It’s not everyday that three trained musicians meet for an improv session in order to record a pinball album. Under normal circumstances this perhaps wouldn’t have happened. But because of COVID, all of us had about two to three years where our lives and activities have been altered in one way or another.

Pianist Reinier van Houdt, sound designer Robert Kroos as well as jazz improviser and composer Suzana Lașcu chose quite an unusual pandemic project of their own though. They banded together to try an experiment: What if we went to a big pinball place, create field recordings there, write some smaller compositional sketches as a basis, and then meet up for a spontaneous, chaotic but also structured live session? The aesthetic goal: a musical representation of the random but also controllable nature of pinball play.

Wild balls, wild music

When I first heard of the experimental music album Flipperen by this trio who call themselves Ilinx, I was instantly intrigued. Although I’m not a huge follower of avantgarde music that often defies common and well-known structuring and is not always pleasing to the ear at first, I appreciate the open-minded approach: It consists of a mixture of electronic and classical instruments, voices are used for singing as well as noise-making, and the fact that it’s based on improvising means embracing randomness and surprise. When you hear the varied pieces from Flipperen, you are always in for a wild ride that oscillates between serious and silly, minimal and manic, fragile and furious.

There is a lot to discover on Flipperen aside from the pinball samples and the music though. Mastermind Suzana Lașcu and her versatile voice evoke associations with the legendary work of synthesizer pioneer Suzanne Ciani who famously produced the score, sounds and voice for the 1980 machine Xenon. The artwork for the album is from Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong who did this piece, Pinball Wizards II, already in 1973. Without a doubt, this is a project well worth diving more into for The Ball is Wild.

Let’s have a chat!

After an e-mail correspondence with Flipperen producer Frederic Van de Velde from the indie record label Futura Resistenza, and with the help of Colin Alsheimer from This Week In Pinball, who connected us, I had the pleasure to talk with Suzana Lașcu in a lenghty video chat about how all this came together, the many inspirations which were at work, and why playing a music piece or playing a game often connects well with the principle of Ilinx.

Hello Suzana! Why did you choose to work on a music project that involves pinball as a theme? I understand that you and Robert Kroos, one of your project colleagues, went to the Dutch Pinball Museum a few years ago during COVID and did field recordings with the machines there. Can you give me an idea of how this came about?

“The pandemic was sort of a renaissance for a bunch of my creative processes that I was discovering again. I was a student at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. There was an inspiring community and we had resources from teachers, from the facilities at this place. It was inevitable that a project of this kind would come out of it, among other ones, because I was studying field recordings, sound installations. There were those courses that were helping everyone explore other media and other ways of representation for complementing an artistic endeavor.”

“I was also having this radio show in Rotterdam at the time and there was still available funding for this sort of project. So we made something in spite of not having a budget. I remember hanging out with Robert Kroos, who’s a film sound designer. We had already improvised in other contexts with other peers of ours, and so we decided to work together again. He knew Reinier van Houdt as well so he was considering inviting him into this trio collaboration.

I was then trying to come up with the concept inspired by John Zorn‘s model of, basically, coming up with everything out of nothing. I personally wanted to have a project inspired by games. So I googled „games“ and then the pinball museum in my neighborhood popped up. And yeah, there also was a glass of wine involved. It was a very spontaneous thing. I remember, this was during the very last Dutch lockdown, that’s why we knew the place would be empty. We contacted Gerard van de Sanden, the director of the Dutch Pinball Museum [The Ball is Wild 🪩 did an interview with him in 2022 – Ed.], and he was very cool allowing us – without asking for a rent or a fee – to just bring some microphones and see what each of these pinball machines had to offer in terms of sound design.”

Why did you want to choose games as a topic?

“I’m a jazz musician originally. So there’s this ludic component of playing and improvising. And rules or frameworks for something to happen are also essential. The playfulness around games was very attractive to me. Aside from that, Suzanne Ciani has obviously been such an influence.”

Initially, which pinball machines caught your eye the most?

“I had a preference for the earlier pinball games from the 60s and 70s because they were made out of wood. There was more of this sculptural or material exploration to be had because you could really hear the ball traveling through all of the interiors of the machine. The purer the game, the more satisfying it seemed. And it also proved to be better in the editing process, because in choosing the specific samples, this was a sculpting effort bringing forth the relationship between the materiality of these machines – made of wood, metal, plastic, evoked through the ball’s movement –, and the reactivity of the sound design as the ball traveled through the pinball machine, getting abused by the elements it encountered.”

This is interesting because at first I thought you would record specific pinball games and that it would be important for the listeners to know: Oh, this is this game, and now here we hear that game, etc. But instead, most of your pinball recordings are not attached to certain machines. The thing that you actually recorded is more like the basic act of playing pinball, right? You hear the flippers and the balls bouncing around, the ball search, stuff like that. So what was the intention in terms of how to execute the recordings?

“The execution of the recordings beside the placement of the mics and pressing record? Honestly, it wasn’t more than that at first. But the decisions that were made in the editing process were essential. We were aiming for this interaction between existing material and new material. My whole point in the post-production process was to assemble sound art collages. For me, it’s extremely … landscapy, I would say, almost like being inside a pinball machine. There are also other elements coming out of our improvisation: They sort of spring out of the samples. If you think about it, it’s pretty linear. We have the samples, we have a few stages of music, we have the improv, and then we have the editing. And yes, the more mystery there is around from which decades these original samples belong to, the better, right? We were also trying to be as discreet as possible because usually the love of sound is more important than the incidental specific pinball game that was used.”

