Various – Warum ist die Banane krumm ?

Klaus Wagenbach founded Verlag Klaus Wagenbach in 1964 in West Berlin, the publisher of prominent German-speaking contemporary writers like Gunter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, Erich Fried or Ernst Jandl. In 1968, Wagenbach implemented his own version of Collectivism among staff members, with equal wages, collective decision-making (including voting for books under consideration for publication) and a decidedly Marxist ethos. Wagenbach went as far as publishing several Rote Arme Fraktion‘s manifestos in 1971, for which he was sentenced to a fine and prison on probation (info from German Wiki). Wagenbach launched the Quartplatten LP series in 1967 to release the sound poetry of Ernst Jandl (‘Laut und Luise’), Wolf  Biermann‘s anarchist songs (‘Drei Kugeln auf Rudi Dutschke’) and documents the GRIPS‘ children’s theater-cum-political activism stage productions.

♫ The 1971 sound poetry compilation Warum ist die Banane krumm ?, or Why is a banana bent?, alternates children reading short poems (written or collected by Peter Rühmkorf) with writers performing their own texts. The latter include poetry, short prose pieces, non-sensical tales and free rock. The playfulness of Jandl’s Gedichte für Kinder, or Poems for children, is plainly approachable even to non-German speakers, as are Peter Rühmkorf’s nursery rhymes. Floh de Cologne contribute a fine collection of imaginative, miniature protest songs, complete with Marxist sloganeering typical from the band (see video below). Generally speaking, contributors come from various parts of the Federal Republic and East Berlin, plus Swiss Peter Bichsel and Austrian Ernst Jandl. Some, but not all, belong to the Wagenbach Verlag roster of writers, like Wolf Biermann, Ernst Jandl, Peter Rühmkorf or Günter Bruno Fuchs.

01 Kindermund (:10)
02 Günter Bruno Fuchs Aus dem Notizbuch des Abendkönigs (7:36)
03 Kindermund (:08)
04 Wolf Biermann Erster Mai (:58)
05 Kindermund (:13)
06 Günter Herburger Birne macht Reklame (5:09)
07 Kindermund (:19)
08 Ernst Jandl Gedichte für Kinder (4:38)
09 Kindermund (:21)
10 Reinhard Lettau Auftritte verschiedener Herren (3:18)
11 Kindermund (:11)
12 Peter Rühmkorf Altes und Neues (1:14)
13 Kindermund (:05)
14 Floh De Cologne Scheißschlamassellied (4:31)
15 Kindermund (:10)
16 Peter Bichsel Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch (7:46)
17 Kindermund (:09)
18 Christa Reinig Die Fliege/Der Fischotter (2:04)
19 Kindermund (:23)
20 Wolf Biermann Das Märchen vom Märchenerzähler (4:55)
21 Kindermund (:14)
22 Peter Rühmkorf Abzählverse (4:14)

Total time 48:40
LP released by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, ref. Quartplatte 7, Berlin, 1971

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Poetry Out Loud #9

Poetry Out Loud #9 finds Peter and Patricia Harleman on themselves, in a self-sufficient set-up where Peter produced the recordings, Patricia designed the cover and both performed the poetry and music. As a consequence, their sound poetry appears more intimate than on other P.O.L. issues and the LP almost serves as a kind of sound diary. As always, though, the pseudo-shamanism of hand drums and small percussion combines with the hypnotic effect of echo pedal to underline the obsessive incantations of the poems. Totally unique.

