Podcast Episode 3 - East Meets West. Pt. 1: Violence, Sex, Politics

Antonin Artaud: Bruitage, from “Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu” (1947) [1.32]
Diamanda Galàs: Panoptikòn from “Diamanda Galàs” (1984) [15.06]
Keiji Haino: excerpt from “I Said This is the Son of Nihilism” (2004) [18.39]
Terre Thaemliz Yer Ass is Grass from “Soil” (1995) [8.22]
Vampillia feat. Attila Csihar: One (previously unreleased, 2012) [8.58]
Yosuke Yamashita Trio: Chiasma from “Chiasma” (1976) [7.15]
Carmelo Bene: excerpt from “Bene! Quattro modi diversi di morire in versi. Majakovskij-Blok-Esenin-Pasternak”, music by Vittorio Gelmetti (1974) [6.18]

This episode is dedicated to Koji Wakamatsu. I also thank Japanese ‘brutal orchestra’ Vampillia for sharing their still unreleased collaboration with singer Attila Csihar.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), post surrealist poet, theatre writer, actor. The radio broadcast Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (‘To have done with the judgement of god’, 1948) is his last work, a radio broadcast thought as the full realization of his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, a theatre not overtaken by repetition and delivered through action. Friend of André Bréton, fervent admirer of the Dalai Lama, interested in Balinese Gamelan music and South America peyotl rituals, Artaud used voice and noise to amplify the expressivity in order to get beyond the boundaries of language and of the body, anticipating contemporary singing (Demetrio Stratos, Joan La Barbara, Diamanda Galàs), performance art (Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic) and the use of ethnic percussions in post-serial contemporary and electronic music (Iannis Xenakis, Terre Thaemlitz). “When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.” (Antonin Artaud)

http://www.ubu.com/sound/artaud.html

Born in San Diego, California, in 1955, but of Greek origins, Diamanda Galàs is a singer, pianist, videoartist. Choosing to focus through contemporary experimental music in subjects as AIDS (The Masque of the Red Death, Plague Mass, Vena Cava), forced institutionalization (Insekta), the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocide (Defixiones: Will and Testament), she began her career, while developing her unique vocal style, working on the concept of ‘katharsis’ from ancient Greek tragedy, creating a sound environment with her voice and microphones system. Diamanda Galàs started her career as an improviser, with NY-based musicians David Murray and Butch Morris, then left the world of improvised music after collaborations with ‘downtown’ and European artists as John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Andrea Centazzo and Peter Kowald. She debuted in 1977 as a contemporary music singer in Vinko Globokar Un Jour Comme un Autre and since 1989 started working also on cycles of songs taken from Western music repertoire - Edith Piaf, Roy Acuff, Ornette Coleman, Johnny Cash, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Her latest works are the movie Schrei 27, in collaboration with Italian videoartist Davide Pepe and focused on political use of torture, and the sound installation Aquarium, where with Vladislav Shabalin she denounces the environmental disasters on the Gulf of Mexico.

http://www.diamandagalas.com/

Keiji Haino (Chiba, Japan, 1952) started developing his artistic vision through theatre, inspired by Antonin Artaud, shifting to music after hearing The Doors’ When the music’s over. His first band was the psychedelic rock combo Lost Aaraaf, with multi-instrumentalist Magical Power Mako and composer Toru Takemitsu. In 1978 Haino formed the experimental duo Fushitsusha, featuring different musicians to accompany him through records and live performances. Collaborating with avant-garde artists as Derek Bailey, Faust, Peter Brotzmann, Loren Connors, Charles Gayle, Merzbow, John Zorn, Pansonic, Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi, and expressing himself mostly with guitar and voice but sometimes also with hurdy gurdy, ethnic instruments or live electronics, Haino cites troubadour music, Marlene Dietrich, Iannis Xenakis and Blind Lemon Jefferson as influences. Having tried with the band Aihyio to give his personal, Japanese translation of the blues – ‘covering’ The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and The Ronettes – Keiji Haino performances can be described as cathartic, but also intimate – as the ‘vol. 2’ of 2004 Black Blues, made entirely on voice and acoustic guitar, fully can testify.

