Author: DC (Page 682 of 1091)

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FREE JAZZ – A BRIEF INVOCATION

“Is jazz dead? Well, I guess that all depends on what you know.”
-Lester Bowie

“Free jazz reaches back to what jazz was originally, rebelling against the ultra-sophisticated art form it has become.”
-Archie Shepp

“I go out onstage, and my intention is to make the first four rows bleed from their ears.”
-Sonny Sharrock

Free jazz—a place of outsize personalities, outrageous stories, and uncompromising music. There’s the performer who plays so hard that keys fly off the piano. A bandleader who claims to be from Saturn and outfits his 20-piece orchestra in space gear. The saxophonist whose ragtag gospel marches were cited by Paul McCartney as a major influence on Sgt. Pepper’s. The world traveler who finds a common ground between the music of Marrakech and Brooklyn. The pianist who creates spectacular glissandi by dragging his knuckles across the keyboard, playing until his hands bleed. The musician whose ear-shattering shows often end in fist fights with the audience. The avant gardist whose recital moved President Jimmy Carter to tears at a White House Jazz Festival. The player many believe was killed by the CIA. The group that dons tribal gear and lab coats, performing music that swings between vaudeville and African chants. And the free jazz legend whose music touched so many lives that a church was founded in his name and uses his music as liturgy.

 

A FEW COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT FREE JAZZ
(aka Avant Garde Jazz aka Out Jazz aka That Horrible Racket)

1. IT’S ALL JUST CACOPHONOUS NOISE.

Well yeah, some of it is really noisy. That’s the strain of the music that’s influenced folks such as Sonic Youth, Black Dice, The Boredoms, Wolf Eyes, The Stooges, Lightning Bolt, MC5, and the like. Think of it as ecstatic freak-out music. The sort of thing that will peel back the lid of your skull and rearrange your atoms.

But that’s only one small part of the music. Free Jazz spans 50 years and numerous countries and includes music that’s so delicate it’s practically ambient as well as tunes with a funk beat strong enough to shake the dance floor. Not to mention the pieces that showcase echoes of melodic folk music, Indian rhythms, minimalist repetitions, gutbucket blues, Hendrixian squalls, orchestral grandeur, big band exotica, electronic beats, proto-punk swagger, and much more. It’s an entire continent of sound represented by tens of thousands of albums and approaches. Once you start digging, you’ll be amazed by the sheer variety and vitality. There’s something for just about every taste – all you need is a slightly open mind.

 

2. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LISTEN TO FREE JAZZ.
OR: HOW DO YOU TELL THE GOOD STUFF FROM THE BAD?

Relax and trust your instincts. Most people automatically assume that there’s something in Free Jazz they’re not getting. Like you need conservatory training to appreciate what the musicians are doing. Or that there’s some secret content you’re not privy to. Nonsense. It’s just sound. Sometimes complex and abrasive, sometimes funky and buoyant. There’s no code to be broken. Don’t worry. As Gertrude Stein once said: “There’s no there there.”

A newcomer listening to Free Jazz isn’t substantially different than someone who’s just discovering indie rock or electronica or reggae or whatever. The more you listen, the more you explore, the more you expose yourself to different facets of the music, the more likely you are to find what you turns you on. Maybe Ornette Coleman grates on your ears. Fine. Be honest with yourself and keep looking, because maybe Sun Ra or Matthew Shipp will excite you. Ask friends. See what trustworthy critics are recommending. All that.

If you can, try to see some Free Jazz live. Pieces that may demand a fair amount of concentration when they’re coming out of your speakers often seem effortlessly absorbing in person. You may rush to turn off a Cecil Taylor album the first time you hear it, but live you won’t be able to take your eyes off the man. In performance, the passion and exuberance of the music is impossible to miss.

 

3. IT’S TOO OUT THERE FOR ME.

Maybe. But if you’re already listening to some pretty out shit like Radiohead, Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, Sonic Youth, Mouse on Mars, Aphex Twin, ambient-era Brian Eno, TV on the Radio, and even some parts of Yo La Tengo, then you’re ready. Without knowing it, you’ve already been listening to Free Jazz filtered through other sensibilities. Some of the classic Free Jazz recordings might even sound too tame!

