Michaux at Galerie Di Meo

Clown

Some day.
Some day, perhaps soon.
Some day I'll tear out the anchor that keeps my ship far from the seas.

With the kind of courage needed to be nothing and nothing but nothing, I shall let go of that which seemed indissolubly close to me.
I'll slice it off, I'll knock it down, I'll break it up, I'll send it reeling.
Disgorging at a go my wretched pudency, my wretched combinations and gradual concatenations. Drained of the abscess of being someone, I shall drink again the life-giving space.

By making a fool of myself, by abasements (What is abasement?), through shattering, through emptiness, through a total dissipation-derision-purgation, I shall cast out that form of me which was thought to be so well-attached, well-composed, well-coordinated, of the same stamp as the company I keep and as my fellow-men, my oh so worthy fellow men.

Humbled as though by a catastrophe, levelled off perfectly as if by an immense funk.
Reduced immeasurably to my true rank, to the lowly rank that I know not what idea-ambition made me desert.
Annihilated as to height, as to esteem.
Lost in a remote spot (or not even), without name, without identity.

CLOWN, submitting to the assault of laughter, jeers and guffaws the notion that against all evidence I had formed of my importance.
I shall plunge.
Without purse into the infinite space at the back of the one mind open to all, open myself to a new and incredible dew by dint of being null
and blank...
and laughable...


Henri Michaux (1939)


I'm back from Paris, arriving home Sunday evening. Sadly, I haven't been able to visit the Maldoror exhibition at Galerie Furstenberg (interestingly, someone desubscribed as a 'follower' after posting the - admittedly disgusting - quote from Les Chants de Maldoror).

This was amply compensated by being able to visit an exhibition of Henri Michaux's work from the 1980s at Galerie Di Meola. The exhibition consisted of a dozen of Michaux's work on paper, mainly watercolours and indian ink paintings. The exhibition is on until March 28th 2009. Here is a link to a Google books edition of Michaux's Selected Writings.

I had a nice time in Paris: I've walked throught the city until my feet hurt, have eaten very well and saw lots of beautiful art. In a Paris art bookshop, I finally bought a beautiful book of Pierre Verger's photography called 'Schwarze Götter im Exil', the catalogue to the eponymous 2004-2006 exhibition in various cities in Germany. At the Joseph Gibert cd shop, feeling like a kid in a candystore, I bought Deathspell Omega's recent album Chaining The Katechon. I was helped by a very nice cassiere who was a big fan of this excellent French Black Metal band. I'm sad to say that a cd shop with such knowledgeable personel and immense range of cd's doesn't exist in my country anymore.

Henri Michaux - Le Prince de la Nuit, 1937

Prince of the Night

Prince of the night, of the double,
of the star-gland,
of the seat of Death,
of the useless column,
of the supreme question;

Prince of the broken crown,
of the divided reign, of the wooden hand.

Petrified prince in a panther's robe.
Lost prince.


(Painting: Le Prince de la Nuit, 1937, 33x25 cm, gouache on black background, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; Poem: Peintures, G.L.M., 1937).

Spektr - Mescalyne

In 1963, author and poet Henri Michaux participated in the making of a documentary film on mescaline, "Images du monde visionnaire":





The film was produced by Laboratoires Sandoz, the company for which dr. Albert Hofmann worked when he discovered LSD by accident in 1938, and it was directed by Eric Duvivier. The film's intended audience was the medical profession. In an essay on that film ('Tempo de l'infini turbulence'), artist Jean-Jacques Lebel writes that Duvivier had never taken mescaline himself. Michaux felt the film did not adequately reflect the psychedelic experience, and created a spoken word introduction to the film which subtly undermines it.

Here, I translate part of that introduction.

"When it was proposed to make a film about mescaline hallucinations, I have declared, I have repeated and I repeat it again, that that is to attempt the impossible.
Even in a superior film, made with substantial means, with all one needs for an exceptional production, I must state beforehand the images will be insufficient. The images would have to be more dazzling, more instable, more subtle, more changeable, more ungraspable, more trembling, more tormenting, more writhing, infinitely more charged, more intensely beautiful, more frighteningly colored, more aggressive, more idiotic, more strange.
With regard to the film's speed, it should be so high that all scenes would have to fit in fifty seconds."

