Sunday, June 21, 2009
Henri Chopin Live in France 2005
"[I]t seems to me that this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 89).
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ghérasim Luca’s Two Poems (Alga Marghen) LP
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The work of Romanian-Jewish surrealist Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994) seems to be undergoing a process of (re)discovery recently. Hot on the heels of Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s remarkable English translation of Luca’s The Passive Vampire published by Twisted Spoon late last year (the first substantial translation of Luca’s work to appear in English), the great Italian archival label Alga Marghen has just released an LP of Luca’s poetry as part of its Vocson series dedicated to reissuing the key documents of sound poetry. Previous reissues in the series include historic recordings from the likes of Brion Gysin, Åke Hodell, Isidore Isou, and Sten Hanson, as well as the entire output of Henri Chopin’s seminal OU audio-magazine.
The record consists of two side long pieces – “Autres secrets du vide et du plein” and “Crimes sens initiales” – recorded at the famous EMS electronic music studio in Stockholm, in April 1971 and 1972 respectively. Relatively simple in execution, both pieces were recorded one track at a time on a four track before being submitted in places to modest electronic treatment. In this respect, Luca’s aesthetic is far removed from the vocal pyrotechnics of a Chopin or François Dufrêne. Indeed, according to Chopin's liner notes (taken from his Poésie Sonore Internationale, Jean-Michel Place, 1979), Luca is, technically, “not a sound poet.” Rather, he “is more a speaker who managed, without complex, to enter into the Fylkingen studio vortex.” "In his recordings, which are not many, [Luca] superimposes his very warm voice, marked by his Romanian accent," and the result is a veritable “sound wonder.” Listening to the seductive grain of Luca’s voice, I wonder whether the record might not have benefited by being given the lathe cut treatment by New Zealand's Peter King Records.
To the English-speaking world at least, Luca is know primarily through the work of Gilles Deleuze, who frequently cited the surrealist’s work – along with that of the late Beckett – as a prime example of stuttering in language, which for Deleuze constitutes the highest poetic function:
“I believe that Ghérasim Luca is one of the greatest French poets, and of all time. He certainly does not owe this to his Romanian origin, but he makes use of this origin to make French stammer in itself, with itself, to carry the stammering into the language itself, not simply the speaking of it. Read or listen to the poem ‘Passionément,’ which has been recorded as well as published in the collection Le Chant de la Carpe. One has never achieved such an intensity in the language, such an intensive use of language. A public recitation of poems by Ghérasim Luca is a marvellous and complete theatrical event.”
(“One Manifesto Less,” in The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 213.)
“I believe that Ghérasim Luca is one of the greatest French poets, and of all time. He certainly does not owe this to his Romanian origin, but he makes use of this origin to make French stammer in itself, with itself, to carry the stammering into the language itself, not simply the speaking of it. Read or listen to the poem ‘Passionément,’ which has been recorded as well as published in the collection Le Chant de la Carpe. One has never achieved such an intensity in the language, such an intensive use of language. A public recitation of poems by Ghérasim Luca is a marvellous and complete theatrical event.”
(“One Manifesto Less,” in The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 213.)
On “Passionément,” Luca literally stutters for several minutes (“Pas pas paspaspas pas / pasppas ppas pas paspas”) before finally succeeding in getting his words out in the poem’s last, explosive lines. According to Deleuze, in this performance, “[t]he entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final sonic block, a single breath at the limit of the cry I LOVE YOU PASSIONATELY [JE T’AIME PASSIONNÉMENT]” (Deleuze “He Stuttered” Essays Critical and Clinical Trans. by Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 110)
Similarly, on Two Poems, Luca produces an intensive use of language in which language is pushed to its limit, where words become pure asignifying sounds or intensities. This is achieved through the sober repetition of a few textual fragments that are overdubbed and layered in varying degrees of density to produce swarming, shifting, sensual layers of vocal patterns that effectively obliterate sense. Working a slow accretion of vocal phrases-textures through stratification, lamination, Luca opens up or creates a new language within French, a strange, musicated language of stammers, near-inaudible murmurs, and stop-start Steinian iterations.
