René van der Voort’s Counter Culture Chronicles and Erik Sluijter’s Casioli Press co-produced beautiful editions of my work, the chapbooks Blue Iris, Black Rose: Ira Cohen and the Language of Flowers (2022), and Ira Cohen: Divine Visions – Ian MacFadyen in conversation with Ana Collins (2024). I told René how much these publications meant to me and how much I liked the CCC/Casioli production of Bobby Yarra’s enlightening memoir of his friendship with Gregory Corso, Gregory Gave Me The World (2023). Erik Sluijter told me, “Those booklets were our joy and joint effort, assisted by a great team of designers – André Koolmees, Lula Valetta – and printers – Stencilwork, Bertus Gerssen. We spent many nights working on those publications.” Erik also assisted René with the tape cassettes produced by René’s Counter Culture Chronicles: “I did work for the tapes in the background, mainly digital to analog transfer or vice versa and fixing quality, although René was always very keen on keeping it as original as possible.” The latter observation is crucial in regard to the care and rigour of René’s approach – not to clean up and smooth out but to respect and preserve the acoustics and sonority of historic recordings.
René was inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s use of tape recording, an audio extension of Kerouac’s ‘verbal sketching’, the poet’s voice moving through the sound-fields of TV, radio, conversation and traffic. Erik told me that one of the biggest challenges that he and René had faced at CCC was the restoration and transfer of the Ginsberg reel to reel ‘En Route To Gent’, originally released as CCC 10 in 2016 and then as a revised reissue, CCC 178, in 2025. The Gent recording, made in 1979, begins with an interview with Ginsberg, followed by the tape record of travelling to Gent by car, and ending with an excerpt of Ginsberg’s reading at the concert hall in Gent. In this way the tape, which includes the voices of Benn Posset, Harry Hoogstraten, Peter Orlovsky and Simon Vinkenoog, combines Interview, Field Recording and Poetry Performance, documenting different discourses and changing ambiences, a road trip through temporal soundscapes.
René understood that poetry in performance was not secondary to a published text, that it questioned and resisted the fixity and primary authority of the poem as printed artifact. As well as issuing archival cassettes, René taped and filmed contemporary readings and performances and his CCC project holds a significant place in a major change in our understanding of Beat poetics over the last quarter century as explored by critics and theorists like Michael Davidson and Charles Bernstein, and exemplified by Lytle Shaw’s seminal Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018). CCC produced and issued cassette recordings during the same period which saw a critical turn from the dominating, primary analysis of text to the address of the semantic aural richness of recordings of poetry readings, including diction, intonation, timing, breath measure, rhythm, improvisations, alternate versions, recollections, explications, audience participation and environmental sound. Poetic discourse was heard to be communal, embedded in the social and physical environment, and in the historical and political moment. From the beginning Beat poetics had been characterised by an ethos of bodily presence and spontaneity, a performativity resistant to the reigning academic poetry with its formal restraints and institutionalized support apparatus of textual analysis. René loved Beat recordings from the 1960s, each tape a singular, unrepeatable event which nevertheless could be put into circulation and played back and learned from and appreciated. The recordings were intimately, historically bound up with the rapid dissemination of low cost, small circulation mimeo magazines, circumnavigating the lengthy time lag required by bound magazine and book publication. Mimeo’s communal immediacy was intertwined with a culture of live performance and taping in which it really was a case of “You heard it here first”. ‘Howl’, for example, was first heard and acclaimed when Ginsberg read Part I of the poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955, but the complete work would not be published by City Lights until the October of the following year.
The poetry website PennSound, founded in 2005, has made 50,000 sound files available for free download, including Beat poetry. It is a marvel, an audio palace of true treasures. But CCC has its own special place as an archival project providing access to valuable recordings, preserving and restoring and making available, albeit in small editions, works which would otherwise be unknown or forgotten, an alternative experience of choice and attentiveness within a computerized culture fuelling ‘too much remembering’ as well as an accelerating forgetfulness. Most importantly, a CCC cassette returns the listener to an experience of the material medium on which the poet’s voice was originally recorded, incarnating a particular time and place and community through analog magnetic tape.