For the title track of their "Mescalyne" ep, French industrialized Black Metal band Spektr have sampled this very text. In using this specific sample, they raise the bar on themselves. Is their music "...more aggressive, more idiotic, more strange..." or is it "insufficient"?

In his writings on drugs Michaux writes that 'interruptions of consciousness' are characteristic of the mescaline experience. Such interruptions are echoed in the musical structure of Spektr's ep: Industrial Ambient and highly charged, aggressive and tormenting Black Metal alternate abruptly, as in the abrupt switching on and off of consciousness, as in sudden neuronic polarizations of depolarizations. The timing and dynamic of these alternations is irregular, prompting some reviewers to complain about a lack of composition. I do not agree: I believe the irregularities are intentional. I believe these irregularities purposefully mimic Michaux's description of the mescaline experience - or the mescaline experience itself.

Mescalyne is not "...more frighteningly colored...". Rather, it is a stark black and white, like their previous album "Near Death Experience". I had hoped that Mescalyne would continue down the path struck out by "Near Death Experience", which refers to musical idioms beyond Black Metal's narrow boundaries. I had hoped that - where "Near Death Experience" already incorporated funky, jazz-inflected drumming - Mescalyne would turn into a full-blown rhizomatic Black Metal, with Ambient, World Music, Jazz and Dubstep, mixed together with street noises, radio static and the sound of war into a blackened and surreal sound collage. It was not to be: Mescalyne is a little (though not much) more conventional than "Near Death Experience".

That is not to say that Mescalyne is "insufficient" - far from it! Spektr is a Sielwolf for the naughties and Mescalyne is "intensely beautiful". I especially love it's Ambient: it sounds as if Montague Rhodes James's chosen medium was music instead of story, and as if he had personally lived through the horrors of the 20th century instead of the genteel and sheltered world of 19th century King's College, Cambridge. "Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place...". Recommended!








Post scriptum

Here is a post on the ever-excellent Ombres Blanches blog about "Images d'un monde visionnaire".

"First the hunt, then the revels!"

Hunted out some books today, mostly secondhand:

• Henri Michaux "La Nuit Remue";
• Joris-Karl Huysmans "Marthe";
• Rainer Maria Rilke "Wladimir, der Wolkenmaler";
• Michael Taussig "Walter Benjamin's Grave";
• Georges Bataille "La College De Sociologie".

Now I see well why with such dark flames

"Now I see well why with such dark flames
your eyes sparkled so often.
O eyes!
It was as if in one full glance
you could concentrate your entire power.
Yet I did not realize - because mists floated about me,
woven by blinding fate -
that this beam of light was ready to be sent home
to that place whence all beams come.
You would have told me with your brilliance:
we would gladly have stayed near you!
But it is refused by Fate.
Just look at us, for soon we will be far!
What to you are only eyes in these days -
in future nights shall be stars to us".

From this sombre poem about the death of a child, the cd "KTL", a collaboration between Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg, descends. In this post, I'll trace it's genealogy a bit more extensively than has been done in other reviews of the album.

The poem above was written by the romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, while grieving over two of his children, who had both died within 16 days at a very tender age: Ernst Rückert (january 4th 1829 – january 16th 1834) and Luise Rückert (june 25th 1830 – december 31st 1833). It is part of a much larger cycle of poems, called "Kindertotenlieder". The cycle contains no less than 425 poems in total, which are reproduced in full here.

From this cycle of poems, the late-romantic composer Gustav Mahler selected five poems for a symphony - the one above (reproduced in a translation by Emily Ezust) is one of these five. The poems that Mahler chose for his "Kindertotenlieder" symphony all deal with the theme of light and darkness. The composer wrote that "[t]hese five songs are intended as one inseparate unit, and in performing them their continuity should not be interfered with". Mahler's wife Alma wrote in her book 'Erinnerungen und Briefe' (1946) that she felt that Mahler tempted fate in setting Rückert's poems to music - and sure enough, fate answered Mahler's call, death taking his oldest daughter Maria in 1907 at the age of 4.