 

LISTENING TO FREE JAZZ: WHERE TO START

Just follow the link to Destination: Out. We’ve got a selection of Free Jazz’s “greatest hits” for you to sample on MP3. For free. Don’t be shy.

www.destination-out.com

The tracks at Destination: Out offer 10 starting points, depending on your tastes. There are songs for those who like heavy funk. Pieces with propulsive electronic grooves. Tunes with a Kraut Rock drone vibe. Haunted ambient soundscapes. Trippy freak-folk workouts. Songs with screaming electric guitars. Gentle Indian-inflected trance music. Proto-punk noise with breakbeats. Pissed-off bluesy torch songs. Etcetera.

Destination: Out is a site I run with a friend that offers rare and out-of-print Free Jazz tracks. If you like what you hear from the “greatest hits,” scroll down and check out the other songs we’re currently hosting: African-jazz by The Brotherhood of Breath, eccentric world-music mash-ups by Don Cherry, heavy metal dirges by Last Exit, pure shredding noise by Japanese speedfreak saxophonist Kaoru Abe, and Julian Priester’s amazing disco-meets-La Dusseldorf space grooves.

Starting next Monday, we’ll return to our usual schedule of posting new tracks twice a week. So there’s plenty more to come. We also have links to other Free Jazz blogs, musician sites, and information about labels, stores, and radio stations.

 

PHOTO GALLERY

Sun Ra:

 

The Art Ensemble of Chicago:

 

Miles Davis:

 

Albert Ayler:

 

John Zorn:

 

Peter Brotzmann:

 

Sonny Rollins sporting a Mohawk during his Free period:

 

Derek Bailey:

 

Don Cherry:

 

Anthony Braxton:

 

Ornette Coleman “Shape of Jazz to Come” album cover:

 

Alice Coltrane “World Galaxy” album cover:

 

Andrew Hill “Compulsion” album cover:

 

Pharoah Sanders “Thembi” album cover:

 

Cecil Taylor “Dark to Themselves” album cover:

 

Jackie McLean “Destination: Out” album cover:

 

Sonny Sharrock “Black Woman” album cover:

 

Dave Burrell “Echo” album cover:

 

John Coltrane “Ascension” album cover:

 

Herbie Hancock “Sextant” album cover:

 

Albert Ayler “Spiritual Unity” album cover:

 

FREE JAZZ LINKS AND RESOURCES:

Thurston Moore’s Top 10 from the Free Jazz Underground
(originally appeared in Grand Royal magazine). A passionate list and lots more:
http://rootstrata.com/rootblog/?p=1801

The Real Godfathers of Punk – Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. What? You thought maybe it was Iggy?:
http://www.furious.com/perfect/jazzpunk.html

Gary Giddins Roadmap to Post-War Jazz. An entertaining history of the music, using one track to represent each year. Gives a good sense of how Free Jazz fits into the so-called tradition:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2002/06/04/post-war-jazz-an-arbitrary-road-map/

The definitive Kozmigroov Index –aka good jazz fusion. “Kozmigroov is a transgressive improvisational music which combines elements of psychedelia, spirituality, jazz, rock, soul, funk, and African, Latin, Brazilian, Indian and Asian influences culminating into an all encompassing cosmic groove.” Righteous:
http://www.freeform.org/music/kozmigroov.html

The European Free Improvisation Pages picks up the story of Free Jazz as it heads across the Atlantic:
http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/

The Restructures page has links to interviews and discographies of just about every Free Jazz musician you can name:
http://www.restructures.net/links/links.htm

 

A FEW ESSENTIAL BOOKS AND DVDS:

FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS
by A.B. Spellman
Forget the Bebop in the title –this book contains long and insightful profiles of Free Jazz luminaries Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. It also has sections on Jackie McLean, who was doing adventurous work at the time, and neglected genius Herbie Nichols. One of Lester Bangs’ favorite books. Essential reading.
http://www.amazon.com/Four-lives-bebop-business-Spellman/dp/B0006BNPN2/sr=1-1/qid=1159977198/ref=sr_1_1/002-0093870-2777639?ie=UTF8&s=books

 

BLACK MUSIC
by Amiri Baraka
Written when he was still LeRoi Jones, Black Music is an on-the-scene report from the front lines of Free Jazz during the 1960s. It brilliantly highlights the radical politics and racial issues that were often at the core of the music.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Music-Imamu-Amiri-Baraka/dp/0688243444/sr=1-1/qid=1159977405/ref=sr_oe_1_2/002-0093870-2777639?ie=UTF8&s=books