http://www.fushitsusha.com/

Terre Thaemlitz is an award winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work combines a critical look at identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production. He has released over 15 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has lectured and participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan. He currently resides in Kawasaki, Japan.

http://www.comatonse.com/

Vampillia is a ‘brutal orchestra’ coming from Osaka, the same city that saw Boredoms arise in the 1990s. Composed by 11 elements – electric guitar, drums, three singers, three violinists, piano and a Dj – the band during its performances alternates classical/acoustic instrumentals with grindcore bursts. In 2011 Vampillia released the albums Rule The World/Deathtiny Land (Code 666) and Alchemic Heart (Important Records), the last featuring Japanese avant noiser Merzbow and American vocal experimentalist Jarboe. Devoted to a music both lyrical, intimate and expressive, they are currently collaborating with Hungarian black metal vocalist Attila Csihar, singer for Mayhem, Tormentor, Current 93, Jarboe and recently Stephen O’Malley’s Sunn O))). Csihar last projects are Void Ov Voices, opening act for Ulver, Lustmord, Ruin and Diamanda Galàs, and Burial Chamber Trio with Greg Anderson of Sunn O))) and avant guitarist Oren Ambarchi. The piece featured on the podcast, and titled One, was sent to me last February when I was still in London, and is released here for the first time publicly through a new mix. The album, one of the five Vampillia is going to release this year, will be called Some Nightmares Take You Aurora Rainbow Darkness.

http://vampillia.com/

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2316/

Yosuke Yamashita (Tokyo, 1926) is a Japanese pianist, composer, essayist, and writer. Praised by critics for his unique piano style, and a pioneer in Japanese free jazz and avant-garde music, in 1969 he formed Yosuke Yamashita Trio, whose music is featured in the final scenes of Koji Wakamatsu’s masterpiece The Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), dedicated to Japanese terrorism, struggle for revolution, power, and political repression. Also a soundtrack composer as for Atsushi Yamatoya’s Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wasteland (1967) and Shoei Imamura’s Dr. Akagi - awarded in 1999 Mainichi Film Concours as ‘Best Film Score’,  in the 1980’s with bassist Cecil Mc Bee and drummer Pheeroan AkLaaff formed the New York Trio, often hosting saxophonist Joe Lovano.  While also famous for a performance in which he played a burning piano dressed with an asbestos suit, Yosuke Yamashita has been a visiting professor of music at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, Nagoya University of Arts, and Kunitachi College of Music.

http://www.jamrice.co.jp/yosuke/index.html

Carmelo Bene (1937-2002) was an Italian actor, writer, movie director. He debuted in 1959 with a Caligola that was very appreciated by Albert Camus himself. Close friend and also a collaborator of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and deep connoisseur of the work of Pierre Klossowski, an intellectual at the border of official French culture but a pupil of Rainer Maria Rilke and of André Gide, Carmelo Bene was influenced by Nietzsche and structuralism, by the paintings of Francis Bacon and by James Joyce's Ulysses; in 1960 - and again until the 5th edition in 1980 - he took the poems of Vladimir Majakovskij, the Russian revolutionary poet, as the starting point to his studies on voice, on voiding words of the dialectics between signifying/signifier, and on using the voice itself as a full orchestra. Helped for the music initially by post-serialist composer Sylvano Bussotti, Bene's quest for a theatre that goes beyond the flattening of the voice as mere extention of the written language in 'Majakovskij' passes through the stretching of the dynamics and possibilities of the voice, emphasizing gestures and phonetic elements.

http://www.immemorialecarmelobene.it/

To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic website and search for 'completecommunion'.