This year, Gisèle Vienne (philosopher, marionetist, director) and Dennis Cooper (writer, poet, performance artist, blogger) created a theatre piece named after Mahler's sombre song cycle, a piece which "interrogates the confusion between phantasm and reality in the collective sphere". Cooper calls it "a combination black metal concert/funeral in the dead of winter in the middle of the Austrian woods".
Besides the cycle of Mahler's poems, Vienne and Cooper were inspired by folkloric Yuletide rituals from Austria, in which people don monstrous masks to portray the devils and daemons of the Wild Hunt - masks that would make many a black metal performer proud! These rites too are connected to the death of children. From Wikipedia: "In the folklore of Bavaria and Austria, Perchta was said to roam the countryside at midwinter, and to enter homes on Twelfth Night. She would know whether the children and young servants of the household had behaved well and worked hard all year. If they had, they might find a small silver coin next day, in a shoe or pail. If they had not, she would slit their bellies open, remove stomach and guts, and stuff the hole with straw and pebbles". This ancient tradition is apparently still very much alive in Austria, judging by the number of websites dedicated to it: see here, here and here for some examples.

The premiere of "Kindertotenlieder" will take place on february 28th 2007, on the Festival Les Antipodes, at the Le Quartz gallery in Brest, France. Here are some dialogues from the play. A photograph from the website is reproduced nearby - note that the dead child (don't worry, it's only a doll) is wearing a Burzum hoodie!

From these funereal forebears, KLT descends, a collaboration between Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg. The music on the cd is apparently not the soundtrack to the theatre piece, though elements may appear in the finished piece.

On the website of the Rehberg's record label Éditions Mego, KTL is called "A six part collision amongst the increasingly fading prescences (sic) between the light and the dark" - echoing the theme of those of Rückert poems (light and darkness) that Mahler selected for his symphony. That very theme is also reflected in the description of the two places the music was recorded, each a place where light and darkness collide: "Pieces were recorded in a resistance fortress in southern France during a thunderstorm. Others in a wintergarden drenched in the sunlight": thunder (light) versus storm (dark), winter (dark) versus sunlight (light).

As the Mego website calls KTL a "threatening new collaboration taking in parallel worlds of Extreme Computer Music and Black Metal", I feared that this release would be marred by the schlock-horror approach of Black Metal, so unapproapriate for the mournful theme of this release. Thus, I think, it is a good thing O'Malley and Rehberg did not follow the musical onomatopeia which is present in Mahlers work (from Derek Lims essay: "... the most subtle is in Wenn dein Mütterlein, Mahler accompanies the melody with pizzicato cello, imitating in the Bachian sense, the mother's footsteps. Later, pizzicato viola imitates the footsteps of the daughter who once followed the mother's footsteps, but no more"). A modern-day variation on Mahler's musical onomatopeia - such as a sample of a weeping mother or whimpering child - would have spoiled the stark, pristine beauty of KTL with lurid sensationalism.

Thankfully, this is not the case: O'Malley and Rehberg do not take a leaf out of Mahler's late-romantic style, but follow their own musical path. Like Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, the six tracks of the cd "... are intended as one inseparate unit, and in performing them their continuity should not be interfered with".

The first track of the cd, Estranged, opens with an icy-blue shimmering ambient tone - somewhat reminiscent of the ambient sound of the last track of Burzum 's "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss", but even more minimalist. Over this, sound effects are slowly added, O'Malleys guitars putting accents on the electronica. As a whole, the track is somewhat similar to Sunn 0)))'s "A Shaving of the Horn That Speared You" , from White1. Another musical precursor is Justin Broadrick's Final project.

Then, on the four movements of "Forest Floor" - the second to sixth tracks on the cd - the music crescendoes into a cold and ferocious metallic (not just metallic as in the musical genre, but metallic as in the element, as in iron, steel, silver) soundscape - an assault of industrialized loops - and then slowly diminuendos into desperate and desolate drones - the musical equivalent of being lost in the alps in a winternight night during a snowstorm.

When the storm has settled, all is covered in snow: "Snow", the coda of KTL ... starting with flakes, blots, squiggles, marks, scribblings, doodles of noise ... Henri Michaux described fighting with such blots, likening them to 'insatiable desires or knots of force, which are destined never to take form' ... one cannot decide whether their origin is electronic or electric ... and out of these slowly a structure rises up, slow loops, sombre repetitions, sinister slashings of sound: the most mournful of all six tracks.

Breathtaking.