Everything is funny if you loop it enough

Nervous Testpilot Meets Erwin Beekveld

Erwin Beekveld vs. The Chair of Comedy

“What’s this? A link to what is transparently going to be stupid video in my inbox from someone whose taste I don’t quite trust? Well, that totally makes up for my completely pitiful salary.” Quickly scanning the filename for any vague assurance that it’s not NumaNuma, or anything from Saturday Night Live in the last five years, you click with hesitant trepidation upon the tiny icon…

Erwin Beekveld is the man behind something you might have received under the auspicious banner “LOL ROFFLE” in the last few weeks. No, it’s not this…

...it’s They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, a gloriously pointless “video remix” comprised of looped sections of dialogue from Lord of the Rings set to a horrifying early-90’s euro-techno interpretation of the theme music on which somebody has expended far too much effort. I blogged about it last week, if you weren’t paying attention.

Now, unless you’re the aforementioned Gary Brolsma, or the Star Wars Kid, and actually end up becoming the unfortunate star of your own meme, nobody ever bothers to take the time to find out exactly why you were spending your time posting rubbish on the internet and not working on the land. In order to expose the devilish internal mechanics of the fractured European psyche, I spoke to Mr. Beekveld to find out what he had to say for himself.

Erwin winds his clockwork tooth to create safe, renewable energy.

Erwin is a 36-year-old Dutch guy for whom the land has little attraction. Laid off from ten years of employment as a programmer and systems-administrator for a large Dutch music-retail chain, he “lost faith” in steady employment and now works freelance.

When he’s not paying the bills, Erwin’s either remixing C64 tunes like Cauldron II, Game Over, Parallax and Spellbound under the name of Tron, collaborating with the remixing duo Subversive Elements, an interest which was sparked “so long ago that most of your readers were probably still in liquid form,” or sampling his mates’ answer-phone messages to use in "Hobbits"-style pop-dance atrocities.

None of this is particularly evident from his inscrutable site http://www.beekveld.com/, a testing ground for various web-programming projects which happens to house some of Erwin’s unusual and very accomplished photography. “Every month I would put up some new pictures that I've taken during everyday activities, for my friends to see,” he told me. “But recently, I decided to restyle my website, and as a test I put a random handful of my pictures on it. I don't even recall which ones I put up there!” Photography is more than a hobby, though: “I took my first photo when I was about eight years old and I've been snapping ever since. I am a serious photographer but it is not really my profession. Friends call me stupid for that.”

"The orcs hath taken our conditioner! Now Middle Earth is dangerously frizzy!"

So, what about those hobbits? With the video being played at on a huge screen at the Fellowship Festival in London, and even a possible release for the music (yes, really), I asked Erwin how he felt about the success of his strange little brainchild.

“I neither expected nor intended it to become so insanely popular. I'm getting tons of fan mail from all over the world. Some wrote me that it totally made their day - I find it very rewarding to hear that my "creation" made people laugh, smile or beefed up their rainy day. Those are the best!” he enthuses.

He describes the piece as “bad holiday-camp entertainment” and told me that it came about as a result of the rampant emotional trauma that repeated viewings of Peter Jackson’s orc-tastic festival of posturing is bound to induce. Certain moments of Stanislavskian brilliance are bound to be salient: “On top of the list was Orlando Bloom's ‘serious face’ during, ‘They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!’ You can imagine this sentence, including the serious face, can be called upon repeatedly during normal conversations. A friend of mine, Martine, raised it to another level by saying it every odd minute, and I noticed it had a 3/4 beat. Another friend of mine, Jackles, finally persuaded me to make a tune of it.” The same friend was responsible for posting the resulting “product,” (created in Propellerheads’ Reason) complete with video mashup, to a LOTR fan forum. Everyone knows the rest.

Cool Edit Pro makes me want to wear a red straightjacket as well.

“Does anyone know if Orlando Bloom’s seen the video yet?” asks Beekveld, but I have to confess to languishing in ignorance. If I were Orlando Bloom, I’d use it as my showreel. But that’s probably why I’m not Orlando Bloom.

Fuelled by an eclectic musical taste that runs from the instrumental electronic flouncery of Jean-Michelle Jarre, through Mozart, and ends up lodged behind the artistic dustbin that is the oeuvre of Alanis Morrissette, Beekveld’s future projects include, “a tune with the working title ‘The Egyptian Ignition Problem.’ It is a musical work of 8 minutes describing powerlessness, despair and inner acceptance. In genre best compared to Ravel's Bolero. It will be on the CD I'm working on with Jackles under the name of Confessant.” He sees this work as his greatest achievement, and hopes that he’ll be remembered as more than just the hobbit guy.

He’s not too afraid of the little furry-footed pests, though. Extended and instrumental versions of “Hobbits” are apparently also in the works, and copyright permitting, the single will be out relatively soon. “And if, of course, another blockbuster movie comes along with an occasional silly line and a catchy theme suitable for a techno remix, I'm sure I'll make another one.”

Don't you be comin' all up in Marks and Spensers talking no smack.

Asked if he had any further use for the glistering interface with the masses that is nervoustestpilot.co.uk, Beekveld demanded that the public purchase the Confessant album twice (check his website regularly for release information) and contributed his motto, “There are no problems, only solutions.” I paused for a few seconds, my lip trembling, then screamed, “They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!” into his face with all my might, running off to be enveloped by the night’s thankless shroud.