The cassette tape and the stapled photostat mag would be revived in the later 1970s through Punk culture, its Beat-inspired initiatives both mirroring and powerfully transposing the mimeo and reel to reel works of the hugely influential Lower East Side poetry scene in New York in the 1960s. Live spoken performance would move from reel to reel to cassette recording and the duplication and distribution of tape cassettes, a fast, pre-computer analog technology perfectly suited to poetry in performance and getting the words out there. Introduced in 1963, the Compact Cassette became a vital commercial audio format for music, and this accelerated in 1979 when the Walkman portable cassette player was introduced. When René started CCC in the 1990s the tape cassette was in commercial decline, overtaken by the sales of CDs, but it was still vital for home recording and the creation of mixtapes, while much of the left field, cutting edge music admired by René was only available on small edition cassettes. However, the use of cassettes would increase significantly in the 21st century in parallel with the revival of vinyl records, a turn away from dominant digital media and a renewal of pleasure in analog sound and technology. The anonymously produced Beat cassettes available in the 1960s in alternative bookshops and again in the late 1970s in independent record shops – Burroughs, Bowles, Gysin, Corso, Snyder – often lacked all informaton about original place and time of recording and only cursorily (or wrongly) indicated the contents, while sound was often of very poor quality having been exhaustively, carelessly copy-taped in series, and the cassette covers were rudimentary, deteriorated photostats. René’s CCC tapes, on the other hand, although part of this poetry cassette lineage, were carefully sound-curated and site and date specific wherever possible and the slipcase insets were beautifully designed, including colour photography of the artists, and had distinctive red, yellow, blue and green spines.
The cassettes might include small reproductions of related images and flyers – Wallace Berman lettering a Kaballah wall mural in Topanga Canyon in 1975, a cassette liner of a 1976 reading hand-written by Angus MacLise, an advertising card for a Fielding Dawson writing workshop in 1984. . . Or a specially printed text could be included as with CCC 38, the tape of Louise Landes Levy’s Not Further Than The Nightingale which was accompanied by a printed folded A4 card of Louise’s poem ‘Eulogy for Lionel Ziprin NYC, 2009’. Knowing of my friendship with the writers and that I had written about their works, René gave me a number of tapes by Louise and by Ira Cohen, including Ira’s The Majoun Traveller (CCC 49) and The Subliminal Cassette (CCC 42), while other tapes arrived magically, at exactly the right moment, either through the auspices of Louise when she visited London or by post from René himself when I was writing about particular writers. Franco Beltrametti and Jim Koller’s Amici Nella Poesia (CCC 78), recorded in Switzerland in 1987, and Piero Heliczer’s The Autumn Feast (CCC 33), a recording made for the soundtrack of his 1961 film, were perfectly timed gifts while Angus MacLise’s The Kathmandu Cycle (CCC 22), a 1976 reading, was an inspirational source while I was writing the essay ‘The Mercury Mirror’ for the book Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen, edited by Allan Graubard (2019),
CCC, like Bart de Paepe’s Sloow Tapes in Belgium and Eddie Woods’ Ins and Outs Press in Amsterdam, was a small operation in business terms, but rather than ‘marginal’ it was an example of ‘In-Between’ practices as described by Fiona Woods in 2010, through which analog mediums, artifacts and cultural interventions may be promoted and reviewed on websites (by Jan Herman, for example, who had his own cassette issued), drawing upon existing networks in ways which mobilise interest and create interaction, using formats and processes which are not totally reliant upon computerized systems of connection, online dependency and institutionalized commercial exclusivity. René’s CCC was a return to analog during the period when the computer became the dominant, technologically unique digital dissemination system allowing the creation, distribution, reception and consumption of audiovisual content in a single ‘box’. René’s preferred box was a cassette in a case, a little package of sound to select and handle and listen to and relish, beyond all algorithms.
Dear Hans – Ira Cohen: Selected Letters to Hans Plomp, CCC 174, is a white cardboard box containing 32 folded A4 reproductions of handwritten letters, collages, postcards, poems, photostats and the envelopes which contained them, envelopes printed with brilliantly coloured woodblock ink stamps of clouds, planets, birds, geishas, unicorns, masks and cobras, beautiful, striking and amusing examples of Ira’s take on Air Mail – ‘Ira Mail’ – with every communication a graphic, visual and poetic work of art. Dear Hans is a testament to the friendship of the two writers and to Ira’s playful creativity and love of “boxes of treasures”, and it’s also a homage to the lineage of Fluxus, Mail Art and Stamp Art, and to the Art & Project Bulletin of Adriaan van Ravesteijn and Geert van Beijeren which ran from 1968 to 1989 in Amsterdam. The Bulletin format was a single folded sheet, the front cover including the Art & Project Gallery logo and exhibition date and the artist recipient’s address, leaving three sides for the art contributions of the participating artists. Many conceptual artists contributed to 156 Bulletin issues and in 1972 Alighiero Boetti responded by creating a grid arrangement of the six envelopes of the Bulletins mailed to him along with decorative postage stamps, an inspired ‘Return to Sender’. This work in turn was a homage to Robert Filliou’s 1962 hat-shaped velvet envelope containing photographs, documents and mementoes relating to the Festival of Misfits which took place in London in that year, attended by Fluxus artists. Dear Hans pays tribute to the seductive possibilities of the folded sheet, envelope and box, the container as tactile art work and underground postal medium to be unsealed, opened and unfolded by hand, revealing and preserving avant-garde histories and personal connections.
