Wormed
Klein
Lauri Ainala
Felicita
Helena Celle
Tobin Sprout
AnD
Steven Warwick
Screen Time
Kamixlo
Linda Sharrock
Mai Mai Mai
Radian
Circus Devils
Robert Pollard
MMMD

 

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Wormed Eukaryotic Hex Swarm
‘When WORMED reach out into the void, the results sounds far more like a dark space opera inhabited by bizarre aliens, genetically and technically evolved meta-humans struggling for power and survival in galactic empires. On their third full-length Krighsu the fast rising Spanish Sci-Fi tech death prodigies are telling a dystopian cosmic story with lyrics and music joined into an overarching concept. Odd-time signatures, avalanches of breaks and complex rhythmical as well as melodic patterns will excite every aficionado of extreme technicality, while growls down-tuned strings and double-bass assaults will more than satisfy extreme metal connoisseurs. While being outstandingly skilled musicians WORMED are avoiding any self-indulgent show of prowess for its own sake. Instead the five-piece from Madrid clearly lays its emphasis on creating atmospheric songs, which develop and grow along the underlying story.’ — Wormed

 

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Klein Marks of Worship
‘Klein’s latest is a form of cathartic release. The young London-born artist by way of Los Angeles, Surulere and Lagos, told press that music wasn’t something that was encouraged in her traditional Nigerian family, nor was she secure enough to tell friends about the music she was making until now. “I was really sad and I sort of needed something for myself; something therapeutic because I felt like I needed to cleanse myself of all this bad energy so I decided to make a song about praise and worship. I get WhatsApp messages from my auntie’s preaching to me so I tried to translate that into a song.” What we get is Klein paying tribute to her global roots in the video. Directed by Akinola Davies Jr., “Marks of Worship” is a five-minute spoken word layered over visuals of a dispirited Klein at an otherwise festive traditional Nigerian celebration before taking part in a purification ritual.’ — Track Record

 

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Lauri Ainala Orpokotijuhlat Saarella 4
‘Liturgical nostalgia and the hypnotic power of religious ritual seems to be the primary forces on these ten unnamed compositions. From the soulful droning of an organ to fragmented choirs creating wordless melodies, the album is interspersed with hints of ceremony and a darkness lurking behind the light. The source of sound always feels as though it’s coming from a distance, through a veil or calling out from a memory. The album’s trajectory is more consistent with movements of a greater piece than a series of separate songs, although many do have distinctive moods or qualities that allow them to stand as sonic portraits. The majority of Orpokotijuhlat Saarella seems to be manipulated patchworks of field recordings, with a striking juxtaposition of natural and human-made sound. Ancient voices reach through static and the crackle of dying fires. It’s akin to looking at faded photographs and imagining a fuller version of the environment contained within. There’s a sense of awe, of grandeur, and even melancholic remembrance.’ — Black Metal and Brews

 

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Felicita A New Family
‘PC Music’s Felicita has been responsible for some memorable tracks over the past few years, particularly on their 2014 Frenemies EP, and today he’s announced a new EP, A New Family , and shared a video for its title track. The song is a warmly demonic burst of noise that reminds me a lot of the sadly forgotten early-’10s UK band Teeth, and it’s built around the nonsensical but catchy whispered chorus: “Trick/ cool/ volvic/ yeah/ spray it and we’re wet, wet.” The video, which was directed by Matt Copson, only adds to the track’s allure: It’s a haunting and unsettling game of spin-the-bottle that morphs into something alien and unfamiliar.’ — Stereogum

 

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Helena Celle Streaming Music For Biometrics
‘Helena Celle is the synth work and multi-dimensional audio practise of Glasgow-based musician Kay Logan. A dedicated 21st century polymath, Logan’s interests lie in the power relationships inherent in technology, how to harness aleatoric practise in a discipline that is often rigid and in exploring the interface between computer science (Logan is also a computer programmer) and sound. Her music is a deliriously sun-burnt foray into abstract techno and a very personal take on an electronic music language that remains obscure to outsiders but here rendered a unique form of emotional communication.’ — Night School Records

 