To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com

From Francis Bacon to Free Improvisation (and beyond)

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970

I started Gilles Deleuze's "The Logic of Sensation" this winter, and when I read the pages related to the concept of "histeresis", and its application to modern painting - the blurring of the boundaries between object and subject, the use of color as rhythmic pattern - by the French philosopher, I found out that what he put on the table was in fact embracing many of the artistic tides developed since the second half of the 20^th century. Deleuze's book is about Francis Bacon's painting, but, as many of the philosophers writings, it tries to be inclusive and to track a sort of 'minor' history of the most vital artistic statements of the time, and back. But, far from what Gilles Deleuze embodies in his text - Francis Bacon, Vincent Van Gogh, Eadweard Muybridge, Diego Velasquez, Paul Cézanne, as long as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust literary masterpieces -, I was thinking first and foremost about Antonin Artaud - on which Deleuze himsepf came back in many of his essays, from The Logic of Sense to A Thousand Plateaus - and performance arts, from Vito Acconci to Marina Abramovic. And, obviously, to music.

I was listening to Roscoe Mitchell's No Side Effect (RogueArt, 2006) in those days. So in a certain way improvised music (Albert Ayler, the AACM) was implied in surrounding the impressions Deleuze's book gave me, but, in my effort to articulate a more extended analysis, I have to imply also Demetrio Stratos' and Sainkho Namtchylak's studies on voice, that are related to some techniques many post-bop horn players developed, starting with John Coltrane. Maybe the proper field for this study would probably be European contemporary music, with Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen as examples of what was then called 'post-serialism', and the so-called 'Industrial music' - this definition in Europe doesn't include music related to heavy metal, but forms of music developed first as accompaniment for performances, and then risen to a proper authonomy with Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten and Maurizio Bianchi -, and the Sound Art, as a matter of how the sound can influence the perception of the space. 

In this article I want to give some tools that can be useful for a first approach with a discussion on how the French philosopher's essay fits with music, and to what extent, skimming through genres and styles. Deleuze was very influent in the 1960s here in Europe and then in South America, where he still is. David Toop in his Ocean of Sound talks diffusely about Deleuze's concept of 'rhizome' - a root without a proper original branch, metaphor for a way of thinking without relating reality to a unique and univocal meaning - as a strategy to reach a 'nomadic' way - a way not based on given, i.e. 'sedentary', structure of language, of signifying - to approach creation; that's what Sun Ra's and other jazzmen were doing: issuing their own records on their own labels, and so avoiding artistic compromises, and then giving some of their artefacts to some major or independent labels. That's what the avant-garde pianist did, as an example, with Space is the place, issued on Impulse!, or with Nuclear War, published on Mark Stewart's On-U Sound.

Francis Bacon Study for the Head of George Dyer

Hysteresis, so. It's difficult to undesrtand it correctly if you are not aware of some cornerstones of the structuralism. In particular it would be interesting to focus on Jacques Lacan's seminars about psychoanalisis and the concept of 'hysteria', that he, as structuralist, considers as the refusal to apply the language of Power to the body, as the proper feeling of the hysteric subject. And this, because power refuses to give desire his proper place in the world of language and in the word of the Law. As far as desire, for Lacan, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." So desire can never be satisfied, as Slavoj Žižek says: "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

A good part of the Deleuze's thinking is based on the opposition between power and desire. The concept of power is taken from Hegel and seen as something - the dialectics - that comes from, and produces, dissociation - thesis versus antithesis. "Petrolio", a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, or his Salò movie, are good literary translations of that concept. Desire is all that remains when the structures of the speech as a form of power on reality - the presumption to give order to reality with words - collapse. Again, Pasolini's 'Teorema' is a good picture of that idea. At the center of the paintings of Bacon there is a work of removal, an ethic work that leads precisely to abandon power for desire. Bacon take away the figure, the shape and the filling is blurring, so there are no more specified subjects - man and animal, subject and object, figure and environment, and so on.