01 Peter Harleman Trance (3:49)
02 The Harlemans Take a Sip of Me (1:39)
03 Peter Harleman If I Told You (2:29)
04 The Harlemans It Wasn’t Easy (4:27)
05 The Harlemans Fear For my Body (5:07)
06 The Harlemans I Give My Body to the Drums (3:23)
07 Peter Harleman I Forgot Your Name (2:04)
08 The Harlemans Nothing To Say (3:18)
09 The Harlemans I Am (2:32)
10 The Harlemans Curing (5:38)

Total time 34:20
LP released by Out Loud Productions, St Louis, Mo, 1975

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See also, Poetry Out Loud:
Number Six >
Number Seven >
Number Ten >

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Arthur Pétronio – Verbophonie

The son of Italian quick-change artist Leopoldo Fregoli, Switzerland-born violinist, poet and painter Arthur Pétronio (1897-1983) lived in Belgium and The Netherlands between 1910 and 1924. Trained as a violinist and a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe before WWI, Pétronio was a member of the Orchestre du Théâtre Royal de Liège. He published several avantgarde poetry journals in Belgium, including the influential Créer (1922-1923), a loose avantgarde group including poet, artist, musician and photographer E.L.T. Mesens and writer Franz Hellens, as well as connexions with people like Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau or Pablo Picasso. Pétronio settled in France in 1924.

Pétronio published several books of his own poetry, like Sang et Chair, 1955, pictured right. He apparently created the “verbophonie” concept as early as 1919, as a way to integrate sound poetry into regular music scores, but he developed the concept further in the 1950s thanks to tape recorders. No wonder Henri Chopin recognized a kindred spirit when the two met in the late 1950s. They collaborated on a tape composition titled Aérythme in 1963, and Pétronio was included in Henry Chopin’s Poésie Sonore Internationale, published by Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1979. His composition titled Cosmosmose (also on this LP) was included in the Futura: Poesia Sonora LP box set published by Cramps, Italy, 1978.

♫  Petronio’s take on sound poetry embarks a fair deal of musique concrète, tape collages, primitive sound effects and noise, especially on Tellurgie (1964) and Cosmosmose (1968). Petronio’s sound art is thus well balanced between musique concrète and sound poetry. These are home recordings on less than professional equipment, though, and some unwanted noises show up, especially in #3. Several female readers/performers contribute to this theater of voices as guest vocalists, in addition to Petronio’s voice. Note Igloo actually started as a sound poetry label: the first Igloo release was a sound poetry LP by Jean-Paul Ganty in 1978, and Henri Chopin released an LP titled Poésie Sonore on the Belgian label in 1983.

01 Tellurgie (10:25)
02 Nouvelle Innocence (11:04)
03 Cosmosmose (18:00)
04 Sortilèges (4:04)

Total time 43:33
LP released by Igloo Records, IG002, Brüssels, 1979

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Lydia Tomkiw ‘Incorporated’

First a poet, Lydia Tomkiw (1959-2007) was a familiar figure of poetry readings and slam sessions in various Chicago underground venues. During the 1980s, she published several poetry chapbooks (The Dreadful Swimmers and Popgun Sonatas, 1980), appeared in poetry journals (the Columbia Poetry Review #6) and anthologies (The Best American Poetry and New American Writing, both 1988). She met Don Hedeker during a gig of his band The Trouble Boys in 1980, and when they started their own duo in 1983, its name was lifted from one of Tomkiw’s poems. Algebra Suicide met with immediate success in the Chicago underground milieu and got international cult following, culminating in the band’s 1990 European tour.

Chicago’s Club Lower Links, founded 1985 by Leigh Jones and Michael Zerang (see googlemap location), was a key venue for Algebra Suicide’s performances and Lydia Tomkiw’s reading sessions. The club programmed free jazz (Hal Russell, Roscoe Mitchell and Steve Lacy, Evan Parker), experimental rock (The Effigies, Tom Cora, Hans Reichel) and slam sessions, or Spoken Word Thang (see handbill below). With various partners, Tomkiw bought the venue in 1991, but the club definitely closed in 1993. A regular poetry readings partner, Sharon Mesmer wrote a heart-wrenching obituary of Tomkiw on her blog in 2007.