 

AS SERIOUS AS YOUR LIFE: The Story of the New Jazz
by Valerie Wilmer
Written in the late 1970s, both as Free Jazz was coming into its own and as the musicians were facing increasingly harsh economic struggles. A nice overview of the music and a bristling advocacy of the avant garde aesthetic.
For updates on where the music went from there, see the later half of Gary Giddins’s encyclopedic Visions of Jazz.
http://www.amazon.com/As-Serious-Your-Life-Story/dp/1852427302/ref=pd_sim_b_1/002-0093870-2777639?ie=UTF8

 

NEW YORK IS NOW!
By Phil Freeman
A fresco of the New York Downtown scene circa the late 1990s. Provides useful and occasionally pointed information about key musicians such as Matthew Shipp, Davis S. Ware, William Parker, and Charles Gayle.
http://www.amazon.com/New-York-Now-Wave-Free/dp/1930606001/sr=1-6/qid=1159981106/ref=sr_1_6/002-0093870-2777639?ie=UTF8&s=books

 

MADE IN AMERICA: A Portrait of Ornette Coleman by Shirley Clarke
DVD
This great documentary by legendary underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke is long out of print. However, Downtown Music Gallery in NYC has DVD copies for sale straight from Clarke herself. Run, don’t walk:
http://search2.downtownmusicgallery.com/Searching/WWW_DMG_Search.cgi#results

 

ALL THE NOTES: Cecil Taylor
DVD
Rather than a conventional overview of Taylor’s life, this quirky doc allows you to hang out with Cecil as he rehearses his big band, listens to music in clubs, and talks at home about his influences and artistic theories. A charming and intimate portrait of a genius.
http://search2.downtownmusicgallery.com/Searching/WWW_DMG_Search.cgi#results

 

THE CRY OF JAZZ
DVD
Filmed in Chicago in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is an essay on the politics of music and race. It predicted the civil unrest of subsequent decades and features rare footage of visionary pianist Sun Ra from his Chicago period.
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Ra-Jazz-Edward-Bland/dp/B00012SYSM

 

YOU TUBE: CLIPS OF THE GODS

Witness the incredibly surreal spectacle of Ornette Coleman and Prime Time on SNL – introduced by Milton Berle. Did this really air? Weird and incredibly funky.

 

A solo performance by piano god Cecil Taylor from Imagine the Sound doc. It starts slow and lyrical then whips into a firestorm. See if you can keep up with his hands.

 

Miles Davis and his crack electric band performing at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. More of a slow simmer than a full-on bitches brew, but still gives an idea of the man’s power.

 

Lastly, here’s a series of brief minute-long palette cleaners from John Zorn’s amazing Naked City band, featuring Eye from the Boredoms. Live thrash mayhem from the recent MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. Yes, this is jazz!