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Tobin Sprout Future Boy Today/Man Of Tomorrow
‘Tobin Sprout was the Scottie Pippen to Bob Pollard’s Michael Jordan in the mid-’90s iteration of Guided By Voices, contributing some of the finest songs to the band’s most revered albums. Now that GBV’s “classic” lineup has dispersed once again after spending the early part of this decade reunited, Sprout is back with his sixth solo album, The Universe And Me, a look at the mind of a young boy in the tumultuous transition to manhood. The project was a seven-year labor of love, with Sprout digging up old childhood memories and long-lost demos while writing songs behind a piano in his Michigan home studio. Some of those older tracks made their way to the album, including electric psych-pop gem “Future Boy Today/Man Of Tomorrow,” a typically soaring Sprout composition that was originally intended for GBV.’ — Stereogum

 

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AnD Where Are You Going To Take Me
‘Now regarded as one of the most uncompromising production outfits on the European techno scene Berlin / Manchester noiseniks AnD widen their musical vision across these four tracks without leaving behind the raw aesthetic and driving energy that has characterised their music and their live performances over the last few years. From the kind of straight up 4/4 pounders that have made the closing slot at Electric Deluxe’s Awakenings events their own, to experiments with off-kilter drums and caustic noise this EP is as good a statement of AnD’s present and future as you’ll hear all year.‘ — Perc Trax

 

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Steven Warwick CTFO
‘The Berlin-based producer and artist Steven Warwick presents a unique audio-visual ‘mixtape’ on PAN, compiled of a series of darkly lyrical and sonic musings, as well as personal snapshots, written stories and videos taken across trips whilst residing in LA and Berlin. Arriving as his first musical release under his own name, Warwick (aka Heatsick)’s latest venture also utilises a new sonic repertoire allowing for a new route for his music, “It’s a reset in a way, creatively and emotionally”. Titled Nadir, the release reflects on a somewhat sardonic, and at times melancholic and unsettling mood. Recorded in both Los Angeles, New York and Berlin, it is a soundtrack and document of time spent in and around those environments both urban and rural.’ — PAN

 

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Screen Time waking at dusk and hearing the wind
‘These are pieces that combine electronic and acoustic sources. With a couple of exceptions, even the electronic sources are modeled on sounds we hear in life. Sometimes I think the pieces share a mood. My thanks to two marvelous musicians – Renata Bratt who plays cello and Ben Blechman who plays 5-string violin (he has a low C string below the 4-string instrument’s G.) Besides playing my raw charts with insight and a sure grasp of what would work, they each provided extras. In particular, for tracks 3 and 5, though I provided frameworks, they both contributed melodies, accompaniments, and etherialized knockings and scrapings. True, I did then edit their recordings quite a bit. Almost certainly, any infelicities now audible are more likely to be my work than theirs.’ — Lee Ray

 

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Kamixlo Bloodless Y (Evian Christ Remix)
’21-year-old Chilean Kamixlo is setting dancefloors across London alight with his signature style of Latin-infused club bangers. The musician and DJ takes the best in Reggaeton, Bachata and Cumbia and gives it a modern twist unlike anything you’ve heard before. Along with his friends and Bala Club comrades, Blaze Kidd, Uli K and END GAME, the DJs are gaining traction for their inimitable sound. He’s fresh from releasing his EP Demonico on the imprint run by Berlin label PAN and grime producer Visionist.’ — i-D

 

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Linda Sharrock In The Abyssity Of The Grounds Untitled
‘Gods is the first major release of new material since, arguably, her 1989 LP with Wolfgang Puschnig on ECM, by one of free jazz’s most important icons, whose transition via a debilitating stroke into deep, guttural wordlessness has seen her enter a new realm of primal vocal raging. This is Linda Sharrock, best known for her show-stealin’ voice work on ex-husband Sonny’s two albums Black Woman (1969) and Monkey-Pockie-Boo (1970), recorded in 2014 for over two hours at her wailing, heart-stopping best, flanked by the stellar (In) the Abyssity of the Grounds (Theresa Eipeldauer (voice), Mario Rechtern (soprano, alto, baritone, saxoline, voice), Max Bogner (guitar, electronics, voice), and Didi Kern (drums)). A truly stunning, demented, and absolutely essential bombardment of relentless energy by one of the giants of avant-garde music.’ — Cafe Oto

 