From l to r: Club Lower Links poetry reading handbill ;
poetry reading with Sharon Messmer at Paul Waggoner galery ;
the Popgun Sonatas chapbook, 1980 ;
with Bart Plantenga and Theo Dorian (bearded)

Published 1995, Incorporated was Tomkiw’s unique solo release and includes collaborations with various artists like Chuck Uchida (of No Empathy), Sosumi, Reality Scare, The Legendary Pink Dots, Martin Bowes (of Attrition) and Dirk Ivens (of Dive). Tomkiw and The Legendary Pink Dots met during the latter’s US tour and performance in Chicago in the 1990s. Pretty Something was later included in the Kollabris 2001 CD on Terminal Kaleïdoscope.

01  May I Take Your Order, Please? – w/ Chuck Uchida (3:24)
02  Delilah’s Ex – w/ Sosumi (3:57)
03 The Edge Of Things – w/ Chuck Uchida (4:13)
04 Iris – w/ Reality Scare (5:39)
05 Thief – w/ Reality Scare (5:32)
06 Hot June Evening – w/ Robert Coddington (4:46)
07 Sometimes… – w/ The Legendary Pink Dots (2:32)
08 Heartbeat – w/ Chuck Uchida (2:30)
09 From The Place Everyone Avoided – w/ Reality Scare (3:20)
10 Saturn Makes A Move – w/ Dirk Ivens (1:54)
11 Pretty Something – w/ The Legendary Pink Dots (3:05)
12 Strange Candy – w/ Martin Bowes (4:10)

Total time 44:55
CD released by Widely Distributed Records, USA, 1995

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Mouloudji & André Almuró ‘Le Condamné à Mort’

As a radio producer working with Pierre Schaeffer at the latter’s Club d’Essai from 1947, and then for GRM after 1958, electroacoustic composer André Almuró (1927-2009) created many radio plays based on French literature (see my Wikipedia article). This LP is one of them, a setting of Jean Genet’s Le Condamné à Mort (or The Man Sentenced to Death), recorded in 1952 and released on LP in 1968. The poem, first published in 1945, is a paean to prison inmates’ homoeroticism, with explicitly gay language and provocations typical from Genet. French singer and actor Marcel Mouloudji’s warm and passionate voice contrasts with the sombre, industrial sounds of Almuró’s music. Far from mere incidental accompaniement, the sounds deploy their terrible beauty around the reader. The latter doesn’t steal the show either, and the mix is well balanced between voice and musique concrète – surprisingly so, as the LP is produced by Mouloudji’s regular producer at Bourg Records, Z. Jovanovic. Anyway, Almuró’s impressively dark, electroacoustic vision contributes to this stunning rendition of Genet’s oeuvre.

A rip from the CD version is available at Ubuweb. This new rip from the LP was an excuse to write a Wikipedia entry – or is it the other way round?

Le Condamné à Mort
01 Part I (15:00)
02 Part II (10:35)

Total time 25:35
LP released by Bourg Records, France, 1968

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Spiral #10 – February 1990

Mere chance encounter on a dissecting table or testament to polymath Willem De Ridder‘s extraordinarily disparate interests, this issue of Spiral cassette magazine contrasts rather diverse interviews and sound documents. For De Ridder, doubt and transgression are preferable to the infallible certitudes of human knowledge, and the common denominator of the individuals presented here is to explore alternative ways of thinking. Also typical from De Ridder is relying on individuals, not groups or organizations.

The hour-long conversation with English alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942) can hardly pass for a short introduction to Morphogenesis and morphic fields, the concepts Sheldrake disclosed in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. I suspect De Ridder was attracted to a keen spirit here, as the book was written in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, in Hyderabad, India, where Sheldrake worked as a plant physiologist from 1974 to 1985. As an expatriate himself, De Ridder experienced the benefits and disadvantages of exile.

