HAROLD SCHELLINX Post-Post-ULTRA

With roots in experimental post-punk music and the anarchist squat and DIY culture with which a new generation of musicians and artists attempted to lay alternative foundations for the future that was gradually crumbling before their eyes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as co-initiator of ULTRA, about which he wrote a beautiful book thirteen years ago, in Dutch, via the anti-rock pop of the Amsterdam Amphibious mini-label, the formal strict serialism and the freer variants that he learned at the Utrecht Institute for Sonology with Gottfried Michael Koenig and at the summer schools in Kürten with Karlheinz Stockhausen, the tamed aleatoric sounds of the first home computers, along intuitionistic constructivism, proof theory and the foundations of mathematics as a conceivable path to music as a pure, soundless structure, Harold Schellinx became the architect of a still unbridled expanding structure, a universe of its own, built in the trenches along and margins of academia and official art culture, from a long series of largely unknown, un-public works, extensively documented in a labyrinthine web of writings, on a hand-coded web site, harsmedia.com, the American Medium, and in the extensive series of Feature Pieces in Gonzo (Circus) Magazine, for some twenty-five years.

Schellinx has spent his life moving from here to elsewhere, and has therefore been neither here nor there all this time. His place NOW, post-post-ULTRA, as a musician, as a scientist, as a writer and as an artist, is that of a Babylonian alchemist, a Catweazle, who tirelessly continues to try to fuse his Babylonian (in Borges' sense) and Sudokist extremes into one, perhaps wise, stone.