Selected Recordings
- Ghérasim Luca Two Poems (Alga Marghen, 2009) LP
- Ghérasim Luca “Autres secrets du vide et du plein.” On VV.AA. Text-Sound Compositions: A Stockholm Festival (Fylkingen Records, 2006) 5CD
- Ghérasim Luca “Son Corps Léger.” On VV.AA. Lunapark 0, 10 (Sub Rosa, 1999) CD
- Ghérasim Luca “La Santé Du Mort.” On VV.AA. Polyphonix 1 (Première Anthologie Sonore) (Multhipla Records, 1982) LP. Re-released by Get Back in 2002.
- Ghérasim Luca “Passionnément” (Performed by Beñat Achiary). On VV.AA. Tous Poètes? 40 Ans De Poésie/Gallimard (Gallimard, 2006) CD
- Ghérasim Luca Ghérasim Luca par Ghérasim Luca (José Corti, 2002) 2CD. The most extensive collection of Luca’s recordings available, although it lacks the electroacoustic pieces found on Two Poems.
- Bernard Heidsieck “Ghérasim Luca.” On Respirations Et Brèves Rencontres (Al Dante, 1999) 3CD + Book. A tribute to Luca by a pioneer of poésie sonore.
Couple of Luca samples:
- Ant Hampton “Ghérasim Luca/Fridge.” From the blog “Likely Collapse,” Hampton mixes Luca’s “Son Corps Léger” with “Sequia,” a track by Fridge from their album Sevens and Twelves (Output, 1998). Luca’s voice, decayed and tinny, set against a spacious, dubby post-rock backdrop.
- Nevus Project's “Son Corps Léger.” Another setting of Luca’s poem, this time backed by a guitar version of Erik Satie’s 'Gymnopédie No.1' played by Pierre Laniau (from his Pièces pour Guitare, EMI, 1982) and the ghostly strains of a theremin. Released on the CD 17 Ysesings accompanying Y SIN EMBARGO magazine's "Deterritorialization" issue (#10, December 2006).
Friday, June 12, 2009
Sound Poetry Playlist #2
1. New Humans – “You in the background” On AKA – New Humans / Vito Acconci / C. Spencer Yeh (Semishigure) CD
2. Arnulf Meifert, Kommissar Hjüler & Mama Bär – Unrein Bis Zum Abend/Reise Ins Diesseits (Die Taubnessel) LP
3. Mama Bär – “My Little Feelings” On Tanzprocesz-Sicherungskopie (Tanzprocesz) TC
4. Bruce Russell & Ralf Wehowsky – “Deathbed Blues” On Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues (A Bruit Secret) CD
5. Pierre Guyotat – “From Page 11 ‘L’jiarret Boueux’” On Progenitures CD
6. Iranian folksinger – “Track 3” On Folk Music of Iran (Lyrichord) CDr
7. Jac Berrocal – “Prière + Extract Voyage Au Bout De La Ville” (Words: Antonin Artaud) On Prière (Alga Marghen) 10”
8. Pierre-André Arcand – “Trafic entre les médias” On ERES+7 (Obscure) CD
9. Lasse Marhaug – “May Rap Bonk Bonk (MAJAAP Pudding Mix)” [Remix of material by Maja Ratkje & Jaap Blonk] On Vox Ex Machina (Leonardo Music Journal) CD
2. Arnulf Meifert, Kommissar Hjüler & Mama Bär – Unrein Bis Zum Abend/Reise Ins Diesseits (Die Taubnessel) LP
3. Mama Bär – “My Little Feelings” On Tanzprocesz-Sicherungskopie (Tanzprocesz) TC
4. Bruce Russell & Ralf Wehowsky – “Deathbed Blues” On Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues (A Bruit Secret) CD
5. Pierre Guyotat – “From Page 11 ‘L’jiarret Boueux’” On Progenitures CD
6. Iranian folksinger – “Track 3” On Folk Music of Iran (Lyrichord) CDr
7. Jac Berrocal – “Prière + Extract Voyage Au Bout De La Ville” (Words: Antonin Artaud) On Prière (Alga Marghen) 10”
8. Pierre-André Arcand – “Trafic entre les médias” On ERES+7 (Obscure) CD
9. Lasse Marhaug – “May Rap Bonk Bonk (MAJAAP Pudding Mix)” [Remix of material by Maja Ratkje & Jaap Blonk] On Vox Ex Machina (Leonardo Music Journal) CD
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Guattari on Machinic Orality
Some interesting thoughts that bear upon performative and sound poetry by Félix Guattari, from his underrated late work Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm.