And so does Mistress Monique Von Cleef, 1925-2005, who was banished from the United States in 1965 after the New Jersey police raided her House of Pain S&M salon in Newark, NJ. Coincidentally, she then fled to her native… Netherlands (see good bio here). The sound document included here is supposedly the recording of a BDSM session with a volunteer Japanese slave. This might or might not be a genuine audio document, but listening is fun and is probably the closest De Ridder ever got to a snuff-movie-for-the-ears.

As responsible for film to tape transfer and HDTV processes for Hollywood’s 20th Century Fox during the 1980s, Richard M. Wolfe can be considered a key person in all things television. However, the fact he is also a drug legalization activist since the 1970s keeps me wondering if De Ridder was really interested in his professional skills. There might be a portion of hypocrisy in De Ridder, which should be taken into account when approaching this complex personality.

Thanks to anonymous reader for the rip.

Other issues in the Spiral series can be found here.

01 Rupert Sheldrake Morphogenetics In Austria Theory (57:01)
02 Baroness Monique Von Cleef Disciplining A Client In Tokyo (21:00)
03 Richard M. Wolfe On The State Of Television (11:34)

Total time 90mns
Cassette released by Spiral Information Service, Amsterdam, 1990

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Raymond Murray Schafer ‘Sounds Unseen’

This flexi disc was issued in 1981 for the opening of a Raymond Murray Schafer exhibition at Gallery Stratford, Stratford, Ontario, organized in conjunction with Presentation House, Vancouver. Acknowledging Murray Schafer’s multiple activities as a writer, educator, philosopher, visual artist and composer, the exhibition included graphic scores, drawings, collages, and a sound sculpture build from found objects like “old saw blades, rusty nails, machinery parts”. The Sounds Unseen flexidisc is housed in a fold out, 6-pages cover with texts and pictures, but unfortunately no list of the works exhibited, though graphic scores like Divan I Shams I Tabriz, 1970, and Requiem for the Party Girl, 1972, are both mentioned. Other works exhibited possibly included the Snowforms graphic score, 1981 ; drawings from The Composer in the Classroom, 1965 ; hieroglyphs like the ones collected in the Arcana book/score, 1972 ; films or stills from Bing, Bang, Boom, NFB, 1975, or the recently released Music for Wilderness Lake, Fichman-Sweete Production, 1980.

♫ One side of the record is delivered in English and the flip in French, yet the latter is not a translation of the former. On ‘Here The Sounds Go Round’, Murray Schafer enumerates the multifarious forms and ubiquity of sounds, their “everywhere-ness” including air transmission, natural or mythical sounds, voices, noises, silence, and extending to what Murray Schafer refers to as “music seen and heard”. Above all, the speech stresses the conscious activity of listening. Using accessible words suitable for educational purposes, Murray Schafer’s performance is sometimes close to slam poetry as the writing makes extensive use of repetitions, cadences, internal rhymes and pauses. On the flip side, Canadian percussionist and composer John Wyre (1941-2006) joins Murray Schafer, to illustrate and punctuate the latter’s considerations on sounds with cymbal crashes and timpani rolls.

01 Here The Sounds Go Round (6:18)
02 Reflexions Sur Le Son (8:42)

Total time 15:00
Flexidisc released by Gallery Stratford & Presentation House, Canada, 1981

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Spiral #9 – January 1990

The previous Spiral episode I posted was terrible and this one is also rather tiresome, at least for the main interview. But there is hope: the second track on Spiral #9 is a fine field recording of barking dog packs in a small Italian city, presumably recorded when Willem De Ridder was living in Italy in 1979. It seems it was recorded from a hill atop Genzano Di Roma, for it remarkably sounds like a panorama of various dogs scattered across the city. I added one of these covers from the Discogs Spiral pages, as they look rather different from the ones I use. I wonder if there was several issues for each tapes, or maybe different ones for the US and Europe. Thanks to anonymous reader for the rip.

01 George – interview with Willem de Ridder (73:38)
02 Genzano Di Roma, Italy field recording (17:05)

Total time 90mns
Cassette released by Spiral Information Service, Amsterdam, 1990

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