SCHIPHOL MAKIMONO
This time, Pascal turns to the richest storehouse in The Netherlands, Schiphol,
for his latest inspiration.Explore the exotic reaches of the airport in this musical excursion.
If you want to escape the pressures and tensions of sophisticated commercialism,
daily hypnosis of television, undercurrent of social and political tidal waves,
then follow your heart to our national airport and find peace in the calm and
relaxed friendliness of Schiphol. Cosmopolitan Schiphol symbolizes the impact of
travellers on the airport, or more correctly, perhaps, the impact of the airport
on the traveller. Details of Schiphol provide the timing, shape, resonance and
momentum of the associations; this is what makes them echo. Through echoing, the
airport almost assumes the role of psycho-analyst. Here, more and more the
searching traveller seems to find an intangible but real elixer which
rejuvenates the mind, body and spirit.
Taking the various airport idioms and
translating them into breathtakingly ear-appealing vignettes, Pascal stimulates
the jaded palate of everyday civilization with music that is pure escape. As the
ear listens, the mind conjures ancient aviation rituals, as primitive
superstitions of a roaring Fokker, woven into eerie, lush, mechanical sounds.
The world speeds on, another day passes. The airport mirrors the beautiful
sunset and you get the delicious feeling of standing barefoot near the runway,
as the smell of diesel fills the air, then runs in rivulets up your nostrils,
bringing on a deep nirvana-like acquiescence. Another change of scenery! Lost!
And found again! Bam-boozled into a spin you feel the urge to dance a slow
tango. This is the kind of sound that makes you wish you had taken dancing
lessons, and you will. Now listen here! Have you ever heard the sound of cherry
blossoms in bloom below the equator?
SCHIPHOL MAKIMONO is Pascal's
original method of offering you a peek under the skirts of dozens of exotic
airline-hostesses who roam Schiphol daily. Their sounds twinkle softly in and
out of your ears and are as bright and gay as a christmas tree in the fifties.
The moon rises over the horizon another plane lands, placing you in the midst of
the pulsating, brooding, yet heart-pounding airport. You close your eyes and
listen to passengers getting off planes, passing through customs, claiming their
luggage, preparing to check in with reality again.
I've given up trying to figure out how Pascal thinks up his fabulous music, and
I'm not so sure he knows himself. It always seems fresh and exciting, as if
you'd never heard it before. Now, hold your hats, because here, in all honesty,
has been created that marvelous lost universe of imagination - completely
appealing, impeccable in its taste and typically Pascal Plantinga!
Peat Moss, Admiralissimo Primo of the International Brotherhood of the Fifth
Fleet
Biography
PASCAL PLANTINGA : SOUNDDIVER
It all began in the rice paddies just outside Son My Village, better known to
westerners as My Lai, in South Vietnam. Charlie Company was on the prowl for the
red menace (the despised Viet Cong) and in a flash, it was all over - hundreds
of unarmed civilians were dead, Lt. Calley was on his way to a court martial and
I was on my way to the delivery room floor. From there, it was all uphill and I
had not yet learned to spell the word "Sisyphus." Several weeks
after I was born my parents decided to grab on to the rudder of an American
helicopter as it was departing a rooftop in downtown Saigon. I was strapped to
my dad's back, none-to-happy about the smell of burning diesel all around and
wondering how far the drop was to a certain death just below. But fortune was on
our side and before you know it we were jumping ship somewhere in the Pacific
and found ourselves two weeks later on a pristine beach bordering the City of
Angels, Tinsel Town, U.S.A.
Having made a narrow escape back in the
mysterious east, we decided to take a trip to Mann's Chinese Theater where I got
my hands and feet measured for future placement on the sidewalk. My parents
thought I was destined for greatness. I was only two months old, but they were
certain I would be a big movie star someday. Three weeks later, as I was
approaching my third month of life, my parents decided to take a room at the
Ambassador Hotel in L.A. Two days after settling in to our room, we heard some
gun shots. That night we learned that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in our
hotel. We were on the next plane to The Netherlands. We needed swampy land,
but no rice paddies. The Netherlands seemed to fit the bill well. Instead of
rice paddies, we found tulips and wooden shoes everywhere, and the odd windmill
to split the breeze.
We were simple people. The Netherlands provided safe,
steady themes. We were happy. In my fifth month of life, the Beatles released
the White album. That record completely changed my life. I said goodbye to
dreams of Tinsel Town, and hello to rock & roll. On my first birthday, I
received a guitar. Thirty years later, I am still playing that guitar, but now I
have a bunch of groovy boxes hooked up in sequence to the guitar, so if I want
the guitar to sound like a bagpipe or an alp horn, it is not a problem. With the
groovy boxes, I can arrange and perform songs as quickly as lightning strikes a
barn in the great plains of Kansas, and it saves a pile of money: I don't have
to pay union wages to other musicians backing my "live" performances.
The fewer musicians on stage with me, the better.
I am Pascal, named for a
brilliant 17th century mathematician or a late 20th
century computer programming language - take your pick. But one thing is
certain: I like to travel lightly. Just me, my guitar, my groovy boxes and a
drummer to keep time out of mind while I flail away at my guitar and my groovy
boxes. In fact, does anybody have a bootleg recording from the gig I played up
in Friesland with New Yorkse Dave on drums last year for the big
500th founding shindig? If so, please attach that recording to
this biography. It will more than supplement what I am trying to write. Music is
my biography. Words can only take me so far. I may run out of ink, but I'll
never run out of audiotape.
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