"'Recording the Grain' is proof that the world of free jazz and improvisation is still interesting."

--Hans van der Linden, Kindamuzik, on Office-R(6)'s CD 'Recording the Grain'

"Office-R(6) is a sort of big band, in which North meets South and West meets East. Morten Olsen on percussion, Koen Nutters on bass and structure, Robert van Heumen on laptop (running LiSa), Jeff Carey on laptop (with Super Collider), Sakir Oguz on Buyukberber and bass clarinet and Dirk Bruinsma on soprano and baritone sax. These people work together in various combinations under the big banner of N-Collective. From what I gather from the information they operate in strict improvisation mood. It seems without any post editing. Acoustic and electronic meet up in a great way. A great way that needs a lot of concentration to fully grasp what they are doing, as this is certainly not easy listening music. Hectic, nervous, intense. Sometimes its hard to tell what is what around and that is something that is a great quality of this. Highly demanding and highly rewarding music."

--Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, on Office-R(6)'s CD 'Recording the Grain'

"the sextet Office-R(6) literally sculpt rather than play the music using acoustic instruments and computers yeilding a music that is sublty seismic and eminently contemporary."

-- Musicreaction, on Office-R(6)s CD 'Recording the Grain'

"It's rare indeed to come across an album that straddles so many categories with such success. Office-R(6) are an Amsterdam based affiliation connected to the N Collective, the network of musicians that includes the great MoHa! (whose drummer Morten Olsen features here). The four pieces on this puzzlingly titled mini-album are anything but mundane, fusing electronic and acoustic instrumentation and composition.

Useful reference points might be John Zorn's game pieces or the Search and Reflect workshop explorations of John Stevens, although Office-R(6) adhere less dogmatically to the structural matrices of each composition and use them instead as loose organising principles for their improvisation. Working from structures developed by founder Koen Nutters, the sextet balance percussion (olsen), bass (Nutters) and reeds (Sakir Oguz Buyukberber and Dirk Bruinsma) with live sampling (Robert van Heumen) and Supercollider software (Jeff Carey).

Unlike most electroacoustic showdowns, the music never feels like the digital elements are just shadowing the acoustic ones, or vice versa - this is a perfect balance between the two. "It Makes Events Circle Around It" shows such a dialogue in action, with Carey's bell tones weaving in and out of a tightly organised chorale for the acoustic instruments. On "relative Enmity For The Members" (you'll need to work on those titles, guys) the preconceived structure allows points of detail to orbit round each other and then converge dramatically at certain moments, to stunning effect. This is genre-defying stuff that rides roughshod over Improv purism and compositional dogma. To the warring factions of the avant-garde: Office-R(6) have drawn up a blueprint for peace."

-- Keith Moline, The Wire, on OfficeR-(6)'s CD 'Mundane Occurences and Presentations'

"The N-collective is an international, pan-European (though there's an American in there too) group of musicians whose website gives little indication of any permanent connections between its constituent members other than a mutual interest in getting gigs, recordings and supposedly funding (nothing wrong with that - musicians have bills to pay like everyone else). One of its spin-off groups is Office-R(6), featuring double bassist Koen Nutters, laptoppers Robert Van Heumen (LiSa) and Jeff Carey (synthesis), Sakir Oguz Buyukberber on bass clarinet, young rising star Norwegian drummer Morten J Olsen (whose duo MoHa! is causing some a stir) and saxophonist Dirk Bruinsma of the criminally ignored (at least by the British press) art-rockers-cum-contemporary-new complexity Blast. This debut 24-minute EP, recorded - very well too - at Amsterdam's STEIM, consists of four tracks whose titles allude to methods for organizing improvisation. But discipline and precision are predominant here, giving the pieces the structured cohesiveness of composed music, though with a taste for breaking the flow in unexpected twists and turns. Energy fragments in all directions in a capricious game piece between acoustic texture and skilled electronic interaction, imbuing the music with the joyful energetic velocity that might remind you of the golden age of European improv - think the robust language of contrasting colours and the 360°-turnaround strategies of the likes of Paul Lovens, Peter Kowald, Wolfgang Fuchs or Evan Parker. A highly palatable, invigorating and sophisticated appetizer of tradition and renewal, superbly performed and recorded."

