New releases from the Henning Christiansen Archive 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 body of recordings now available to the public should refute and prior concepts of Christiansen’s music as an inadvertent by-product of action art. Op. 201 L’essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a striking case in point. This 1991 composition for intoning voices set against an ambient backing of sea drones and pulses occupies the grey area between European expressionism and American impassiveness. The voices declaim unconnected words in various attitudes into and indifferent, resonant space that takes on the condition of weather, evoking distance, alienation from the self and erasure of national boundaries – signs of true journeying. Such thoughts of effacing the centre come from our conception of Eastern spirituality, and here Christiansen approaches the idea from both directions at once. The power of the music’s disingenuous simplicity is Christiansen at his finest and it’s incredible that this piece has been out of earshot for nearly thirty years.
A collection of four shorter, earlier works puts us on more familiar ground. In Op. 41 BADET Charlotte Strandgaard reads her poem “The Bath” on location, as it were, while Christiansen accompanies her on melodica and generally splashes about. It’s a somewhat melancholy documentation. The homemade quality of Christiansen’s music prevails here, with two tape collages from the early 70s adding a brighter element while still retaining a sinister aspect. The six brief parts of Op. 72 Bondeføreren Knud Lavard were made as incidental music for a school play, of all things: instrumental playing of folkloric naïveté is rapidly juxtaposed by abrupt switches in mood. Kom Frem For Satan collages together a similarly disjointed narrative from sound effects, found street music and instrumental interludes. The set is rounded out by a recording of the lament from the notorious Horse Sacrifice performance, in a mournful rendition sure to bum out every listener.
Finally, something new: SAVE THE NATURE – USE FLUXUS documents a performance in the car park of The Box gallery in Los Angeles last November, given to mark the opening of a Henning Christiansen / Ursula Reuter Christiansen exhibition. Christiansen’s music is not heard directly, but through his legacy; most directly in his son, Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen’s performance in which he combined recordings of his father with a new sound piece on Henning’s instruments. It’s a heavily reverberant, percussive piece, steadily encroached upon by nature sounds that are less demonstrative but no less compelling. All four sides (if you’re listening to this as an LP) share an attribute of giving the listener an engaging, if at times abstract, soundscape that holds attention even when the exact business of the performance at hand is obscure. Paul McCarthy, with daughter and gallery founder Mara McCarthy and Chiara Giovando perform and equally percussive work, with vocalisations constantly disrupted by McCarthy père banging the back door of the gallery with a 2 by 4. Bjørn Nørgaard reworks elements of his collaborations with Christiansen and Joseph Beuys simultaneously with Mai Dengsøe Hansen performing Christiansen’s EURASIENSTAB fluxorum organum op. 39. It’s perhaps the most opaque work here, as was many of all the artists’ collaborative performances in the 60s and 70s, with multiple references and meanings self-consciously piled atop each other in a way that was both decayed and oversaturated, ensuring failure of explication. “Serious but not hopeless; or, hopeless but not serious.” The set ends with Mark Harwood’s Chile Metal Freedom, a sound collage from his recent trip to Chile that coincided with widespread protest and unrest. A relentlessly tumultuous piece that recalls Nono’s Non consumiamo Marx without the stultifying dogma, in hindsight it appears to be prophecy, giving that LA audience a glimpse of what 2020 would bring to their country.
