Avant Marghen Vol. 5

New volume of the Avant Marghen series issued in a numbered edition of 80 copies only. This luxury black boxset edition actually includes the fifth group of 7 LPs previously issued for the VocSon series and now sold out. Each individual LP record includes a numbered Avant Marghen inner-sleeves.

LP 1) Jean-Louis Brau “Instrumentations verbales” LP. First 80 copies from the original pressing of 350 copies issued in 2010. Jean-Louis Brau (1930-1985) approached everything in an explosive way, sometimes achieving some major results, like his sound poetry, as demonstrated by “Turn back nightingale” (1972), in which he makes references to François Dufrêne, on a background of disarticulated drums and pre-punk saturations. Also included on this one-sided LP are “Elégie Elémentaire” and “Ataloche Roche”, both recorded in 1961 during Isidore Isou’s conference at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, as well as “Instrumentation Verbale” and “Cantate pour l’interdiction de Mandrake”, both recorded in 1963 and first published in “Poésie Physique”, book w/ 3 singles (Brau, Dufrêne, Wolman), privately issued by Wolman for Achèle, in 1965.

LP2) Maurice Lemaitre “Poemes et musiques lettristes et hyperphonie” LP. First 80 copies from the long sold-out original pressing of 350 copies issued in 2014. An exceptionally wild sonic art and poetry document, Maurice Lemaitre “Poemes et musiques lettristes et hyperphonie” was recorded between 1952 and 1968. Neither Isou, nor Pomerand, Dufrene, Wolman, or Spacagna achieved what Lemaitre did. Lemaitre dares the unthinkable: neo-yeye rhythmic muzak destroyed by “lettries” disseminated with the biggest care. One more treasure: the very “pop music” oriented Lemaitre with his “I wanna go home mister” blues, here in a version with a borderline insane companion: Isidore Isou. Also included on this LP is a previously unreleased torrid “concerto” titled “L’alcove” for a lettrist male chorus and female solo orgasms, followed by “L’ascension du Phenix M.B.”, a sound collage from 1967… No need of Yoko Ono’s loops for another “Revolution 9”, one year before Lemaitre cuts the tape with a scalpel, leaving the cuts exposed: home revolution in between two manifestos and three hypergraphic paintings.

LP3) Ulises Carrion “The Poet’s Tongue” LP. First 80 copies from the immediately sold-out original pressing of 270 copies issued in 2012. Ulises Carrión’s audio works clearly reflect his passion for language, its structures, sounds and meanings. His many initiatives and projects bear witness to his boundless obsessions with communication and circulation of works and ideas as a cultural strategy. All pieces from this LP, recorded at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht between September and October 1977, have in common their refusal of discursiveness. They are not meant to be true or beautiful. Each piece is a series of vocal units that unfolds according to simple rules. Their beginning and end are arbitrary – they could go on infinitely. They should go on. They go on.

LP4) Anton Bruhin “11 Heldengesänge und 3 Gedichte” LP with 4-page insert. First 80 copies from the original pressing of 350 copies issued in 2014. “11 Heldengesänge und 3 Gedichte” is a sound poem which takes us into a medieval world of minstrels and errant knights, a phantasmagoria in text and sound. It is also a modern document of the not-yet-existing electronic Sampling Art in the 1970s. Like an anthropologist Anton Bruhin presents this fictional culture inventing its language and music as well as drawing its objects: a hat, a cup, an arm, a flag, a wurst… everyday-life artifacts from an ancient time catalogued with scientific precision. In “11 Heldengesänge und 3 Gedichte”, a masterpiece by Anton Bruhin, all is artificial and nothing is real, exactly like in our contemporary world.

LP5) Gil J Wolman “Wolman et son double” LP. First 80 copies from the original pressing of 385 copies issued in 2015. Antonin Artaud had a major impact on the future sound poets of the “poésie physique,” François Dufrene, Jean-Louis Brau and Gil J Wolman. The “mégapneumie” (poems of breath and sound) of Gil J Wolman appeared as soon as 1950 and eventually developed into an improvisation for breath and organic sounds originating from the throat and the whole body. The work seems to be designed to disturb the human aspect of speech. “Wolman et son double”, a previously unreleased recording probably from the late ’70s, is Wolman’s most theatrical — as well as musical and lyrical — piece. This is due to its experimental recording techniques; Wolman records a series of improvisations on a 30-minute track, then mixes them with a new series of mégapneumes and using manipulations with echo and Larsen effects.

LP6) Eduardo Kac & Porn Art Movement “Pornéia” LP, also including an LP-size 40-page full-color book. First 80 copies from the instantly sold-out original pressing of 270 copies issued in 2016. These previously unissued recordings from the Porn Art Movement (1980-1982) include five performances recorded live on Ipanema Beach in 1982, as well as a selection of previously unheard studio recordings of Eduardo Kac yell-poems. Kac fused existing coarse and curse words with parts of words, neologisms, salacious buffoonery, the antinormative scribblings of toilet-wall graffiti, commonplaces, blasphemy, expletives, agrammatisms, incorrect orthography, slangy expressions, lexical exorbitance, general obscenities, the gross and the grotesque, into a new whole. The LP also includes the Manifesto Pornô (1980) and four recordings of Flatographic Poems from 1982, in which Kac uses the flatus as a compositional unit and the mellifluous flatal flow as material. This anal poetry was the only series of works produced in the Movement to literally explore the internal side of the body.

LP7) Jose Luis Castillejo “TLALAATALA” LP, limited to 80 copies featuring a dark-grey sleeve, only available with this boxset edition. A killer reading of Jose Luis Castillejo TLALAATALA book by Fernando Millan, recorded in Madrid in 2001. Writing, perhaps the art more subdued to avidity and ambition, an instrument of subjection since it was invented by priests and legislators, has been the last of the arts to seek for its liberation. Writing itself created the worst of our servitudes that still rules and dominates the world: literality. Because without literality any servitude to being of metaphorical and reflexive freedom would be impossible. As proved by TLALAATALA the liberation of writing must go through the elaboration of vacuous structures that should be perceived without being captured, without being fixed through numbers and signs. It goes through a writing where you can no longer state that “the written, written is”, since it establishes an imaginary and metaphorical reflection of the vacuity and of the mutual relation of processes and phenomena.