And again, movement in Bacon is always double, systolic and diastolic at the same time. An abject athleticism - from latin 'ab-jectus', something that remains beyond the sub-jectus, which is the subject - leading from the figurative pattern that imprisons the figure into being only in this movement - the sink, the mirror - and filled to the figure - the body as Plexus / spasm, hysterical scene: escape through any body prostheses: syringes, umbrellas, mouth / scream ... -. Extraction and isolation, as opposed to the intelligible narrative relations of classical figurativeness. The butchered meat, the zone of indiscernibility between man and animal. The bones will rise from the flesh, as the flesh descended from the bones. Acrobatics of the flesh, an extension of athletics in the body. Face, head, cry escapes the body through the mouth, like blood from a severed artery. Spiritual movement.

Place created by those forms of art is similar to the anthropologist Victor Turner concept of 'liminarity' in his 'Rite of passage', and a good picture of it can be considered the way a Tibetan singer uses his throat in order to produce a double sound, positioning his tounge and glottis as if he is passing from 'l' letter to 'm' letter. This is a 'middle' position, but one that produces a double sound. Hysteresis, so, is the 'rhythmic' eye. The eye becomes ear: it feels time, as does the ear when you listen to music. And so becomes 'schizophrenic', says Deleuze, but not in the usual sense of dissociation. Schizophrenia as music is, because music disembodied bodies, the place (not the concept) of vanishing lines that cross the bodies themselves, but that are consistent elsewhere, hysterized through the introduction of color. How can we not recognize in that description the timbre, old fetish of improvisers, but also the use of a certain layering of sound even in analog and digital electronics, or in some contemporary composers, as in Karlheinz Stockhausen or Iannis Xenakis? How about electronic music, be it Miles Davis electrified trumpet, or the first contemporary composers in producing music through ring modulators?

The body draws on its new organs, like Antonin Artaud had predicted in 'Pour en finir avec le jujement de dieu'. It's a metaphor for multiculturalism, in the sense of the crossing of two different cultures, that usually produces something completely new: the 'african-american' music isn't a mere adding of two cultural forms of art: it is a totally new music. The 'hysterized eye' ceases to perceive the figures arranged in space according to a scan or narrative perspective, and through the articulation of three elements - material structure / set position / area and contour as the unfocused limit of both - creates a structure of rhythm / feeling. The body is thus the zone of indiscernibility between subject and object, between sentient and heard. Pure affection. The feeling acts as an agent deformating the body, and creates a gap in which it is organized through a sequence, a spasmic passage from a level to the other. 

So let's go back to music, to the rhythm given through the use of color. It's something similar to the dyplophonies used in Tibetan singing, or to the resonances of certain Arab, Middle or Eastern instruments - qanun, sitar -. But the same is with the way a musician like Roscoe Mitchell sometimes uses triplophonies on his horns. Same with Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, their use of tritones: they aren't a mere addition of a sound to another, but a new form of vibration. And the same is with the bass lines Henry Grimes give shape as a matter of texturizing different colors, different layers of sound.

Surely, if we think about avant garde jazz, its roots aren't in Western philosophy, but in a practice that is more confident with other concepts, like sound as vibration, as an example. Quoting Sufism and his mysticism can be a better idea. But since the 19th Century European thinkers - e.g. Schopenhauer or Nietzsche were both enthousiasts readers of the Bhagavad Gita- were looking at the Eastern World as a new model, less related to the division between reason - the self-consciousness as the result of the ego seeing himself - and the irrational - all that can't be explained with scientific measures. Psychology and anthropology - Carl G. Jung ideas on Symbols and Collective Unconscious, as Victor Turner idea of Experience - are more related to an Olistic approach to the human mind than Freud's idea of the Ego and Hegel's concept of dialectics. A more fluid approach to things, and a reflection of that knowledge parameters change can be seen in Antonin Artaud's 'The theater and its double', or in Jerzy Grotowski's Toward a poor theater; the same is with Francis Bacon and, to some extent, Jackson Pollock's paintings, and music after the middle of the last century.