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi, D! You’re first! My fingers are strangled and glued together into a gnarly abstract sculpture on Anita’s behalf re: that gaming gig. Yeah, video games extremely appeal to me for some reason, and I feel like I learn a lot about how to fuck up and advance my writing from playing/ studying them, I’m not sure why. I do know and of course really like Arca’s music, and there’s a new one, I think, right? I need to get that. I’m trying to see if I can restore that Kaulitz post. It’s kind of wild, and its code got fucked in the Google murder and data transfer, but I think I maybe can. This week is mostly getting the Derek McCormack conversation/afterword finished and some stuff I have to do for Manifesta around the films ‘cos they want a bunch of stuff for their publicity and some random things I should do and hopefully will. And you? It used to be that as long as you were kind of cute and young and could kind of sing in tune you could be a briefly big teen idol/pop star. I think all those terrible shows like The Voice and American Idol and whatever introduced the idea that you actually have to be able to sing well technically to qualify as a pop star, which is really tragic, I think, because I don’t think kids actually care how well their teen idols sing, they just want to gawk at them and have personalised merchandise. I somehow had never heard of the “Larry Stylinson” thing and the conspiracy theory, etc. It’s nice. I’ll go hunt the histories. Love like a magical hidden camera that you can plant anywhere in the world you want by osmosis. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, you’ve made me want to hunt down ancient pix of my friends or family and little me at long defunct amusement parks because as a kid I pretty much demanded to be taken to every single thing that even hinted that it might be an amusement park. Coincidences like the Alan Burns thing are as close as we adults get to the sparkle in kids’ brains when they watch ‘Frozen’. Nice. ** David Ehrenstein, I do love me some verbal dexterity, so I will indeed educate myself, thank you. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. I totally agree about The Review of Contemporary Fiction. I used to wait with veritable bated breath for each new issue. No, it’s long gone. Dalkey Archive has become the merest shadow of what it was even a few years ago. I don’t know what happened. It’s really sad. Someone who used to be an editor there told me that, for whatever reason, they basically have started publishing only books in translation that their original publishers pay Dalkey to translate/publish, and, if you look at their list of recent and upcoming books, it’s just an endless field of books by writers you’ve never heard of and which, by their descriptions, sound quite dishwater dull. I really hope they pull themselves out of this phase because Dalkey was hands down the best publisher in the US for forever by my reckoning. Burns is very, very worth reading, yes. ** Sypha, That one note/turgid thing worked really well and much better live. Philip has any number of very strange tastes that seem like things he claims to like to be provocative, but I don’t know. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yes, indeed, that John Foxx song comes from that Burns novel. Or at least the title does. Nice track. Cool video. ** chris dankland, Hi, Chris! I’ve only read two of Burns’s books. Mm, I don’t know … his writing is very sharp and adventurous, and it just excites me. I’m a sucker for daring/ adventuring skilled prose. There is cut up in his work, but that excerpt was the only thing I could find online to share, so that’s what ended up there. If you look at the pix of some of his other books, you’ll see they can get much more typographically wild and choppy. The two writers that first spring to my mind who use cut-up are Kathy Acker and Robert Gluck, but they use it in a more intuitive way and less mechanically by-the-book than Burroughs. I think they’re both as good as Burroughs. I really like a certain period of Burroughs — ‘Naked Lunch’ -> ‘Wild Boys’ — but I don’t think he’s a god. Brion Gysin, who also did cut-up and supposedly invented it, is a terrible writer in my opinion. Excellent painter though. For the thematic posts, it’s a combination of artists/works I already know and then, yeah, using google search. Basically searching using ‘contemporary art’ or ‘gallery’ or ‘museum’ or words like that in combination with various words that match the theme I’m looking for. It’s laborious, but I seem to find the searching fun or something. I read about the big Covid spike in Arizona. Man, I’m so sorry. The US — aka Trump and his state-based mind slaves — has fucked up dealing with the virus so badly. It’s hard to watch. I hope your governor gets it under control ASAP. Ugh. My morning has started well, and I hope yours will too when it starts, which is now, I guess, when you read this, but is still hours from now as I type this. ** politekid, Hey! I thought you might show up here given that it was you who got me off my ass to spotlight Burns. You got ‘Dreamerika’! Whoa, cool. I still have a bunch of him to catch up on. I’ve only read two so far. He’s not an easy author to collect at the moment. Ooh, ‘The Void’ looks good! And I can play it right here on my Mac. Excellent. I’ll get it. Thank you, buddy. Wow, ‘Pathologic’ sounds completely like a must. Okay, two-fer. I’m good. I feel bad talking about how nice it is here, but you guys’ll be ‘here’, albeit via an unnecessarily much rockier, lengthier road, soon, I have no doubt. Well, I don’t know if this is anything to go by, but the museums that have opened here so far have pretty decent sized attendance. I mean not packed hordes or anything, but they’re not in any way deserted, so hopefully the big T will need you. You would have needed a dedicated actress in any case, right? So hopefully she’ll see the length as an exciting challenge. Probably, yeah, right, about the feelers? The cafes are doing well, full of drinkers at slightly enhanced distances. And almost all galleries are open now. You have just have to wear masks in them, no big deal. It really does feel almost normal here. It’s weird. Best of the best of all days to you and your today! Thanks a lot again, and it’s always a super treat to get to see you. ** cal, Hi. I’m all for cutting to ribbons. I would just save the cut stuff in a doc just in case you end up wanting to slide a little bit of it back in. Happy that the spotlights have seemed well trained to you. I like martial art films, sure, but I’m not an aficionado. I think I more like films that kind of use martial arts in a melded-in way like early John Woo, etc. I was at one time, and may still be, a gigantic fans of Jackie Chan films. I even stood in line for three+ hours at a bookstore to get him to sign my copy of his autobiography. I’ll find ‘Shadow.’ Do you like Stephen Chow’s films? I have kind of a soft spot for them. Thanks, pal. ** Thomas Moore, Hey, Thomas! Burns is strangely forgotten/ overlooked even in the UK. Due and probably destined for a big rediscovery. It’s out! Everyone, We will be celebrating the birth/publication of Thomas Moore’s sublime new novel ‘Alone’ here on the blog in a couple of days but, if you can’t wait, you can score it right now and here. ** Bill, Hi. Well, I played it. Maybe it was a bootleg or something? I played it online, not via download. I don’t remember where I did that. I’ll try to see if I can hunt down the location again. The Burns is good, man, yep. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Burns knew his shit. I’ve always dreamt of living as if life was a Bresson film. It’s not easy. I think one would need to have pretty advanced physical training. And be in a very extended gloomy mood. Which is not me, unfortunately. You’re blogging! Did I know you were blogging? I don’t think so. Looks sharp and suave at first glance. Bookmarked. Everyone, Mr. Corey Heiferman is blogging and with great seeming finesse and visual acuity under the rubric BABBLENTERTAIN, so go here to check the place out and then maybe bookmark it? I did. Luck re: the application. I’m spending my days right now finessing a convo. between Zac and me that will become the afterword of Derek McCormack’s new novel and also this and that. Big up! ** Okay. Here’s a post from the somewhat distant past that needed to be alive again. Enjoy its world, and thank you again from the future for doing it, Mr. Jackson. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Alan Burns is one of the most challengingly innovative novelists in contemporary British fiction. Inspired by painters, he strives to create what René Magritte once described as the “magic of unforeseen affinities” by means of a collage, cut-up technique that he attributes to the fiction of William Burroughs. The result is a surreal assemblage of events, images, even syntactical arrangements that challenge the reader’s comfortable assumptions about what a novel is or can be. Burns possesses a thoroughly original voice.