“Speech empties itself when it falls into the clutches of scriptural semiologies fixed in the order of law, the control of facts, gestures and feelings. The computer voice – “You have not fastened your seatbelt” – does not leave much room for ambiguity. Ordinary speech tries by contrast to keep alive the presence of at least a minimum of so-called non-verbal semiotic components, where the substances of expression constituted from intonation, rhythm, facial traits and postures, reinforce and take over from each other, superimpose themselves, averting in advance the despotism of signifying circularity. But at the supermarket there is no more time to chat about the quality of a product or haggle for a good price. The necessary and sufficient information has evacuated the existential dimension of expression. We are not there to exist but to accomplish our duty as consumers.
Would orality constitute a refuge for semiotic polyvocality, a reprise in real time for the emergence of the subject-object relation? Quite frankly too marked an opposition between the oral and the scriptural seems hardly relevant. The oral, even the most quotidian, is overcoded by the scriptural; the scriptural, however highly sophisticated, is worked by the oral. Instead, we will begin with blocks of sensations formed by aesthetic practises before the oral, textual, gestural, postural, plastic … whose function is to elude significations attached to the trivial perceptions and opinions informing common sentiments. This extraction of deterritorialised percepts and affects from banal perceptions and states of mind takes us from the voice of interior discourse and from self-presence – and from what is most standardised about them – on paths leading to radically mutant forms of subjectivity. A subjectivity of the outside and of wide-open spaces which far from being fearful of finitude – the trials of life, suffering, desire and death – embraces them like a spice essential to the cuisine of life.
Performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity. It shoves our noses up against the genesis of being and forms, before they get a foothold in dominant redundancies – of styles, schools and traditions of modernity. But it seems to me that this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities. What I mean by this is that there is something artificial, constructed, composed – what I call a machinic processuality – in concrete poetry’s rediscovery of orality. In a more general way, every aesthetic decentring of points of view, every polyphonic reduction of the components of expression passes through a preliminary deconstruction of the structures and codes in use and a chaosmic plunge into the materials of sensation. Out of them a recomposition becomes possible: a recreation, an enrichment of the world (something like enriched uranium), a proliferation not just of the forms but of the modalities of being. Thus not a Manichean, nostalgic and old fashioned opposition between good orality and wicked scripturality, but a search for enunciative nuclei which would institute new cleavages between other insides and other outsides and which would offer a different metabolism of past-future where eternity will coexist with the present moment.” (89-90)
Unlike Steve McCaffery and Gerald L. Bruns, two recent theorists of sound poetry (see McCaffery's Prior to Meaning: the Protosemantic and Poetics 161-186, and Bruns's The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics 39-76), Guattari positions the extreme vocal emissions of sound poetry as a necessary rupture or initial destruction of the cliché, on the way to an enrichment of the world, as opposed to an end in itself – committed, that is, to Bataillian excess and irrecoverable expenditure, and thus incapable of articulating any emancipatory political-social agenda. Guattari is right, I believe, in insisting that sound poetry is a “re-singularization” of the subject, insofar as its violence constitutes a necessary deconstruction of normalized capitalist subjectivity as a crucial step in a larger process of subjective renewal.
