043: Avenue Céramique - Charles Ortjens-Straatman
This piece has been inspired by Avenue Céramique in Maastricht. We highly recommend listening to this piece on location.
Avenue Céramique
Text: Charles Ortjens-Straatman
Avenue Céramique has always been an inspiring place to me.
I can remember that my family and I drove home from Brussels. I must have been around 5 years old. We lived on the Mosalunet, just around the corner from Avenue Céramique, the stately avenue that intersects the prestigious architectural neighbourhood that gives the avenue its name, Céramique.
Around midnight, of course extremely late at that age, we drove across the Avenue. I was completely impressed by the ‘high' buildings, the ‘Stars of Europe’, the lights and the mysterious darkness of the night.
When I grew up here, Céramique felt like a place of progress. It felt like living in an enormous city. This metropolitan quality is diametrically opposed to the rest of Maastricht. When I walk through Céramique nowadays I feel the dualism of the city itself, but also within myself. On the one hand I still think like the little boy that grew up here around the corner, on the other hand I feel slightly disappointed. Avenue Céramique could be a lively place, but in reality it’s not much more than a broad avenue with mainly apartments, a mattress store, a notary office, a pharmacy and eventually a museum.
My perception of Céramique as a child is not representative for Avenue Céramique, which is why this location gives me a sense of lost innocence.
The basis of the music is the anecdote at the beginning of this text. The feeling I had as a child on Avenue Céramique. The execution is based on the feeling I have when I walk around Céramique: the impermanence but also nostalgia to my youth. I have emphasized this by for example using excessively synthesized sounds that replicate acoustic instruments (conga’s, timbales, voices and bass guitar), and by recording the intro and outro on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. These elements give the music a nostalgic and ‘out-dated’ edge.
Charles Ortjens (may 30th, 1998) is a composer and musical performer from Maastricht, the Netherlands. He studies Music & Technology at the HKU in Utrecht and specifies in electronic composition and sounddesign.
He works both autonomously and for the media such as theater, film and other multidisciplinary projects.
He has done several theater-productions and has experience in performing on stage.
His autonomous works are very diverse. It differs from italo-disco remixes of famous songs and hits to more serious work in which more research is involved.
There is however a common thread in his autonomous work:
Nostalgia is an ever-recurring theme. His sounds are therefore difficult to place within a certain time period.
The listener bathes in a mishmash of musical characteristics of the past 60 years.
Follow Charles:
Bandcamp / Soundcloud / Youtube / Instagram
“Objective” representation of Avenue Céramique. Picture by Julien Theunissen