‘Burns was born in London on 29 December 1929 into the middle-class family of Harold and Anne Marks Burns and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School. When he was thirteen his mother died, and his older brother died two years later; both deaths profoundly affected him both emotionally and artistically. Burns has described the impact of these separations: “The consuming nature of this experience showed itself not only in the disconnected form but also in the content of my ‘work.'” The most obvious treatment of these experiences is in Buster (1972; originally published in New Writers, 1961); however, the theme of death pervades all his novels. From 1949 to 1951, Burns served in the Royal Army Education Corps, stationed at Salisbury Plain. After his discharge he traveled through Europe; he married Carol Lynn in 1954. He was called to the Bar in 1956 and practiced as a London barrister until 1959, when he spent a year as a postgraduate researcher in politics at the London School of Economics. For the next three years Burns was assistant legal manager for Beaverbrook Newspapers, “vetting [appraising] copy for libel and copyright.”

‘While walking down Carey Street on his lunch hour one day he saw, in a jeweler’s window, a photograph of a man and woman kissing, which reminded him of a photo of his mother and father on their honeymoon. Having previously felt stymied in his attempts to write, Burns describes the artistic significance of this moment: “I understood in literary terms, the value of the image because I saw that I didn’t have to grapple, as it were in essay form, with the endless complexities and significances of the love and other feelings that existed between my mother and father, and what they meant to me. I could let it all go by the board, let it take care of itself; I could, in the time-honoured phrase, show, not tell. . . . I could tell this story in a series of photographs, which is to say, a series of images, and let the stories emerge and the ideas emerge from that series of fragments, and that’s how I found myself able to write that first book, Buster.”

‘Although quite different from the novels that follow it, Buster suggests some of the fictional concerns and techniques Burns employs in all his works. Central to his fictions is the technique of fragmentation, and although Buster is more conventional than any of his other novels, it too employs a limited form of fragmentation. Events in the work follow one another rapidly, and the temporal links between incidents are implied more than they are stated. The effect is one of an associative rather than a temporal pattern of organization.