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Mai Mai Mai Nel Sud (Live Extract)
‘Φ (Phi) is the third and final installment in Mai Mai Mai’s Mediterranean trilogy, pushing the project deeper into a vivid interzone of digital synthesis and scorched ritual. The album opens with a searing collaboration with avant-folk instrumentalist Luca Venitucci, locked into a lofty duel of distorted drones, before pivoting to a throbbing oblivion of jackhammer bass, seething feedback, and combat samples. Later passages ooze through industrial spoken word, technoid voodoo hallucination, seasick prayer loops, and nightmare exotica, assisted in places by Italian experimental percussion legend Lino Capra Vaccina (of 1970’s “golden age” groups Aktuala and Telaio Magnetico).’ — Boring Machines

 

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Radian Scary Objects
‘Over the course of their first four albums, Radian perfected a painterly approach to sound construction. What makes the instrumental Austrian trio exceptional is its ability to wrest seemingly endless possibilities by fine-tuning the grain of every sound. On their fifth album On Dark Silent Off, Radian take the tactile dimension of their music even further while also introducing groove and drama basically for the first time. On Dark Silent Off bristles with a passion that you don’t hear on their back catalog. It’s not like past Radian records are stiff, but the band always sounded slightly removed as it supplied you with a constant flow of sensory input. This time, they connect with your heart too.’ — Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

 

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Circus Devils Mother Skinny
‘A loud and invasive meditations on childhood and war, Mother Skinny is a good record for kickers and screamers. Ohio’s Circus Devils have been lurking under the radar since 2001 and Mother Skinny is their eighth album. As always, the band is steadfast in their unpredictability.’ — Jack Rock

 

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Robert Pollard Dunce Codex
‘“Dunce Codex ”appears on Robert Pollard solo record Lord of the Birdcage. Pollard took a bunch of poems he had written and made them into songs for the album, which was apparently a new approach for him.’ — Sound It Out

 

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MMMD Malproksime
‘MMMD’s music has always reminded me of Howard Shore’s scores for The Lord of the Rings films, and as such, my listening has always been guided by that association. For me, Som Sakrifis was heroic music, war music, music by which pastoral hobbits fought against evil wizards and abominable orcs and glowing eyeballs, when outcomes of such battles meant everything to every thing, big or small, dwarf or elf, human or tree. Its overwhelming oppressiveness brought me into a breaking world, vied over by many, but plagued by absolutes. With Pèkisyon Funebri, MMMD has signified a formic return after a brief cartographical break from its regularly scheduled programming. It’s a quiet return at first, as opener “Az álmok itt érnek véget (rész 1)” culls an open landscape, a place where blood has been shed by neighbors who have found themselves equal under a force more terrible than God. “Qoxra” follows, a tremor-inducing dirge for everything that has been lost since “Liberig Min.” What follows is as nerve-wracking as it is steadying, and while my complete ignorance of Greek language obscures my semiotic reading of Pèkisyon Funebri as a multi-movement piece, my feeling is that its slow, plodding drones are of great human import somehow.’ — Jackson Scott, Tiny Mix Tapes

 

