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█ █ P U B L I C . S O U N D
█ █
█ █ presenting our latest release
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r e l e a s e . i n f o
Artist.....: The Hafler Trio
Title......: Exactly As I Say
Rip Date...: Mar-04-2007 Cat.No.....: pgram008
Style......: Ambient Label......: Phonometrography
Quality....: VBRkbps Type.......: Album
Size.......: 170,4 MB Source.....: CDDA
r e l e a s e . n o t e s
Third in a series voice recordings (previous entries being
Normally featuring Blixa Bargeld and Where are You? featuring
David Tibet). As with the previous releases the recordings were
made to be played through speakers at high volumes and should not
be listened to through headphones or compressed.
1-1 Di-ksha (63:52)
1-1a Unwashed Unclothed, But In Flight
1-1b The Faultless New Substance
1-1c A Shadowed Hand Reflected
1-1d Always Growing More Obvious
2-1 Para- Bindu (65:07)
2-1a The First Period Described
2-1b The Second Period Ignored
2-1c Quiet Open Water
"The hafler trio using the voice of Jonsi Birgisson: EXACTLY AS I
SAY. J≤nsi Birgisson, the anxious page, skylarked, willed,
intoned, breathed. Another was there, listening. Buttons were
depressed, and skirts 'battered'. Known for his shenanigans with
the outfit known not only to their parents as Sφgur R≤s, but a few
others as well, the utterances were recorded, suggested and indeed
supervised as well as made by The Hafler Trio. And of this, we are
very glad. Marvellous and delightful things have and are issuing
forth from this."
hypnos.com
"The harder it is to understand, the more powerfully it attracts
one. People do not try to plumb the depths of works which let all
their treasures float on the surface.ö (Prof Sigurdur Nordal:
æThree Essays on the Icelandic poem, 'V÷luspa'Æ [London 1970-71])
During the twenty-odd years of its earthly manifestations, H30, as
it's affectionately known by its many admirers, has been involved
in some profoundly weird shit, as befits a contemporary and
sometime collaborator of the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic
TV, Zoviet France and Throbbing Gristle. The history is far too
complicated to be compressed into the nutshell required of a
review such as this. Suffice to say that the staggeringly prolific
Andrew McKenzie, H30's presiding genius, has been ploughing one of
the more lonely and obsessive artistic furrows in the
turn-of-the-century soundscape, and, in a very real sense, each of
his projects is defiantly unique, utterly unreal, and really
senseless.
Exactly As I Say is a 2CD walk on the wildside of Tantric
transcendence. One CD is entitled 'Diksha', and the other, 'Para
Bindu'. For what it's worth, a diksha is a subtle transfer of the
guru's divine energy into the heart, body and soul of the
disciple: it can take the form of a spoken word (mantra), a subtle
radiation from the eye, or a physical touch, or of a long-distance
transmission via, for example, a photograph, or, in this case, I
suppose, a CD. Para Bindu refers to the point-source in Tantric
symbology that represents the Seed of the Ultimate Sound.
So this is New Age twiddley-poo, right?
Wrong.
H30 is an art project in the most serious and mysterious sense: in
the sense that its apparent meaning is merely a lure - a smoking
mirror that invites us to look at ourselves and to interrogate our
own meaning by dislocating our assumptions about and expectations
of meaning, by tricking us into confronting ourselves at the
deepest and most disturbing levels.
To be prosaic for a moment, and to misapply description to the
ineffable, the first listening to Exactly As I Say is a
considerable test of both one's patience and one's endurance: each
of the two CDs is just over an hour long (they're both exactly
1:03:56, to be exact), and neither moves, dynamically, much beyond
the sonic equivalent of waving a white flag in a blizzard.
'Diksha' offers a long, long intro of a sort of episodic
breathing, punctuated only by a brief energetic moment - a kind of
snore - halfway through, followed by a single sound - a slowly
modulating, shaped F-plus-harmonics - for half-an-hour, then a
very, very, very long fade-out to silence. It's like watching a
plane disappear into the distance. There's no single moment when
you can definitively pronounce - there - gone - it keeps blinking
back into your vision, microscopically, for a microsecond. 'Para
Bindu' begins similarly, and, similarly, half-way through, there
is the brief emergence of a recognisably human voice, inhumanly
extended over several minutes, finally merging into the background
drone - a single tone with delicate applications of harmonic
cadence, until, towards the end, there is a dramatic shift from
the base F to a prolonged G#, before the final fadeout.
If, however, one has the time and patience to go through all this
all over again, and, preferably, yet again, and to follow the
suggestions on the sleeve this time (i.e. to listen on good
speakers, not headphones, in a darkened space, at very high
volume), one's rewarded with - well, let's just say (Attention,
young Paduan!) the beginnings of understanding.