‘In Europe after the Rain the domestic theme reappears, but in a less evident way than in many of Burns’s other works. Although the narrator is the focus of the novel, the reader knows less about his family than that of the nameless girl for whom he searches. Like the children in Burns’s other works, she has been separated from her father (here by the leader of an opposing political faction), and her eventual reunion with him leads not to a new life but to a physical decline. Family is finally an ineffective alternative to the violence and chaos of this world and may perhaps even contribute to the widespread devastation.

‘As in Buster, the images of death in this second novel are compelling and abundant. Burns renders these events with detailed precision, in a thoroughly prosaic tone. The disturbing quality of a passage such as the following stems not only from its graphic nature but, more important, from the matter-of-fact manner in which the narrator relates such carnage: “Disturbed, she gave the cry, went up to the body and touched it, dragged it down as the others crowded round, clamoured for it, each one desperate for it. She wrenched off the leg, jabbed it, thick end first, into her mouth, tried hard to swallow it, could not get it down, the thicker part became less visible, there was nothing but the foot, she twisted off the protruding foot.” Critical reaction to Europe after the Rain was mixed, as it would be toward many of Burns’s later novels.

‘All of Burns’s emphasis on fragmentation, the cut-up method, surreal intrusions, and wild juxtapositions may suggest rather formidable reading. After all, Burns has admitted that he wants “to shock readers into a new awareness” and that he seeks “to work more like a painter than a writer; place images side by side and let them say something uncertain and fluctuating. This work will not be literary and will not lead to discussion or redefinition, but simply exist–like a Magritte painting.” Such remarks may give the impression of an utterly anarchic art, but this is not the case.

‘At the heart of these methods of fictional disorientation is Burns’s resistance to traditional notions of the novel and his rejection of any idea of the genre as being an inflexible monolith of changeless features. “The great attraction of the novel,” he has said, “lies in its search for form. The secret may lie in the word novel itself. If it’s new, then it’s novel.” Thus the novel, in his view, is malleable and accommodating to the mutable nature of a writer’s and audience’s perceptions, and by insisting that it shares in the characteristics of painting, Burns reveals his adamant concern for hard, concrete prose, a prose that is nearly palpable and strongly visual. Scenes and chapters often have an almost independent relationship with their larger narrative, which is nowhere more obvious than in Babel.

‘Burns is also a writer of strong ideological convictions that, while deeply held, never prompt him to lapse into didactic preaching. His political beliefs and his aesthetic proclivities underscore a deeply humanist point of view. “It sounds pathetic–this avant-garde novelist wanting to change the world–but I do, I simply want to leave it a little bit better.” Burns is a champion of individual freedom and consistently attempts to reveal those forces that would stunt or limit expressions of individuality. As he explains, “Like others, I have in a way been writing and rewriting the same basic book, again and again. All that material about the recurrent father figures, and the father-State, and the absent mother, and the young man dead.” Such a characterization might imply simple repetition, yet what this description reveals is the consistency of his vision and his steadfast dedication to opposing the most destructive tendencies of human beings.’ — David W. Madden

 

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Further

Alan Burns Bio & Info Page
Alan Burns Obituary
Alan Burns @ goodreads
Alan Burns interviews JG Ballard
Europe After the Rain: Alan Burns and the Post-War Avant-Garde
Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference
Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the Lasting Legacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction
Identity and Alan Burns
Alan Burns Biography
Buy ‘Europe After the Rain’

 

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Covers & Interiors

 

____
Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

David Madden: Europe after the Rain works on the reader in strange and unexpected ways. For instance, the reader begins fearing for the girl and sympathizing with her concern over her lost father, only to discover their moral ambiguity. Were you seeking such an ambiguity?

Alan Burns: I don’t seek a quality such as “moral ambiguity” in a character (I doubt that any novelist does). I follow a character and try to find out who she is. That of course is why it is necessary to test a character, compel her to make choices, so that she reveals who she is. (When Anna Karenina decides to leave her husband for her lover, Tolstoy has her go upstairs to her child’s bedroom, see the child asleep (maybe for Anna the last time) and still go through with her flight. Thus Anna, and the reader, are put through hell: we don’t merely know about, we suffer through the experience of her “moral ambiguity.”) Needless to say I’m not making comparisons between the two novels, still less the two authors . . . Another source of “moral” and numerous other ambiguities in my characters generally is my awareness of contradictions within characters and between them. As soon as I become aware of a certain characteristic, I instinctively look for an opportunity to show its opposite. For the brave to show fear, the innocent guile, the timorous courage, and so on. An example of this is early in Celebrations where Williams is given one blue eye and one brown.