-- ParisTransAtlantic, on OfficeR-(6)'s CD 'Mundane Occurences and Presentations'

"[...] They share a language based in European improvisation and free jazz, but with a completely new and contemporary approach, using electronics and concrete sounds with analogical instruments, using a non idiomatic language, exploring a vast number of sounds. They somehow remind me of some new age composers, if they had lived to the XXI and had been exposed to free jazz and noise and electronic music in their youth. Sound just runs, crashes, dives into a trouble sea. It's all is played live and it's for me one of the great Improv records of 2006.

stabbedintheface.blogspot.com, on Office-R(6)s CD 'Mundane Occurences and Presentations'

"And then there's the Amsterdam-based Office-R(6) [...] whose energized interplay is never anything less than engrossing. Drawing upon electronic music, noise, jazz, and contemporary music traditions, the players attack their gnotty electro-acoustic improvisations with rabid ferocity. [Their] purposeful, stop-start interplay is permeated by perpetual flux and invention with electronic sputter, bass clarinet growls, bowed scrapes, saxophone honks, and sliced voice samples endlessly circling around and colliding with one another. Sounds converge at some moments before splintering off into multiple directions the next. [Their release on Lampse:] Mundane Occurrences and Presentations at times resembles the kind of challenging music Luciano Berio might be creating [...] in his composing prime."

Textura.org, on Office-R(6)s CD 'Mundane Occurences and Presentations'

"Jeff wrote a great piece for the Noiseroom, a 5.1 listening project. His piece uses the surround spacialization set up to the full extent and draws the listener into a fascinating world of microscopic yet blasting manipulation of sound. A master of granular synthesis, the idea of an intense listening space seemed to be just right for Jeff's radical approach on sound."

Jan St. Werner, 'Noise Room' Curator, Microstoria, Mouse on Mars, etc, ...

"The electroacoustic trio SKIF++ consist of Jeff Carey and Robert van Heumen, both of whom work on laptops, with Bas van Koolwijk adding a visual component. Van Koolwijk's stated intention is to use video to expose its essential falseness, to reveal the cold machinery behind the "placating curtain" of the visuals it generates. This is a facet of the music also, which has a certain feral, vicious quality to it - as if using machinery as some sort of vengeance upon itself. Using devices such as joysticks to exacerbate the chance, improvised nature of this music, this is musique concrete that has torn away from its formal, academic origins. The openingtrack "SK01" uses conspicuous samples of kitchen implements, battered and smashed into near uselessness, alongside coruscating bursts of voracious noise. "SK02" meanwhile starts out as nothing but the random movement of tiny particles, pinging and colliding, before accruing into a larger, more malevolent shape. Deconstruction and reassembly in nasty extremis."

-- David Stubbs, The Wire, on SKIF++'s CD 'SK++[01,02,03,04,00]'

"Illuminating"

The Wire on USA/USB performance of 'Machine Gun Etiquette' at NuMusic 2005

"The sounds produced are an extremist hybrid between free Improv, gutter electronics and darkwave scuzz. [...] like a beautifully evil cartoon score - fractured and malevolent and funny, all at the same time.

Byron Coley, The Wire Magazine, on Jeff Carey's MoHa!

"put up the volume really high [...] everything falls into its place and you have a great rocking 7 inch"

Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, on Jeff Carey's MoHa!

"Rune Grammofon celebrates its first foray into the 7" vinyl market with these two stellar slices of death jazz scooped from MoHa!'s forthcoming album. Both tracks see the Norwegian duo joined by fellow N-Collective member Jeff Carey - hence the title (duh!). While A-side Progorama kinda lives up to its billing with a spastic demolition job on the senses, it is Teknosangen, on the flip, which wins out with its Ram Man assault and Fantômas-like schizophrenic kinetics. Oh yeah, and this little beauty comes on virginal white vinyl and is limited to 500 copies. Get one and hang it over your bed."

Spencer Grady, Record Collector, on Jeff Carey's MoHa! 7"

"[...] a tour de force of both discipline and stamina."

Forced Exposure, on Office-R(6) CD 'Mundane Occurences and Presentations'