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LP
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AI 005LP
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2016 release. Jacobus Derwort started exploring sonic soundscapes listening to his short-wave world receiver at the age of 12. There he would hear music from Africa, China, Japan, Indonesia, South America, and beyond. He started playing guitar, piano, percussion, and saxophone. He met Hanyo van Oosterom in 1978 and they started the legendary cult rock band, The Jones. Derwort was playing the sax, van Oosterom the drums. They started conducting sound experiments in Hanyo's small cellar in the Dutch village of Krimpen aan den IJssel. In the early '80s they made their first cassette, The Kallikatsou. Hanyo started the ambient collective CHI in 1983. Jacobus was the first musician to join CHI. Together, they went to the magic rock "The Kallikatsou" on the island of Patmos, Greece. Here, Hanyo had stayed for months in a cave for some deep soul-searching. He heard the sound of CHI in the silence of the night like a message from out of space. Being together at the Kallikatsou they shaped the foundation of CHI, making handmade flutes from local bamboo and conducting field recordings of water, crickets, owls, goats, wind, etc... Back home they asked Willem Cramer to join CHI, and later Michel Banabila. They released a legendary ambient cassette, The Original Recordings, in 1983 which soon became a collector's item. CHI stopped in 1987. Willem Cramer and Michel Banabila started the world music collective East Meets West in 1989. Hanyo and Jacobus kept recording ambient soundscapes. Jacobus was working on his Bamboo recordings. Hanyo recorded the first tracks for The Kallikatsou Experience. Neither album was ever released. They returned a few times together to The Kallikatsou, but there the history seems to end... until decades later when Astral Industries located them after a long search, inspired by Rod Modell (Deepchord). The result was the vinyl release of The Original Recordings in February 2016. This inspired Hanyo and Jacobus to work on an old plan: remixing the old bamboo recordings. Most tracks were made in the eighties before and after CHI. Original tape recordings using mainly analog sounds, percussion, samples and (of course) bamboo flutes and manipulated clarinets. Hanyo added some new recordings and remixed the old tapes in his Numoonlab Studio in Rotterdam. The result was The Bamboo Recordings, a timeless collection of ambient soundscapes. The Chi Factory is the next step of CHI into the future. It will involve many future ambient collaborations.
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2LP
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AI 012LP
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2019 release. Dedicated to the life and work of Robert Lax (1915-2000), the American poet who lived on Patmos, Greece, as a self-exiled hermit since the '60s. Jack Kerouac called Lax "one of the great original voices of our times, a Pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence." The Chi Factory would like to give special thanks to his good Patmian friends Ulf Knaus and Nikos Eliou, who showed them his house on Patmos (everything is still the same since he left) and also his favorite old wooden door (see leaflet). His great minimalistic poetry became a source of inspiration for The Mantra Recordings. His life on Patmos was far away from public attention -- quiet and always surrounded by the skies, seas, cats and birds. Lax was a real dreamcatcher. The Chi Factory is the next step of CHI, formed by Hanyo van Oosterom and Jacobus Derwort.
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