!nterpenetration 2.7.5: Rinus van Alebeek ・ Burkhard Beins

Rinus van Alebeek debuted as a writer winning the Geertjan Lubberhuizenprijs with his first novel, De Weg naar Oude God, and throughout the ‘90s he published other books with both the same pseudonym Philip Markus and his real name. His writings, mainly about travelling or walking through space in an ever-receptive mode towards the surroundings passing by, make landscapes and cities speak, trying to find stories in them and in the passage through them. This attention to the environment and the informational potential of its multisensorial elements slowly led him to sound recording: his books Stop the Music and Deep Poland discussed various aspects of the sound experience, but it is since the early 2000s that the writer started to use also environmental recordings on cassettes to narrate stories. Currently, Rinus van Alebeek is the caretaker of the legendary label Staaltape, co-founder of Radio On Berlin, sound cassette performer and member of several experimental music projects. In his practice, found cassettes are often used as media support or raw material for works and publications, together with field recordings and sound manipulations operated directly with walkmans. This approach encompasses not only a specific sound aesthetic, but also a narrative perspective typical of the novel writer, regarding his tapes also as “a recording of something that happened in the past, or a reference to the passing of time and the layers of experiences that get drowned by our memories.”