Get all 16 BBJTC releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of In Shallow Water, Composition for Still Lifes, Vanitas and Wind Instruments, Melodies for XYZ, The way sound moves drawing over and over the blueprint of a loop for every situation, MANUAL, Dust, FRIENDS, AV4T4RS (Book 1), Scenes from a Window, and 8 more.
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A person so-and-so, born there-and-then, is standing by the window in a
room with a chair, a table, a single bed and piles of clothes collecting dust and softening the corners of the almost empty space. The room is part of a small
flat, the flat is on the last floor of a housing block, the block is on the edge of a neighbourhood, that is on a small hill, that is in the outskirts of a city.
The window overlooks a small valley with the skeleton of a big building that used to be a factory on the right and what still is a bridge on the left. The foundations
of the factory are obscured by trees with crumbling leaves burned by the august heat. The factory’s front of broken windows resembles a toothless face, shyly peering between the branches of the trees. The bridge leads out of the city and descends to a road and the road rises to another bridge that is very high above
a relatively wide river.
Few small clouds are inertly casting shadows on the asphalt, that is covered with a pattern of snakelike cracks filled with dirt and yellow grass. Seen from above, the cracks describe in weird linguistics the history of the road.
There is a bleached quality to the colours of the scenery. Orange that is almost brown on the edges, green that expands into yellow and sky that is pale blue and almost white on the horizon because of the very dry heat.
The sky is a lid and the scenery the bottom of a bowl of stew. The buildings, bushes and trees are the leftovers after the meal is done and everyone is taking a nap.
The air is dry and it is late in the afternoon. A person so-and-so, born there-and-then, overlooks from a window a scene that is very familiar for it repeats itself
in front of the same eyes for many same years.
It is hard to say if the valley, the factory or the bridge are there when the person is not looking. For all we know they could be a rendering of the imagination. A sort of very basic landscape architecture.
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A shift between a hot and a slightly cooler layer of air happens at once and
introduces – as if by surprise – the evening to the afternoon.
It is a mere latency that will evaporate without a significant trace. Still, it seems enough to rearrange a batch of tiny clouds in a geometrical scheme that freezes in the sky. There are rows of small cauliflowers and their siblings are casted on the asphalt.
»How many shadows casts a cloud?« asks a person so-and-so observing from
his window the shadows of the clouds while his knees barely touch the peeling wallpaper under the windowsill. Like his knees, his thoughts barely touch the shadows of the clouds. Each shadow recreating some notion or another:
the suicide of a classmate
the death of a neighbour
the long forgotten cousins
the smell of the river
the songs of the frogs
the warmth of the concrete
the boredom in the afternoon
the ripeness of the yellow plums
the process of fermentation
the barking of the dogs
pissing from a bridge
stepping on a snail
jumping in a bush
climbing on a birch
The evening is still waiting at the door and the afternoon is hasitating to let it in. In the room the walls are reminiscent of folding screens from a scene described in a book.
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3. |
Oscillating Cinema
16:00
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A person so-and-so, born there-and-then, contemplates the clouds casting shadows. The scenes from the window are screenshots from unfilmed movies.
Scene one. An aerial view framed by a drone flying over a playground.
A meadow, three rusty iron swings in a row, a sun-bleached broken plastic slide and a full grown walnut tree by its side. Children have formed a circle around
the tree and are throwing sticks and stones, battering the branches of the tree, gathering the fruits that fall. The playground is covered with thorn leaves and
the smell of iodine.
Scene two. A steady camera shot.
A clear plastic cylinder candy box full with water. Small swamp green crayfish
in distress swim inside and a black-and-white cat circles around waiting for the dawn in anticipation of its dinner.
Scene three. Panoramic view of a valley.
In the very early April morning the green meadow is obscured by a mist that is hanging low. Only a few unshaven faces are sticking out of the mist – as if floating –
in search of mushrooms.
Scene four.
Scene five.
The scenes go on for the length of this piece. Sometimes a steady shot, sometimes a wide angle or a close up, fading in and out without a cut.
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4. |
Total
00:52
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Every day the sunbeams coming through a window flatten the features of a room in an apartment in a housing block on the edge of a neighbourhood on a small hill on the outskirts of a city.
The window multiplies the darkness inside the room with the light outside and the total gathers on the surface of the glass.
The window crops the world outside and frames it like a hand-coloured lithograph. The window is the threshold and a person is looking past the threshold as if examining a two dimensional reproduction on a wall.
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BBJTC Hamburg, Germany
BBJTC navigates between contemporary music, spoken words and experimental sound.
BBJTC is a part
of the Bad Boy Jesus City Swimmers Club.
The Bad Boy Jesus City Swimmers Club
is an inclusive and gender fluid
entity. Everybody is welcome.
Membership is free.
... more
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