Monday, May 25, 2009

Van Mens (tape, HP5, 1984), Character 6 - Eminenties (tape, HP6, 1986)

Two weeks ago I borrowed a small box of tapes from a friend and today is the final post I can make of this box and today is the final post with two highly obscure tapes. One is by Van Mens from 's-Hertogenbosch, a group around Frank van Mens (text, voice, music), Huub Urlings (music), Frans Leonard (music, production) and Josan Frissen (voice). Instruments used, according to the cover, TV, vacuum cleaner, various keyboards, various snares, percussion, rhythmbox, glass, voices, bagpipes and 'canned applaus'. Sound poetry meets experimental music. Mostly in Dutch, but quite nice. On the same label, HP (not present in de Nederlandse Cassette Catalogus), is an even shorter cassette (single), with two pieces, 'Als Hij Komt...' (if he arrives) and 'Welkomstlied' (welcome song) and judying by the (stolen!) cover by cartoonist Opland, this deals with the visit of the Pope to 's-Hertogenbosch in 1985. I think with pretty much the same people. Maybe the donator of these tapes cares to leave an anynomous comment on this? Not for sale download

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am the anonymous "donator" of these Frank van Mens tapes. I Just loaned them to the owner of this blog. Also the VEC tapes of Rod Summers are mine and some more of the k7s of the last few weeks and have had doubhts whether to post comments on these as well. But now I am requested for it :)

Anyway, van Mens (who I lost out of sight in the later 80ies) has died in past years (I heard it only as a rumor, so I am not sure) and the label HP was nonsense and didn't stand for anything as far s I know. It was just a made up name /abbreviation as those were very fashionable in those days such as UB40, U2 and even V2 (originally V234) and W139 etc.

The musicians on the tape I can tell a bit about too, it was a bunch of friends who were hometaping and there was a relation with free radio and the squaters movement of these days.

Mr. Mens originally was more interested in literature but wanted to join "our club of hometapers", so to speak. Hummelmans was the guy who had a kind of studio and could really play music and also Huub Urlings was a real musician (a bass player and composer) who had worked with Das Wesen from Nijmegen in the period Das Wesen lost his bassplayer and also had recorded with Bert Barten for the Buried Alive LP and tour of 1982 (I still have that LP).

I have fond memories of this scene but lost most of the people out of sight but Huub can still be found online (I just did :))

I was a hometaper too and recorded with Huub and made radioshows with him. In this scene(s) I was the youngest.

I could tell a whole lot more and the owner of this blog knows me but I prefer to stay anonymous unless ....

Anonymous said...

Here are some more additions by the same "anomymous":

in the previous post I refered to a guy named Hummelmans (in fact it is without the "s"). The blog owner had mentioned him as Frans Leonard (I had overlooked the fact the 3rd part of his name wasn't mentioned on the blog and not on the k7 either, for which my apologies to all).

Leonard sounds as a full second name but I think that the Leonard part was his second first name and he had left out his real last name. Not mentioning your real second name was fashionable in leftwing squaters scenes and mentioning it was considered as "not-done". Frans Leonard was not a squater himself, nor was I myself.

Frans Leonard called himself a producer (that sounded good but we all wondered what he meant by it ?). To proove my point that we are talking about 1 and the same person here is a webpage that is about a later digitized recording (2001) from these days and scene. Here he is also mentioned Frans Leonard (as a musician, composer and text writer) but at the bottom of that page the Hummelman name is mentioned as the person who made all recordings:
http://www.polumnia.net/music/flum1.html