Some impressions of ‘The Spoken EP’ – Part 1

Some impressions of ‘The Spoken EP’ – Part 1

Some friends of mine played me some tracks from ‘The Spoken EP’ by the Dutch musician Afke Flaviana van Rijn. We especially listened to ‘Rant’ and ‘Moments’. We didn’t stream them from YouTube but via Spotify, so it was purely an auditory experience. The sound quality on my friend’s computer is quite decent, but naturally limited. I therefore initially mistook the expansive brass sections in ‘Moments’ for keyboard sounds and asked myself whether the whole composition was Afke’s, as I’d been struck by the delicate sonic imagination. At the time, I only partially understood her lyrics, and I spontaneously interpreted the passages that stood out to me as having a feminist slant:

We are not here to serve you
We are not here to wait on or to entertain and nurse you
We’re human beings

Back at home, I then discovered the YouTube recording of it; the sound quality was better on my larger speakers, and I could also see the musicians (including a son of my friends in ‘Moments’) – and in the video’s credits, I read the clear indication that these were Afke’s musical compositions. And I think they’re really brilliant! Both the music for ‘Rant’, which ventures into the chaotic (in parts a bit like ‚Free Jazz‘), and the sonic delights of ‘Moments’.

The second impression her ‘Rant’ text made on me was that of an artistic outcry: We musicians aren’t just here to entertain; we want to be taken seriously as people and as artists! It reminded me of a painting by an acquaintance of mine, about which I’d once written a poem dealing with this very topic.

In the meantime, thanks to her sending it to me, I’ve had a chance to read the lyrics at my leisure and have come to the conclusion that it’s really more of a Generation Z thing – in other words, an indictment of the legacy that earlier generations (presumably mine in particular) have created and foisted upon Afke’s generation:

To put those troubles on our plate
Your children
Now I’m not a mom yet but I imagine how not to be one
Which doesn’t matter cause when I get the chance all our resources will be gone
So hope, hope is scarce these days

It reminds me a little of the questions my own generation asked our parents and grandparents about war and nuclear weapons, and the ongoing threat they pose. The same goes for the civilian use of nuclear fission and the unresolved issue of nuclear waste… But only a little. Because:

Climate change cannot be stopped
Inflation cannot be stopped
The aging population cannot be stopped

It does not look as though – even with sensible disarmament and appropriate final disposal – these things can really be halted any longer. (Although, sadly, interest in resolving nuclear issues hasn’t improved in the last 70 years either.)

I just need everything, everything
To just fucking STOP

Why does it seem unstoppable? Is capitalism to blame, with its relentless drive for growth and constant pursuit of greater efficiency? Yet some historians believe the problem is far older and arose as long as about ten thousand years ago in connection with the development of agriculture and the resulting settlement of what were once nomadic hordes. And there are palaeoanthropologists who see evidence that the overexploitation of nature began even much earlier with the extinction of certain animal species through mass hunting (presumably fifty thousand years before our time). So is it a genetically driven impulse, a greed for more, which humanity will no longer be able to bring under civilised control in time? Afke’s outcry somehow brings all this together and lets it crash against a wall in that final ‘STOP’…

But at the beginning of her text there’s something else, and she picks it up again later in a sense:

There’s this sentiment floating around
and while I can’t quite point at its origin
Its consequences sound in my mind
Fueling my self doubt and hatred with whispers
...
Wow,
I think I’ve gone on long enough
I’m rambling and I’m losing it

So Afke’s self-reflection is also woven into the text and is what (in my opinion) gives it its true depth. It suddenly reminded me of Maxwell’s demon; I don’t know if you’re familiar with it – it’s part of an old thought experiment in physics (thermodynamics) relating to increasing entropy. In this thought experiment, a suitably gifted being (‘demon’) sorts the molecules of a gas, separating them into colder/slower versus warmer/faster ones. This is an unnatural state, as the molecules of a gas are normally well mixed and as entropy is supposed to increase instead of decreasing.

Suddenly, I ‘saw’ the positive and negative thoughts – which are normally more or less mixed – separated from one another in an ominous way. This gave rise to the following short piece by myself:

Maxwell’s alphabet

Maxwell
Your demon’s running riot in my brain
It splits my mind into
Black and white, and it
Gathers the bad thoughts
All on one side
All on just one
There’s no balance left now
No ‘both-and’, no ‘depending on’
The pros are silent and
Only the cons are screaming away
My head’s already lolling to one side under the weight
From the one-sided burden
Of all the cold, all the zeros
Separated from the warmth and the ones
This is not organised information
This is not an informative order
This is sheer over-organisation into nothingness
As if all the empty space were here
And all the stars were there

Maxwell
Your demon must be stopped
For where all the letters are sorted
There is no longer any meaningful text
Only the alphabet

Originally written in German and translated with DeepL.com (free version) and proof read by me

---

My aim was not to separate the thoughts that seemed negative, critical or accusatory from the positive, welcoming and approving ones, but to allow them to find their own equilibrium, their own balance. In the case of Afke’s words, it goes:

An invisible villain with the loudest fucking voice
Fills my head with noise
Like how voids
Can be screaming
There’s no redeeming

So her rant definitely had to ‘come out’, even though it’s recognised as a tirade right from the start, and in this way Afke’s text loops back on itself like a Möbius strip. I love that sort of thing!

I’ve since come across a short video (‘Behind the Spoken EP’) in which Afke Flaviana talks about her musical approach, but the text is in Dutch, and unfortunately I only understand bits and pieces of it. It seems to me that she doesn’t lay down the musical text in stone, but rather provide a sort of framework within which the performers can act more or less freely. This reminds me a little of trends in New Music in the 1960s, where, using graphic scores instead of musical notation, the performers were merely given indications as to where they should play louder or softer, choose wider or narrower ranges, play faster or slower, use staccato or legato and so on, but no melody or key was specified. In this respect, a second or third performance based on the same score was never exactly the same as the first. The concept of the ‘work’ itself was called into question. How does this relate to Afke’s musical philosophy? I will have to ask her that herself.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version) and proof read by me

...please notice and visit the following links:

‚Rant‘:

‚Moments‘:

Afke’s remarks about her ‚Spoken EP‘:

About Afke (Dutch):
https://www.talenthubbrabant.nl/talenten/afke-flaviana-van-rijn-4717

Afke’s website (Dutch, partly in English):
https://afkeflaviana.com/