Joseph Kosuth and John Cale | Balzac's Solitude

Joseph Kosuth and John Cale 

Balzac's Solitude 

Cincinnati, USA: Solway Gallery, 1994 

36 x 23 x 10 cm. 

Edition of 12 signed and dated copies

Balzac's Solitude is a collaboration between one of the founding members of the Velvet Underground, and one of the earliest practitioners of Conceptual Art.1 

The work consists of a leather-bound book housing a 144-note Reuge music box mechanism. Kosuth designed the work, mostly the inclusion of the quote from French novelist Honore de Balzac: “Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.” Cale composed the music. 

He originally set out to create a low rumbling sound to be reproduced by the music box mechanism. When this proved impossible, he substituted an existing untitled composition he had written for a friend’s wedding. I haven’t heard it, but the LA Times described it as "a bland little piece of no particular distinction."

The work was created for the 1994 exhibition The Music Box Project, curated by Claudia Gould. Gould had co-founded Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine with Joseph Nechvatal and Carol Parkinson in 1983. When their audio periodical folded after a decade of activity, she revisited the idea of music boxes by artists, something originally conceived of as a fundraising edition for Tellus. 

Other works in the show include Laurie Anderson's witty Tilt #1, which utilizes as a carpenter’s level. One of two short tunes by Anderson plays, depending on which ay the level is titled. The movement also activates either a bobbing boat or tiny floating balloon. 

John Cage contributed Extended Lullaby, which features a dozen music boxes, each playing a fragment of a piece he composed for his partner Merce Cunningham's Dance Company a year before his death in 1992.

Kiki Smith transcribed a poem she wrote into Braille and then translated the raised patterns on the page into the pins of the revolving music box cylinder, creating a brief, atonal composition.

Other artists in the exhibition include John Armleder, Nam June Paik, Aminah Robinson and Haim Steinbach. David Byrne, Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, and Glenn Branca all declined to participate. 

1. Josuth Kosuth provided the cover graphic for John Cale’s live album, Fragments of a Rainy Season, two years prior. It also consisted solely of a quotation: two lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: 

Banquo: It will rain tonight.

First murderer: Let it come down!

Sun Ra | Egypt '71

Sun Ra
Egypt '71
London, UK: Strut, 2020
5 LP box set
Edition of 600

Last week Record Store Day released a list of forthcoming recordings, which includes this 5 LP set reissue, with unreleased material, which will be available on August 29th.

"In December 1971, Sun Ra made an impromptu trip to Egypt with his Arkestra, his first time in the country. Hosted by drummer Salah Ragab and Goethe Institute's Hartmut Geerken, they performed hastily arranged concerts at Ballon Theatre in Cairo and at Geerken's house in Heliopolis. The performances emerged on three LPs released by Ra during the '70s: 'Horizon', 'Nidhamu' and 'Dark Myth Visitation Equation'. These three LPs now receive their first reissue on vinyl alongside two LPs of previously unreleased recordings. Rare photos and extensive new liner notes by Geerken and Paul Griffiths complete a definitive package celebrating Sun Ra's iconic trip to the Land of Ra. "

- Press release

Other releases include Philip Glass, Brian Eno,  and the first vinyl reissue of the Lou Reed/John Cale Andy Warhol tribute Songs for Drella. 

See the full list here. 

This week on Tumblr: Andy Warhol Album Covers

This week on Tumblr: album covers designed by Andy Warhol (The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, John Cale, John Lennon, Aretha Franklin, Moondog, Count Basie, etc.) and album covers that incorporated Warhol's graphics (The Smiths, Debbie Harry).

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/andy-warhol

RRR-100

RRRecords is a record store and label ran by Ron Lessard, out of Lowell, Massachusetts. The label were the first to focus exclusively on 'noise', publishing Merzbow's first American vinyl release in the early 80’s (and then later issuing a 5 cassette box set). The have also released projects by Alan Licht, Jon Oswald, Kevin Shields, Nurse with Wound and dozens of others. The label reissued one of my favourite artist records ever: Pop Record by Roger Miller (of Mission of Burma, not the easy-listening crooner).

Other than their elaborate (and often unique) packaging, they are perhaps best known for a series of influential compilation recordings. The first was released in the early nineties, and includes tracks by Jim O’Rourke, John Wiggins, Controlled Bleeding, Ron Rice, Merzbow and, ah, ninety-five others. On a single 7” single.