The semi-mythological Trickster - upsetter of applecarts, scourge
of Apollonian orderliness - manifests in different forms in
different cultures: Coyote and Raven in North America, Eshu and
Legba in Africa, the Monkey King in China, Krishna in India - and
has attracted a fair number of artists to his wily ways, from
Whitman to Duchamp via Beuys and Schwitters (Joseph Beuys' famous
1974 installation piece, 'I Like America and America Likes Me',
involving his three-day-long self-incarceration in one small room
of a New York art gallery with a coyote for company was no
arbitrary choice of companion). Trickster has also always
attracted an inordinate number of lightweights who,
misunderstanding his proper role, are actually mere playful brats.
(I've never been able to decide, myself, whether or not Andy
Warhol was a manifestation of Trickster or just a trickster, an
emperor with no clothes. It's two of his film pieces I remembered,
however, in the course of trying to think of art work with which
to compare Exactly As I Say: 'Sleep' [1964] is one static shot of
a man sleeping for eight hours; and 'Empire' is another eight-hour
static shot of the Empire State Building taken from the 44th floor
of the Time-Life Building one evening in July 1964.)
One set of associations that is definitely worth highlighting in
terms of H30's provenance is a quirky New York nexus originating
around Robert Rauschenberg's revolutionary 'White Paintings'
(large canvases painted a uniform white) of 1951, which were the
inspiration for John Cage's seminal 'Four Minutes Thirty-Three
Seconds' (1952) - a piano piece written for a pianist who is
instructed to sit at the piano and play nothing for precisely four
minutes and thirty-three seconds. John Cage was working, around
this time, in the studio set up by BΘbΘ and Louis Barron, two of
the pioneers of electro-acoustic music, most famously remembered
for their composing the glorious electronic soundtrack to the 1956
sci-fi classic, 'Forbidden Planet'. Both consciously and
unconsciously Exactly As I Say refers back to this nexus (and as
many more besides, doubtless) in a manner that implies that the
work of H30 is arguably Modernist, for all its industrial/post
punk accretions, and is actually as attached to history as grunge
and garage is not (or tries to be not). Which isn't to say that
it's irrelevant in a post-postmodern landscape (or soundscape) -
far from it. It just carries, like a snowball, a cumulative weight
of precedent, a sort of cultural inertia, that must be getting
more and more difficult to overcome with each successive project.
(The attachment to the heroic being a Modernist characteristic, of
course.)
Total kudos, therefore, to Andrew McKenzie for inviting J≤nsi
Birgisson of Sigur R≤s to collaborate with him on this project,
and to J≤nsi for accepting. Although he might as well have
selected some random passer-by for all that the technical
manipulations and extensions of J≤nsi's sampled voice render it
totally unrecognisable, the fact is that it is J≤nsi's voice, and
that that carries with it as much resonance as the absence of
sound does in John Cage's piece.
There have been many fruitful - if largely ignored - historical
collaborations between musicians and other artists. John Lennon
and Yoko Ono is one of the more memorable ones. You may have seen
that fascinating early vintage video of the young Jeff Buckley
playing a shower-attachment horn at an 'eighties Fluxus event.
More recently, Sigur R≤s themselves collaborated with the
choreographer Merce Cunningham on 'Split Sides' in 2003, thereby,
incidentally, producing their most distinctive post-'┴gaetis'
album - the EP Ba ba Ti ki Di do.
An earlier, similar H30 collaboration with the enigmatic Autechre
in 2003 attracted some chin-stroking from a few subsequently
somewhat bemused (even by Autechre fan standards) Autechre fans.
Some cynics will read this as cynical mutual opportunism. But I
side with Trickster on this: both Autechre's and, now, J≤nsi's
coolth could only be enhanced by orders of magnitude by
association with one of the coolest artists on the planet.
(Or not, as the case may be.)
I haven't mentioned the packaging, which is an artwork in itself -
like opening a gift, a very special, very carefully crafted
origami box decorated with beautiful calligraphic aphorisms.
Except it's not in Japanese, and the text is prolix sub-Joycean
gibberish. ThatÆs Trickster for you. Treat yourself."
www.noripcord.com
p l a y l i s t
cd 1 ..
..
01 Diksha 63:56
..
cd 2 ..
..
01 Para Bindu 65:11
129:07 min
g r e e t i n g s
agw - amok - bass - bcc - bex - boss - cmg - cmc - cms - d2h
def - dh - disc0 - drum - emp - ftd - fwyh - gem - i8 - ipc
jce - jfk - jrp - just - khz - kinky - kw - lame - maem - mbs
mgc - psycz - r2r - rac - radial - rapid - rks - rtb - sb
sever - sfe - soup - sour - sq - tr - trt - ube - uc - upe
uki - xtc - yard - zi
respect to music lovers worldwide
never forget : go to the show. buy the t-shirt. order the vinyl