Most musicians don’t trust artists. Too focused on content, on saying stuff. Not enough emphasis on technique, always the risk that someone on stage might make sounds the wrong way or, worse still, someone in the audience will hear them the wrong way. You just don’t know what you’re going to get. Let an artist into music and it starts to give the game away, that all the rules are arbitrary and nothing in itself makes sense. Far easier to banish it to the netherworld of ‘performance art’ where it won’t affect anyone.
People like to send me cool stuff and so I got advance rips of two new releases of Henning Christiansen’s film soundtracks from Penultimate Press. The label’s been specialising for a while in bringing out unreleased or long-lost work by unjustly neglected artists and has been championing Christiansen’s music for a while now. Neither of these soundtracks has been issued to the public before. Despite being a major figure of recent European art, and one who was particularly dedicated to music, his music has largely been marginalised in the UK and, it seems, pretty much everywhere else. (A notable exception is the ensemble Apartment House, who have presented performances and arrangements of his work whenever possible.)
The Executioner, from 1971, is the first film made by Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Henning C.’s partner and collaborator. Disclaimer: I know nothing about either movie and am going by the soundrack LPs alone. From the start of the record, the music is disarmingly backward-looking; a soprano with piano accompaniment sings a sentimental melody. It’s a nostalgic world of domestic 19th century culture – if there is any irony here, then it is possibly in juxtaposition with the images on screen. In Christiansen’s music, these simple gestures are genuinely felt, but their effect is more complex. The romantic salon melody takes on the characteristics of a folk tune, tapping into sentiment even older and harder to define. This recurs throughout the album, as soprano and piano are later blended with whistles and other folk instruments. The music segues into collages, field recordings of natural sounds, ritualistic droning on organ keyboards. If you’ve heard other works by Christiansen then you’ll be familiar with each of these elements, but probably haven’t heard them combined in such a way, or directed toward such an overt expression of mood and emotion. Some of this may come from the soundtrack editing, which combines sound and dialogue from the film into a montage that works as an audio drama and not as a collection of music cues.
Den Røde Skov is another film by Ursula Reuter Christiansen, from 1986. This is the most developed sound work I’ve heard by Christiansen, with much more studio work and use of overdubbing and electronics. Again, the tracks segue into a complete, coherent work. Some may be due to editing but there is a stronger presence of collaborators in the material itself, particularly the sound work by Ernst Kretzer. It’s all recognisably Christiansen’s work, but showing a side I’ve never realy heard before. The collages combine modified field recordings with electronically-generated sounds, with voices calling out and echoing over each other. Nature sounds and acoustic instruments are recorded and manipulated into surreal soundscapes. For all those ritualistic qualities present throughout the album, all sounds here remain in flux, morphing and crossfading from an ominous rumble to birdsong and insects underlaid with restless electronic doodles, and again to plaintive flutes and glass sound sculptures. The lengthy track Wolf song is particularly dense with a rush of aural images that range from natural to uncanny, but the entire album is packed with details that will be savoured over repeated listenings.
More than just bringing to light two previously unavailable works, each album works particularly well as a listening experience. It seems that either would make an unusually good entry-way to Christiansen’s music, presenting key aspects of his thinking in a variety of guises. (Based on personal experience, first contact with recordings of Christiansen can sound too single-minded, tied to a particular artwork, or documentation of a performance, where too much context is missing.) I’m judging from digital files but the sound quality seems particularly good, even as it deliberately shifts between studio recording, outside documentation and found sounds. It seems these two titles are only limited edition vinyl for now but hopefully digital alternatives become available later.
[…] continue to build up a much more comprehensive understanding of the sometime Fluxus artist’s achievements as a composer. The links between music and all aspects of Fluxus should not come as a surprise, but the growing […]