Albert van Abbe

You're walking up that hill at the outskirts of the city. It's the last days of summer and the sun is flooding the world below with its yellow heat, as if it was sprinting towards the finish line. The air is trembling with fever and the distant sounds of the city, but on top of the hill there's a place that neither sun nor man can ever stir again. As a child you called it The Castle, and you still do. It's the gigantic carcase of an industrial plant. Once a place for productivity and prospect, later a place for ecstasy and rebellion, now an empty shrine for nostalgic hearts. You enter The Castle, piously, and it's cold and gloomy inside. The only thing asserting you of the existence of an outside world are dim rays of sunlight breaking through the resting places of filthy windows. It's dead quiet, but you know what to do. Your right hand is pressed against the cold wall of the Great hall. Your eyes are closed and you wait. After a while the crumbling walls begin to trust you, or at least accept your presence. And they start to sing. They sing of machines that hammers and thumps tirelessly, of masses of bodies moving in sync, of dissonant melodies flowing through the air, of sharp metal clangs and muffled machine murmurs. After a while, their deep voices fade away. A couple of years ago, they would sing for hours. Now it feels like minutes. No one is left to listen to them. No one but you.

This is Albert's VANABBE03, the Dutch Minimalist's open invitation to his debut album coming this spring.

• 1 Exhibit A
• 2 Exhibit B
• 3 Exhibit C