Jan TurkenburgJuly 9, 2007
*Name: Jan Turkenburg
*Are there any additional names used to describe this project: "De Zwervende Keien," "Marcel, Jan and the Dutch birds"
*Members: Well, it's mostly a one-man project by yours truly: Jan Turkenburg. On some pieces I get some help from my wife Wilma Turkenburg. We used to perform as a cheesy kind of folk duo, but now Wilma only appears very rarely on tracks. Even more rarely I get some help from my friend and colleague music teacher Marcel van der Wulp playing horn. On pieces where Wilma is involved we still use our former group name: De Zwervende Keien (Dutch= The Drifting Boulders) and Marcel and I call ourselves Marcel, Jan and the Dutch birds.
*Tape manipulations, digital deconstructions or turntable creations: Well, these are difficult ones to answer for me. I refer to my pieces as "splogwroughts." I use any kind of sound carrier or live musical instrument to make the works I'm making. My first digital works consisted of cut and paste works using samples only, but I gradually started to add flute, keyboard, guitar and later other instruments on top of it. I try to construct pieces like I've been taught to paint in secondary school. Most of the time I begin with rough outlines of the whole composition. But sometimes, like the first two 365 days tributes, I just start with a few samples and intuitively just cut and paste along. It really depends on what mood I'm in.
*Another genre descriptor: splogwroughts
*Why you use this descriptor: Splogwroughts (also sometimes named splogworks) naturally comes from Splogman's wroughts or works. The name Splogman originally has nothing to do with today's meaning of splog (spam/blog). I began using the pseudonym Splogman, around 2000 when googling on splog or splogman still didn't lead to any result. It's a Dutch abbreviation of flexidisc log (Slappe Platen LOG), because one of my first websites was a weekly log on flexible corporate records.
*Location: The Netherlands
*Original Location: I'm very, very Dutch. My father's family records go back to the fourteenth century Netherlands. From my mother's part I might have inherited some18th and 19th century German and Jewish genes ;-)
*What is your creative/artistic background: My father gave me my first music lessons when I was a kid. After school I took recorder lessons when I was between 8 and 12 years old. I gradually switched to flute when I was a teenager. I learned a bit piano from a friend. I took saxophone lessons at 22 years, after which I was a busker in Antwerp, Belgium. After that I played and sang in the British-Dutch-Belgian band The Stepping Stone Visit. Finally I went to the music academy in Zwolle, The Netherlands to get a full degree as a music teacher on all Dutch school types (from kindergarten to secundary school/highschool). Now I'm a fulltime music teacher at one of the biggest primary schools of this region.
*History: I started creating music this way in 2003, after a long period of hardly having composed anything anymore. It was pretty much Otis Fodder's challenge to make music based on 365 days material that pulled the composing trigger again.
*Born: I was born in 1964 in Vinkeveen, a small farmer's village near Amsterdam. Wilma was born in Zwolle where we live now.
*Motivations: I've always been fascinated by the possibility of recording and manipulating sounds, cutting bits and pieces out of their original context and giving them a new meaning in another context. But it's also a strong urge, an inexplicable need, a neurotic disorder or compulsion to create music and produce sounds.
*Philosophy: Music is just vibrating air. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
*How would you like to be remembered: Someone with a contagious obsession for music.
*Web address: http://www.splogman.com
http://www.myspace.com/splogman