DM: Could you discuss your view of the connection between the novel and Max Ernst’s painting of the same name?

AB: Some months after I’d started writing Europe (but before I’d found a title), I chanced upon a reproduction of the painting in a book on Ernst: I instantly recognized the very landscape I was—in my way—”painting.” I knew I had a title—and a book jacket too! Beyond that, however, I can’t say that I studied the painting particularly closely, though I think I always had it somewhere at the back of my mind. It was not until I was writing the last chapter of Revolutions of the Night that I did look intensely at the Ernst painting and made as precise and passionate a word picture of it as I could. Some years after Europe was published, I saw the original at an Ernst retrospective at the Tate in London, and was disappointed to see how small and seeming-not-so-powerful it was. In reproduction it makes the impact of a colossal work of art, not so in the original.

DM: A feature I’ve noticed in this and others of your novels is a slippery quality, even a vagueness about large issues of plot or character motivation (for instance, the reasons for the father’s fall from grace) while details of appearance or descriptions are minutely and exactingly precise. Can you explain the idea or purpose behind this paradoxical method? Might this be explained in part by what you described in the essay in Beyond the Words as the “distanced technique of writing from the unconscious”?

AB: I like that phrase “slippery quality.” Elusive, yes, it’s yet another aspect of my wish to avoid any suggestion of an absolute, purportedly “accurate” statement as to what happened or where we are or what role a particular character plays in the novel. Look again, and—see, it ain’t so—the opposite may as well be true. As soon as the reader is beginning to feel secure in the world I’ve made for him, it “slips,” he slithers; me too. There’s also a strong element of doubt; that’s part of it too. Some absurdist stuff as well, yet I temper that tendency with a genuine, even passionate, humanism. With nuclear bombs around, we must be careful not to get too far gone into the irrational—and when I yap about “instinct,” I’m also aware, of the fascists’ appeal to “gut feelings” and so on . . . so it ain’t easy to get it right.

So, for example, and to get back from vague philosophizing to the novels, while I go for the “slippery,” I’m concerned by your reference to vague character motivation. I’d want the father’s fall from grace to be not arbitrary or author-driven but fully motivated in the traditional sense. In fact, I suggest that his “fall from grace” is largely accounted for by the simple notion that “power corrupts”—see the heavily ironic paragraph that starts, “The father received me in his spacious and magnificent apartment” and later the (probably too bare) statement that the father was “growing senile.” Final word on “slippery”—it’s close to the “precarious” dream.

DM: There are no names for any of the characters and thus pronoun references are sometimes vague. Why are identities so deliberately elusive?

AB: I could not find the “right” names . . . something connected with Kafka’s “Joseph K.” I regret pronoun uncertainties and would want to correct them, but there it is.

DM: Don’t you think, though, that this nameless quality is exactly appropriate for this blasted place; it enhances the shadowy quality and the ambiguity that pervades so much of the book? Was this namelessness deliberate on your part?

AB: I think you put it perfectly, and I now adopt your formulation as my answer to your question (I particularly like “this blasted place”—with Lear nudging in there). “Namelessness” also reminds me of Wilson Harris—see p. 58 of The Imagination. My only quarrel is with your word deliberate, as you know. I feel the word is inappropriate, because it implies a degree of control I deliberately (!) eschew.

DM: Explain the narrator’s presence in this world of military conflict. He has access to both commanders of the warring sides, yet he is seemingly outside the fray (though it appears he destroys the reconstructed bridge at the end of chapter 11). He talks of his job, but what is it? Is he a journalist, or is his “job” or purpose more subtle and perhaps even metaphysical?

AB: The narrator’s uncertain role and status is vital in maintaining the novel’s precariousness and ambiguity. Give him a job, and the novel becomes more reportage—everything would have been watertight, rational, the reader would demand it. But I have made a contract with the reader that allows me the freedom to slip in and out of the rational. That has to be established from the start and iterated and reiterated (implicitly, by conduct) consistently throughout. A key passage reads, “I changed my life. I went among the prisoners taken to the camp for labour purposes. I wanted to make certain, I wanted to get inside, I knew the language, I wanted to learn more, suddenly . . . My work was in that place. . . .” Remember, his work at that point is assassination.

