche Mode - New Life
The Legendary Pink Dots - The Whore Of Babylon
Frank Sinatra - Theme From New York, New York
Muslimgauze – Babylon Iz Iraq - Untitled #1
Psychic TV - New Sexuality
Bonnie Prince Billy - Babylon System
Lou Reed - New Sensations
Bob Marley & The Wailers - Babylon System
Velvet Underground - New Age
Lady Gaga - Babylon
The Eagles - New Kid In Town
Manfred Mann's Earth Band - The Road to Babylon
Tuxedomoon - New Machine
DISL Automatic - Burn Babylon Burn
Beyonce - New Shoes
Sylford Walker - Chant Down Babylon
The Slits - Newtown
Dead Can Dance - Babylon
Beastie Boys - The New Style
Thievery Corporation - The Richest Man In Babylon
Das Racist - Brand New Dance
The Cockney Rejects - Where The Hell Is Babylon
Ministry - N.W.O
Celtic Frost - Babylon Fell
Wiseblood - Where Evil Dwells
Prince Far I - Babylon Walls
Gus & the NEAMC - New Babylon
Shellac - New Number Order
King Tubby / Vivian Jackson - Chant Down Babylon
The Cure - New Day
Bad Brains - Destroy Babylon
Iggy Pop - New Values
Catholic Discipline - Underground Babylon
Pet Shop Boys - New York City Boy
Steely Dan - Babylon Sisters
Kanye West - New Slaves
King Tubby - Babylon (dub)
Clock DVA - NYC Overload
Me & The Heat - Babylon, Babylon
Clifton Campbell & Trinity - A New Civilisation
Icho Candy - Babylon
Nina Hagen - New York New York
The Slits - Love Und Romance
Discharge - New World Order
Mtkid - Babylon
Duran Duran - New Moon On Monday
Ekali ft. Denzel Curry – Babylon
4 Skins - Brave New World
Bokke8 - Babylon
Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising
Kontra K - Babylon
U2 - New Year's Day
David Gray - Babylon
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - New Day
SZA - Babylon ft. Kendrick Lamar
The Rolling Stones - New Faces
Dr. John - Babylon
David Bowie - New Killer Star
Gabe Lee - Babylon
This Heat - A New Kind Of Water
Johnny Clarke - Babylon
Johnny Cash - City of New Orleans
Эндшпиль - Мой Babylon
The Clash - Brand New Cadillac
Congorock - Babylon
Siouxsie & the Banshees - New Skin
YUGO - Babylon
The Fall - New Face In Hell
Yzomandias & Gumbgu - Babylon
The Fall - New Puritan
Soulfly - Babylon
Linton Kwesi Johnson - New Crass Massahkah
Sunny Riot - Babylon
Flux Of Pink Indians - Neu Smell
Lorena - Tower of Babylon
The Wall - New Way
Ghazi - Babylon
UK Subs - New Order
Nasio Fontaine - Babylon
Killing Joke - A New Day
The Meditations - Babylon Trap Them
Gorilla Biscuits - New Direction
Baby Cham - Babylon Bwoy
Asian Dub Foundation - New Way, New Life
The Misfits - Hollywood Babylon
John Mayor - New Light
Prince Douglas - March Down Babylon Dub
Sinéad O'Connor - The Emperor's New Clothes
Scientist - Mr. Babylon Dub
tpinnyc - New Wave Country
Gregory Isaacs - Babylon Too Rough
Snoop Dogg - New Wave (feat. Mali Music)
Sylford Walker - Burn Babylon
On one of these rainy Autumn evenings, I sneaked into the New Babylon building located behind the Den Haag Central Station, with a broken-wheel heavy suitcase of mine, while I was back in Den Haag from Berlin after one of these perpetual travels. As I entered the foyer, there was some loading and unloading taking place around the adjacent Albert Heijn. There were a few passersby as well walking shadily through the deserted and semi-darkened corridors. The broken wheels of my suitcase were enlivening the paranormal underbelly of this building with nomadic sonic utterances. There were a few migratory birds outside proclaiming the coming of evening in rapturous murmurs. I took out my recording device, and started to chronicle these emergent interactions in mediated aural traces, before its battery went out. I brought these sounds home, and re-listened to them. This listening formed the work Berlin Babylon and a Migratory Bird in which a bird literally entered and left a trace as an expired memory.
Acknowledgements: the unnamed birds, the loaders/unloaders, and the broken wheels of my suitcase.
piano: Akane Takada.
music: Yota Morimoto.
a fragment of a piano piece composed and recorded in new babylon. unlike its original form this version is devoid of parts other than the piano. the emptiness and the somewhat decontextualized musical time leave space for the 'raw' resonance.
Score for the Body, the Building and the Soul
for the New Babylon building complex in Den Haag
memoris - gunnar.grimsson
performed live in Reykjavik 30.11.2021
dedicated to all the wonderful people that have blessed me with music
An excerpt from one of Constant's own soundtracks for New Babylon (c. 1968). (by kind permission of Fondation Constant)
BMB con. perform with Constant's own "electronic controller" from 1968.
Rolling Stones (2018) for Purls & Jars
Composed by Ji Youn Kang
Performed by Ji Youn Kang & Mei Yi Lee
3rd/June/2018 Studio Loos Den Haag