What was it like for you as someone who didn’t play pinball before to go into this museum and not only have one or two machines, but so many of them? Was it overwhelming? Seeing all these machines, trying some of them, recording their sounds – there must have been so many different things happening at the same time.

“We started small with one rather vintage pinball machine. But at some point, we weren’t exactly overwhelmed but instead rather immersed because all of these pinball machines in their, let’s say, standby mode, when they still produce a lot of sound.”

Yeah, because they have to attract the players.

“Right, right. So I remember being at one of these floors and recording everything at the same time. And that was kind of funny in itself. I personally remember being into this Dracula inspired pinball machine. It had a beautiful melodic content. I think we even used some of that. But otherwise, the cacophony of pinball machines was really attractive. We kind of got carried away playing so many of them. Also, I remember being rather turned off by more recent pinball machines inspired by specific movies like The Big Lebowski. That didn’t seem attractive because they include the soundtrack and sounds of that specific IP that everyone recognizes, which kind of kills the mystery to me. We also avoided the really obviously copyrighted ones.”

You talked about immersion and cacophony. The project is called Flipperen, and your trio is called Ilinx, a term from French game scholar Roger Caillois, which – among other things – means experiencing dizzyness, vertigo or disruption of perception.

“Yes, that was Reinier’s idea. It’s just seemed to fit the apparent randomness of it all. Apart from the concept of the project there is the chance factor and the chaos that a pinball machine evokes and executes when you play it.”

There is this kind of visceral side to the tracks as well, especially when you’re singing and also doing those unusual sounds like snoring, grunting, shouting, and different creaking noises. What was the idea behind that?

“We spent two days in the studio in The Hague. Each of us brought as many instruments as we could. Robert brought a Guzheng, Rainier had all these tools to prepare the piano and some synthesizers on the side. I had my own synthesizers as well as a mic and a guitar. It was completely improvised.”

Can you describe the situation within the livesession and the chronology of the project as a whole? Of which parts are the final tracks on the album comprised of?

“Prior to the session, I prepared small scores corresponding to each pinball sample – a few bars, not much more. I then sent Rainier and Robert the charts. So they had those small scores a few days before. Before we started the session, I also played them the pinball samples. I would say: Okay, so this is inspired by this sample, and so on. So the improvisational trio session was informed by both the samples and my scores. We had 14 sounds for an acoustic set, with 14 little corresponding themes, and the same amount again for an electronic set. After the session was done, I put everything into a digital audio workstation and started cutting and forming those sound art collages.”

When it comes to pinball specifically, how was the act of playing pinball for you? In which way did you find it interesting, also sonically?

“Describing the act of playing is not easy. Where do you even start? Of course, pinball has this basic goal of keeping the ball in the game and at the same time trying to hit as many of these little elements. We tried to extract the maximum of sound out of each machine we recorded. Ah, and there’s also something to be said about how we mic’d each machine, because we had an EMF mic that’s supposed to capture electromagnetic frequencies. So whenever there’s something happening, there’s a buzz. And that helped a lot with capturing the sound of the ball traveling, for instance.”

Did you also try to capture the act of playing in your musical pieces in some way, or were the pinball machines mostly used as instruments?

“We basically treated the machines as instruments and then we dematerialized it by just extracting bits out of them.”

Let’s talk a bit about Suzanne Ciani because you mentioned her before. Aside from her many synthesizer works, she is also important to pinball culture, having created the sound design and voice for the game Xenon in 1979. How are you influenced by Suzanne Ciani and what do you like about her?

“Her personality informs her sound design. I remember, in 2019, 2020, this viral video footage resurfaced of her programming the sounds of a pinball machine [The Ball is Wild 🪩 had this story at least five years earlier! – Ed.]. And she had almost a sensual approach. The machine itself featured this female android. It was very delicate, and it wasn’t an abrasive, scary robot. There was this feminine allure that she was bringing to the sound, into the pinball machine, and that was just delightful. And of course, she has such a structural approach with regards to how she prepares a patch in a Buchla – the Buchla synthesizers are her instruments. And she had success beyond that. She sounddesigned for Coca-Cola and so other many other companies just by evoking experiences such as opening a can of soda. Maybe one day I might meet her.”

Let’s get back to the Flipperen project. The amazing cover art for your record is a painting from 1973 by Dutch Situationist painter Jacqueline de Jong who unfortunately passed away last year.

“I did not know Jacqueline’s work before. When I was a student at the Sonology Institute, I was becoming familiar with the Situationist movement in the 70s. So when I saw the painting by Jacqueline de Jong, I was just struck by how what you normally see on a pinball game is at the top. It’s almost an extrapolation or deconstruction or the unfolding of the game in a horizontal plane and that fits somehow so well with the format Frederic Van de Velde, our producer, had in mind in which the painting itself is folded, so on the back of the CD you have the actual pinball machine with the track list, and the continuation of the painting is on the front.”

Flipperen by Ilinx, published by Futura Resistenza, is fully available on Bandcamp. The album can be bought digitally for unlimited streaming or as an audio CD with a 7-inch cover featuring a reprint of Jacqueline de Jong’s Pinball Wizards II.