“Speech empties itself when it falls into the clutches of scriptural semiologies fixed in the order of law, the control of facts, gestures and feelings. The computer voice – “You have not fastened your seatbelt” – does not leave much room for ambiguity. Ordinary speech tries by contrast to keep alive the presence of at least a minimum of so-called non-verbal semiotic components, where the substances of expression constituted from intonation, rhythm, facial traits and postures, reinforce and take over from each other, superimpose themselves, averting in advance the despotism of signifying circularity. But at the supermarket there is no more time to chat about the quality of a product or haggle for a good price. The necessary and sufficient information has evacuated the existential dimension of expression. We are not there to exist but to accomplish our duty as consumers.
Would orality constitute a refuge for semiotic polyvocality, a reprise in real time for the emergence of the subject-object relation? Quite frankly too marked an opposition between the oral and the scriptural seems hardly relevant. The oral, even the most quotidian, is overcoded by the scriptural; the scriptural, however highly sophisticated, is worked by the oral. Instead, we will begin with blocks of sensations formed by aesthetic practises before the oral, textual, gestural, postural, plastic … whose function is to elude significations attached to the trivial perceptions and opinions informing common sentiments. This extraction of deterritorialised percepts and affects from banal perceptions and states of mind takes us from the voice of interior discourse and from self-presence – and from what is most standardised about them – on paths leading to radically mutant forms of subjectivity. A subjectivity of the outside and of wide-open spaces which far from being fearful of finitude – the trials of life, suffering, desire and death – embraces them like a spice essential to the cuisine of life.
Performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity. It shoves our noses up against the genesis of being and forms, before they get a foothold in dominant redundancies – of styles, schools and traditions of modernity. But it seems to me that this art doesn’t so much involve a return to an originary orality as it does a forward flight into machinations and deterritorialised machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities. What I mean by this is that there is something artificial, constructed, composed – what I call a machinic processuality – in concrete poetry’s rediscovery of orality. In a more general way, every aesthetic decentring of points of view, every polyphonic reduction of the components of expression passes through a preliminary deconstruction of the structures and codes in use and a chaosmic plunge into the materials of sensation. Out of them a recomposition becomes possible: a recreation, an enrichment of the world (something like enriched uranium), a proliferation not just of the forms but of the modalities of being. Thus not a Manichean, nostalgic and old fashioned opposition between good orality and wicked scripturality, but a search for enunciative nuclei which would institute new cleavages between other insides and other outsides and which would offer a different metabolism of past-future where eternity will coexist with the present moment.” (89-90)
Unlike Steve McCaffery and Gerald L. Bruns, two recent theorists of sound poetry (see McCaffery's Prior to Meaning: the Protosemantic and Poetics 161-186, and Bruns's The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics 39-76), Guattari positions the extreme vocal emissions of sound poetry as a necessary rupture or initial destruction of the cliché, on the way to an enrichment of the world, as opposed to an end in itself – committed, that is, to Bataillian excess and irrecoverable expenditure, and thus incapable of articulating any emancipatory political-social agenda. Guattari is right, I believe, in insisting that sound poetry is a “re-singularization” of the subject, insofar as its violence constitutes a necessary deconstruction of normalized capitalist subjectivity as a crucial step in a larger process of subjective renewal.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Pierre Guyotat's inhuman stuttering
From: rdn15XXXXXXXXX.com>
To: thejohndoryreportXXXXXXXX.com>
Subject: > >
Hey man I thought you might that guy Jared's email....