I talked with René at an EBSN conference about Burroughs’ use of tape recorders, and the relation between Fluxus and Mail Art and his own CCC. We discussed Joseph Beuys’ use of pre-recorded and improvised tapes in his 1960s performances and the importance of Conceptual Art, René mentioning Lawrence Weiner (who features on an Out of the Vaults CCC tape along with Michael Gibbs), Robert Filliou and Ben Vautier. From the 1960s the history of Conceptual Art was bound up with interventionist strategies, forms of intermedia and communal exchange. Mail Art and multiples began as attempts to challenge and circumvent the art economy during the Pop Art boom of the 1960s in New York, but these initiatives were quickly recuperated and commercialized by galleries and museums, while related alternative systems of creation and distribution in Western and Eastern Europe not only survived but proliferated through the continuing creative confluence of Beat, Hippy and Punk cultures. This was the European ‘Samizdat’ counter history to which René strongly related in which Conceptual Art was a vital current and CCC, although Beat-oriented, extended to the conceptual, deconstructive, collage and serial processes used in ambient sound works and experimental music and vocalisation, issuing tape cassettes of key works by Ulises Carrion, Pier van Dijk and Robert Joseph, and Sue Fishbein.
René ran a record shop for many years and vinyl records were important to him as well as CD reissues of rare tape and vinyl recordings. He knew the multi-tracked voice and sound works of Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck and François Dufrène from the 1950s and 1960s and Chopin’s 10″ and 7″ historic vinyl recordings, released through his Revue OU between 1964 and 1974, would subsequently be collected and reissued by Alga Marghen in Milan on 4 CDs. Likewise, archival and contemporary spoken word and sound works were anthologised and released on vinyl on small labels through galleries and radio stations in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Berlin, Stockholm and London in the late 1960s and early 1970s and were then reissued on CD, while these limited edition vinyl and CD recordings were in turn pirate-copied onto tape cassettes. Significantly, cut-up and permutation works by Burroughs, Gysin and other Beat-related artists would feature within this European avant-garde sound context with its criss-crossing of recording mediums and formats, and René’s deep knowledge of this important ‘minor history’ was recognised and highly valued.
René admired the subversive Provo movement of the 1960s in Amsterdam and embraced the radicalism of avant-garde music, sound and poetry and the eco-politics of communal cultures, but his CCC project, though inseperable from this ethos, was above all a testament to his passion for the poets and performers whose lives he documented through print, image and sound. Between 2021 and 2023, CCC produced Postcards of Unpublished Beat Pics, informatively captioned reproductions of rare photographs of Ginsberg, Corso, Diane de Prima, Jack Hirschman, Jack Micheline, Bob Kaufman, Herbert Huncke, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Another series of cards issued in 2022 was titled the ‘Inscription Series’ and reproduced images of signed books – Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded, Harold Norse’s Carnivorous Saint, John Clellon Holmes’ Get Home Free – and their holographic dedications, emblematic of personal encounters and literary exchange within the Beat community over the decades.
A collector who generously gave to others, René was a counter culture scholar and a passionate transmitter of its colourful, turbulent and living history, with a deep knowledge of European Beat culture – his presentations at EBSN conferences were always warmly appreciated. Through his record shop and CCC, René privileged attentive listening over passive hearing, celebrating the pleasures of auditory perception and raising awareness of the sonic worlds we create and inhabit throughout our lives. Unfailingly calm and kind, amusing and amused, a creative participant and artistic collaborator with profound ethical convictions about the value of alternative communities, René’s example and his Counter Culture Chronicles will continue to resonate and radiate.
Ian MacFadyen, London, May 2026.
(Published by Benjamin J. Heal, June 2026)