DM: John Hall in the Guardian mentions Burroughs’s cut-up tech-nique as being yours also. Was Europe written as a series of fragments “synthesi[zed and] shuffle[ed] . . . so that they form new associations and build up fresh nuclei of meaning”?

AB: Yes, that quote applies to the writing of Europe and my other novels. I had not read Burroughs then, nor heard of his “cut-up” technique. I did not actually use scissors, but I folded pages, read across columns, and so on, discovering for myself many of the techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe in The Third Mind and elsewhere.

DM: Given Hall’s quote and what I see as numerous echoes of Beckett in your work, have you or do you have affinities with existentialist thinking?

AB: I have only dipped into Being and Nothingness, but Nausea much impressed and maybe influenced me, along with Camus. As for Beckett, I delighted in Murphy, Watt, and a couple others, and Godot, Endgame, and more. However, The Unnameable I call The Unreadable. Like Joyce, Beckett extended the range of the possible. He is somewhere there in my mind when I’m working, but I don’t quite know where.

 

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Book

Alan Burns Europe after the Rain
John Calder Publications

‘Europe after the Rain takes its title from Max Ernst’s surrealist work, which depicts a vision of rampant destruction – a theme which Burns here takes to its conclusion, showing man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation, but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival would be impossible. The Europe through which the unnamed narrator travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen, both geographically and morally, and he is forced to witness terrible sights, to which he brings an interested apathy, without ever succumbing to despair or cynicism.

‘Upon the novel’s first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the ‘collective unconscious’ of the twentieth century – in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force, and evoke a powerful image for the modern reader of fears every bit as relevant today as on the day when they were written.’ — JCP

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I only really vaguely know Cole Porter’s stuff, but, yes, happy b’day. ** tomk, Hi, Tom! How cool that the post lined up with your novel’s quest. That’s kind of the ultimate blog hope. I don’t know what Kevin’s fave is. If he contacts me again and says, I’ll pass it along. There were only two games I sought that were actually playable for me on my equipment, ‘GPT Adventure’, which was interesting, and ‘Wallpaper’, which was quite, quite good. Take care, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, they’re kind of beyond mere games or something. Like sit down Raves or something almost. Wonderful, that feedback on your piece. Definitely take that to heart and keep going with it. Cool. ** Sypha, Hi. I wondered, yes. That’s a nice Swans era, ‘Greed/Holy Money’. Except for that one unfortunate foray into the major labels — that album with the Mapplethorpe cover, which I thought was kind of a disaster — I like everything up through ‘White Light … ‘. Maybe a bit after. ** Tosh Berman, ‘Kids’ is a siren, for sure. I intend to play it somehow somewhere. I think your theory on Sparks makes utter and absolute sense. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Yeah, I too want to give ‘Kids’ a go. I played ‘Wallpaper’ on my Mac, so I guess there’s a way. I don’t remember it being all that tricky to find, but I don’t remember how I found it. Ah, the innocent days when Jimmy McNichol could be a semi-star for a brief time. ** Ferdinand, Gaming is a commitment. Like TV series. I learn so much from them. Great, thank you so much about the Darkentries Records post! Very excited to get and build and explore it. ** Misanthrope, I saw the pix. They’re wunderbar! And their old Brownie camera washed out look is beautiful. Nice park. All those slides. That one in the snowy mountain looked especially yum. Thanks for going to that trouble, man. ** Steve Erickson, The new Sparks is excellent, maybe the best among their most recent post-‘Lil Beethoven’ albums. Everyone, Mr. Erickson reviews the new Run the Jewels album right about here. Good luck with the single note music piece. Yes, there have been the rare artists who made one note seem symphonic. Wow, Buy Muy Drugs, that’s a flashback. Is the 4-part video up? Wait, I can find out for myself, duh. ** Right. A couple of weeks ago a fine fella, writer, d.l. and so on mentioned Alan Burns in the comments, which occasioned me realising I had never focused on Burns’ really excellent and very undervalued fiction, and today is the day that I rectify that neglect. Explore and enjoy yourselves, please. See you tomorrow.