If you do could> just fwd this whim of an email to him.>
Hey man> something that just occurred to me that may or may not have> potential utilisation in your thesis is the works of De Sade. Here> you have someone is continuously going over and over the same themes,> subjects, arguments. Like a stutterer who cannot satisfactorily get> the word out...De Sade could be said to be trying to pressure his> prose to into making something happening on the page that, in a sense> can only take place off stage.Bot stutter and de Sade are both> stretching the body as far as the words will allow them. And both are> in something of state of fervent frustration as to the limitation of> the word. >
Anyway just a thought.> -- >
Richard> -------------------------
> From: jlw60@XXXXXXXXXX.nz>
To: rdn15XXXXXXXXX.com>
Subject: FW:> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:15:43 -0800
Hey Richard,
Yeah, you’re right about the work of De Sade evincing a certain stuttering or aphasia, and about his attempt to stretch the limitations of the body as far as words will allow. The problem with De Sade, though, is that, despite the transgressive and repetitive content, his work still remains under the governance of classical representation. Someone I’ve been thinking about recently in this regard is French writer Pierre Guyotat – the so-called “other Sade.” Guyotat was a chronic stutterer, and one may read his novel’s deterritorialized word-flows as a liberation – on the page – from his debilitating stammer. His novel Eden Eden Eden, for instance, is a 192 page novel made up of one continuous sentence. Here is an extract (via Steve McCaffery’s Prior to Meaning):
“ …. boy sleeping on side ; tarantula crawling from sticky pubic hair, climbing up onto whore’s swollen belly, distended abdomen dividing blood over chest ; body of whore shuddering, hands following steps of tarantula around right nipple : “…suck lower man…”; penis, tucked back into hollow of groin, hardening : tarantula brushing against tip of tongue poking between lips ; jissom slopping out of Wazzag’s arse, pushed back, driven out along anal passage by date picker’s member ; Wazzag stifling fit of laughter ; Khamssieh waking : tarantula, alarmed by twitching of muscles, crawling into nostril ; Khamssieh sniffing scent, stifling sneeze, pulling legs together, suppressing shivers of body smeared with cold sweat moistening dried blood, beads of sweat glistening in fresh blood over loins ; nostril swollen with jissom crushing spider ; Wazzag exploding into laughter ; tarantula stinging nostril : venom, flowing with blood, veiling eyes of whore, softening eyelid ; Khamssieh’s hand, weak, crushing tarantula in nostril : venom hardening forehead ; fingernails scraping cold blood around nipples ; pulling dead tarantula, pinching sticky legs, out of nostril, pushing crushed spider between buttocks ; exhausted elbows dropping onto heaps of floor-cloths : penis contracting into shrivelled scrotum ; odour of sodomy wafting through room ; rubbing of jeans, farts : regular in dawn silence …” (Eden Eden Eden 29)
And so it goes on: there’s no characters (they’re splintered into partial objects in constant movement: an anus + an armpit + a penis + …. etc.), no plot, no development, no structure, just an incessant phrasal becoming that overflows syntactical and grammatical organisation as it enacts endless scenes of homoerotic lust. As McCaffery notes, “Guyotat enters and occupies the phrase as a material unit of dynamic force,” one that “cripples pictorial mimesis under the weight of … metonymic, syntagmatic incessance and overturning.” Here, the borders of human body that one still finds in De Sade gives way to a connective series of sliding body parts and fluids in writhing assemblage. In a sense, Guyotat fulfils the promise of De Sadian stuttering.
Pierre Guyotat
To: thejohndoryreportXXXXXXXX.com>
Subject: > >
Hey man I thought you might that guy Jared's email....