Each artist is represented with a single lock-groove.

Lock grooves are typically silent, designed to prevent the turntable tonearm from drifting into the paper label at the centre of the disk. Eventually it was released that the final groove was usable record real estate. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper LP originally contained looped audio after the extended fade of the crashed E Major piano chord that closes A Day in The Life. The collaged backwards studio chatter was briefly controversial as fans mistakingly took the indecipherable dialogue to be “we will fuck you like supermen...we will fuck you like supermen...”

Later in the same year The Who employed a lock-groove to close their Who Sell Out record, and the technique reappears every few years, from bands such as The Arcade Fire, Abba, Godspeed You Black Emperor, The Dead Kennedys, Stereolab and Sonic Youth. Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief closes with an endless loop of a man in a record store listening booth saying "Sorry Squire, I scratched the record”. I suppose they were the forerunner to DVD Easter Eggs.

A year before Sgt Pepper, John Cale released Loop as his contribution to the Andy Warhol curated issue of Aspen Magazine. Considerably more experimental than even the more difficult of songs that he and Lou Reed were releasing as The Velvet Underground, the piece consists of seven and a half minutes of feedback, followed by a lock-groove, extending the assault. Reed’s much celebrated (and much despised, see review below) Metal Machine Music nine years would build on this approach, including the use of the lock-groove.

Other sound artists who employed the technique include Boyd Rice, Lee Ranaldo and The Hafler Trio. RRRecords upped the ante by turning every groove on the disk (50 per side) into a lock-groove. This is surely the first Various Artists 7" to feature a hundred contributors, if not the last.

The edition size is unclear, though a second edition (with the above blue xerox cover) was limited to three hundred unnumbered copies.


[Various]
RRR-100
Lowell, USA: RRRecords, 1993
7” 45 rpm single
Edition size unknown

ACBA: John Cale's Honi Soit by Andy Warhol

Songs For Drella, Lou Reed and John Cale's first reunion record after the Velvets (twenty years after the Velvets) is a memorial for Andy Warhol, initiated at the suggestion of Julian Schnabel. First performed in 1989, the album included a six and a half minute track called A Dream, spoken by Cale in the first person of Warhol. The lyrics seem to be verbatim transcripts, the bulk of the which are presumably taken from Warhol's diaries. Along with candid lines like "I hate Lou Reed", the lyrics include mention of Cale's 1981 LP Honi Soit:

"And then I saw John Cale. And he's been looking really great. He's been coming by the office to exercise with me...it was good seeing John, I did a cover for him, but I did in black and white and he changed it to color. It would have been worth more if he'd left it my way but you can never tell any body anything, I've leaned that."

It was not uncommon for Warhol to be dissatisfied with the end results of album covers he had designed. He had a similar complaint about the Rolling Stones' Love You Live, four years prior. From his diary: "After we left the Carlyle I told Jerry I thought Mick had ruined the Love You Live cover I did for them by writing all over it—it's his handwriting, and he wrote so big. The kids who buy the album would have a good piece of art if he hadn't spoiled it."

In an interview with Rolling Stone from October 1996 John Cale told a story suggesting Warhol had also proposed title a name for his then untitled LP:

"I had this album, and I said, "I don't have a title, and I don't have a cover." And he said [imitates Warhol], "Oh... John. I'm very close friends with Yoko. Why don't you have your picture taken with Yoko and call it JOHN AND YOKO?", a somewhat macabre suggestion, given that John Lennon had just recently been shot dead in front of Yoko Ono.

Cale elaborated further in February 2002 in an interview for the Guardian:

"I went to see him to ask for a cover. He said, 'I'll get Yoko Ono to pose naked with you and we'll call it John and Yoko.'"

In his autobiography What's Welsh For Zen, Cale recounts that the John & Yoko title came from Fred Hughes, Warhol's business manager, who noted that Cale needed a "big, big seller". Warhol's response to the proposed title was "Ooh, John, it would sell thousands".

Also in the autobiography, Cale also confesses regret over his colourization of the cover, noting that "Andy's eye was surer, and when I saw the finished product I had to admit I'd made a mistake".

The album version of A Dream can be found here, the live version here, Cale performing it solo here and Lou Reed solo here.