From time to time I remember that there was a Hermann Nitsch retrospective held a couple of years ago in Croydon. I didn’t go. Even in these Covid times, I don’t regret it; not because it was Croydon, but because I’ve never found shock or catharsis to be enlightening in itself and the invocation of pagan ritual always seemed artificial and derivative. Too much of the art’s supposed power depends upon dedicated promotion of the image of the artist. The real meat, so to speak, was always in the incongruity of the action and its context, or lack of it, but that’s something I’ve never heard Nitsch address and it seems to work against the goals he himself claims.
Like a good Fluxus artist, Nitsch is also a composer. I Dischi di Angelica have just released his Orgelkonzert, performed at the AngelicA festival in Bologna in 2019, in which Nitsch goes to work on the grand organ at Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi for over an hour. It’s a well-recorded, beautiful-sounding document of his later musical practice, allowing the listener to assess the music in its own right, away from its wider associations. This, however, may be a mistake, as Nitsch is not concerned with sound alone and so the reductive approach gives us much, much less to work with.
The Orgelkonzert is improvised, but cast in a form designed to impose on the audience, a large-scale, four-movement structure recalling romantic-era symphonies. The material has moved away from Nitsch’s earlier approach and is neither brutal nor bruitiste as such, relying on drones, or rather on long-held chords. For long periods of time you will hear the same chord, with occasional notes added or subtracted, with periodic flashes of movement or sudden changes. Assistants use boards to hold down clusters. There is a loose sense of alternating between consonance and dissonance, but with only a few overly dramatic clusters suddenly crashing onto a peaceful dyad. There are shifts in register and timbre too, but these are less dramatic. Much of the time you are left simply bathing in sound, a feeling all too familiar and comfortable for new music fans. The trouble with playing the organ this way is that it can so easily feel derivative, as it did when I heard John Zorn improvising on the St Paul’s Hall organ at Huddersfield years ago. There were the same clusters, keys held down by weights, drones – all the Gothic trappings and connotations that become the real material the musician plays with, more image than sound.
I’ve seen Mark Harwood’s live performances several times but haven’t really bothered with recordings until now – some exceptions aside. The gigs are disingenuous exercises in deflection from the absurdity of the audience-performer situation, typically shifting the burden of attention somewhere else, such as on a collaborator or the venue itself. A Perfect Punctual Paradise Under My Own Name is his first solo release away from his previous persona of Astor and the self-reflexive title is a heads-up to the paranoiac-critical method he employs here. As much a ritual as Nitsch’s actions (though Henning Christiansen is the more appropriate avatar here), Harwood offers up a platter of scraps, a baffling collage of field recordings, garbled dialogue and musical moments too unformed to be considered doodles. The slow-paced restlessness never settles in the push and pull between ego and self-negation, trying to present himself in as an unflattering light as possible without tipping into romanticised self-abasement. In trying to deflect from himself, Harwood creates a collage out of the musical equivalent of a child trying to register the exact moment he falls asleep. For this ritual, whatever transformative effect it had on the artist is beside the point; it is left to the listener to meditate on what significance may be found in this unconscious arrangement of unresolved residua.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Hermann Nitsch, Mark Harwood
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Les introuvables de Henning Christiansen, cont.
Monday 12 October 2020
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.