If you do could> just fwd this whim of an email to him.>
Hey man> something that just occurred to me that may or may not have> potential utilisation in your thesis is the works of De Sade. Here> you have someone is continuously going over and over the same themes,> subjects, arguments. Like a stutterer who cannot satisfactorily get> the word out...De Sade could be said to be trying to pressure his> prose to into making something happening on the page that, in a sense> can only take place off stage.Bot stutter and de Sade are both> stretching the body as far as the words will allow them. And both are> in something of state of fervent frustration as to the limitation of> the word. >
Anyway just a thought.> -- >
Richard> -------------------------
> From: jlw60@XXXXXXXXXX.nz>
To: rdn15XXXXXXXXX.com>
Subject: FW:> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:15:43 -0800
Hey Richard,
Yeah, you’re right about the work of De Sade evincing a certain stuttering or aphasia, and about his attempt to stretch the limitations of the body as far as words will allow. The problem with De Sade, though, is that, despite the transgressive and repetitive content, his work still remains under the governance of classical representation. Someone I’ve been thinking about recently in this regard is French writer Pierre Guyotat – the so-called “other Sade.” Guyotat was a chronic stutterer, and one may read his novel’s deterritorialized word-flows as a liberation – on the page – from his debilitating stammer. His novel Eden Eden Eden, for instance, is a 192 page novel made up of one continuous sentence. Here is an extract (via Steve McCaffery’s Prior to Meaning):
“ …. boy sleeping on side ; tarantula crawling from sticky pubic hair, climbing up onto whore’s swollen belly, distended abdomen dividing blood over chest ; body of whore shuddering, hands following steps of tarantula around right nipple : “…suck lower man…”; penis, tucked back into hollow of groin, hardening : tarantula brushing against tip of tongue poking between lips ; jissom slopping out of Wazzag’s arse, pushed back, driven out along anal passage by date picker’s member ; Wazzag stifling fit of laughter ; Khamssieh waking : tarantula, alarmed by twitching of muscles, crawling into nostril ; Khamssieh sniffing scent, stifling sneeze, pulling legs together, suppressing shivers of body smeared with cold sweat moistening dried blood, beads of sweat glistening in fresh blood over loins ; nostril swollen with jissom crushing spider ; Wazzag exploding into laughter ; tarantula stinging nostril : venom, flowing with blood, veiling eyes of whore, softening eyelid ; Khamssieh’s hand, weak, crushing tarantula in nostril : venom hardening forehead ; fingernails scraping cold blood around nipples ; pulling dead tarantula, pinching sticky legs, out of nostril, pushing crushed spider between buttocks ; exhausted elbows dropping onto heaps of floor-cloths : penis contracting into shrivelled scrotum ; odour of sodomy wafting through room ; rubbing of jeans, farts : regular in dawn silence …” (Eden Eden Eden 29)
And so it goes on: there’s no characters (they’re splintered into partial objects in constant movement: an anus + an armpit + a penis + …. etc.), no plot, no development, no structure, just an incessant phrasal becoming that overflows syntactical and grammatical organisation as it enacts endless scenes of homoerotic lust. As McCaffery notes, “Guyotat enters and occupies the phrase as a material unit of dynamic force,” one that “cripples pictorial mimesis under the weight of … metonymic, syntagmatic incessance and overturning.” Here, the borders of human body that one still finds in De Sade gives way to a connective series of sliding body parts and fluids in writhing assemblage. In a sense, Guyotat fulfils the promise of De Sadian stuttering.
Pierre Guyotat Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Sound Poetry Playlist #1
1. Henri Chopin La Plaine Des Respirs (Tochnit Aleph) LP
2. Ghédalia Tazartès Diasporas/Tazartès (Alga Marghen) CD
3. Pierre Henry & François Dufrêne Granulométrie (Philips) CD
4. Antonin Artaud Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (Sub Rosa) CD
5. Frédéric Acquaviva (feat. Pierre Guyotat) Coma (Casus Belli) CD
6. Luc Ferrari Unheimlich Schön (Metamkine) 3” CD
7. Sissy Spacek Sepsis (Helicopter) 7”
8. Junko & Mattin Pinknoise (w.m.o/r) CD
9. Jackson Mac Low Open Secrets (XI) CD
10. Dave Phillips & John Wiese At A Loss For Words (Blossoming Noise) 7”
Henri Chopin at home, 2007.
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