Tunes & Scenery (Hard To Whistle) is an adventurous and quite unique work that was originally recorded on an analog four-track in 1983 by the young visual artist and musician Jacques van Erven. The album brings together the surprising combination of analog synthesizers, small Casio keyboards, a mouth harp, ukulele, marimba, and a variety of drums. A kind of hybrid music of contemporary jazz and world music combined with influences of rock and new wave in opposition spread over fifteen instant composed songs. The album was recorded in the small village of Aalst (not far from the southern Dutch city of Eindhoven) with the help of engineer Koos Behrtel at the studio where Jacques van Erven was painting and playing music. Now remastered and for the first time available on vinyl. Limited to **200 copies** with poster insert and reproduction of a painting by Jacques.
The record you have in your hands was once a cassette from the vast Dutch home-taping culture of the eighties. Tunes & Scenery (Hard To Whistle) is an adventurous and quite unique work that was originally recorded on an analog four-track in 1983 by the young visual artist and musician Jacques van Erven. The album brings together the surprising combination of analog synthesizers, small Casio keyboards, a mouth harp, ukulele, marimba, and a variety of drums. A kind of hybrid music of contemporary jazz and world music combined with influences of rock and new wave in opposition spread over fifteen instant composed songs. The album was recorded in the small village of Aalst (not far from the southern Dutch city of Eindhoven) with the help of engineer Koos Behrtel at the studio where Jacques van Erven was painting and playing music. We have included an image of a painting by Jacques with this release. It’s one of his stunning paintings from that time and is interconnected with the music of Tunes & Scenery (Hard To Whistle) and his artistic practices and visions. A little story:
The city of Eindhoven and its surroundings has always had an interesting and progressive music scene. It was the birthplace of the Dutch consumer electronics company Philips that was involved with the first electronic music in The Netherlands during the fifties. At the Philips experimental electronics studio NatLab, composers like Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt created their first electronic sounds based on oscillating tone generators and tape cut-up and manip