*

p.s. Hey. I think at least a few of you know that my nephew Cody Reding is a writer, but few if any of you know what an awesome writer he is, but you can find out, if you like, which I highly encourage, because a short fiction piece by him called OXBLOOD FERRAGAMOS has just been published on Fanzine. Please read. ** H, Good morning to you. The Jean Lorrain book is lovely fun. I believe that’s the only book I’ve read by him, actually. Oh, you prefer early Ashbery, okay, gotcha. ** Montse, Hi! It was a nice birthday, yes. Is the application form fun at all? Spoken by someone (me) who has a bit of a questionaire fetish. Oh, do you know the Spanish filmmaker José Val del Omar? I just discovered his work recently, and it seems pretty amazing. He was a contemporary/friend of Lorca, Dali, and others. Anyway, I made a post about his work that’s coming up. Have a lovely day, pal! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! My pleasure about the books. Oh, cold sesame noodle is kind of heaven. Or it is when it’s made right. If you ever get a chance to try it, try to get Szechuan style (spicy!), if you can. You have your degree! Wow, that seems like it was quick! I think I lost track of time! That’s so great! Wow, so do you feel like a new person or more adult or something magically now? My day … hm, not too, too interesting. Zac and I have to make this kind of document describing what kind of performers we’re looking for re: our film to give to the person who’s helping with the casting. So, like, actual age, visual age, gender, height, build, the demeanor/ qualities of the different roles and so on. So I spent part of the day working on a draft of that, and Zac and I will flesh it out together today. Gisele and Jonathan Capdevielle and I are doing the last rehearsals of ‘Jerk’ before it plays in Montreal next week, so we conferred about that. My friend Jason McBride, who’s writing the Kathy Acker biography, said he wants to interview me about Kathy for the book, so that should be interesting. And I started eating Zac’s sesame noodles, and they are god. So, now that you’re an official, degreed-up person, how did you spend your first post-student day? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thanks, man. Yes, that is an interesting press, and, based on the Lorrain, their books look quite  lovely as well. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, that’s okay. I hope your cat with the great name is feeling better today. Worrisome stuff. I do remember you propping Lorrain. I’m wary of that new Sade translation but very curious about it too, of course. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne’ is definitely much stronger than his first film. Thank you for your Bresson wisdom. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, whatever, about that Australian critic’s thing. I read everything I can about Bresson, and there are critic detractors out there. In fact about, oh, a month or something ago I met a fairly big film critic here, and when I mentioned Bresson, he rolled his eyes and put his fingers in his mouth and made mock-gagging noises. ‘Politically dangerous’, ha ha, get a fucking life. That’s so ridiculous. ** Ken Baumann, Hi, Ken! Oh, you like Farmer’s work? I just recently discovered it. It’s really terrific. I just got and am going to read that book she did with Tiny Hardcore. Mid-March should be A-okay. I talked to Zac, and he said we can push whatever out of the way to see you. Are you just coming for fun? Oh, man, Iceland is so, so great. You really have to get out of Reykjavík. Zac and I rented a car and spent a week-plus driving all the way around the island/country, and it was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. It’s just nonstop sublime beauty, that place. Well, let me know about Paris whenever it’s good, and love to Aviva and you, and have a sweet day! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I initially misread your sentence as saying the blurb would ‘light up’ Sypha’s street, which I liked. My pleasure re: the books post, naturally. Bon day! ** Jamie, Howdy! It is possible to enjoy oneself with a fucked up back, it’s true. I’m one of the rare non-Dutch people, it seems, who really likes the Dutch language, how it sounds, etc. I did learn to speak and understand it a little when I lived in Holland, which I suppose colors me. Anyway, it sounds like your time there was like my every day in Paris since my French is so primitive. I like imagining what people are saying around me, and I almost always imagine them speaking like genius poets. I’m a big fan of osteopathy. I’ve been helped enormously by osteopaths. I think it’s like a form of magic. Obviously, there are amazing ones and ones that aren’t so amazing, but I do definitely recommend that. And it sounds like you went to one yesterday, yes? And do you feel a difference? Well, initially we were told they were aiming for the series running around Halloween time in 2018. (The first of the three episodes is set on Halloween.) I don’t know if that’s still the thing. Today I think I’ll just work and do some film prep stuff with Zac and maybe visit/meet with Gisele. I think that’ll likely be its totality. How did the writing go? How were the fish, chips, and, most importantly (?), sea? I think it’s wise and lovely that you like the 4 books posts best. I like them a bunch too. A painless and prosperous Thursday to you! Painkilling love, Dennis. ** B, Hi! I do really look forward to being inside and exploring the Armory one of these days. It looks enticing inside there in photos. Wealthy people plus booze does sound either like a fun trip or a complete nightmare. Glad it was the former. Oh, that’s so nice of you to read him ‘My Loose Thread’. Thank you! Have a most excellent … what day is it … Thursday! ** Cal Graves, Cal, hi! It wasn’t too shabby. The b’day. Glad it’s over though. Glad the technical changing numbers part is over, I mean. No, I don’t believe I’ve heard of ‘Ambiencé’. 720 hours long?! Wow, what in the world. How is that possible? Obviously, I’m going to race over and see what that’s all about in a second. Thanks a whole lot for alerting me to that. Take care. ** Bernard, Hi, B. Ha ha, you have Zac’s and my blessing to do that. Yes, I read it on my birthday! It was easily one of my best gifts. (I only got two gifts other than yours, but they were very good.) You’re in NYC again? You’re always there of late. Well, not always, but still. Cool. Staying in the same spot? That Judson Church event sounds like an alley-upper. I do remember Rick Herron. I just read something about him somewhere the other day, and I thought, I know that guy. Cool that his thing killed so well/badly. You sound good and like you’re having a grand old time. Very nice to hear, bud. ** Right. There’s the latest of my gigs featuring music I have been listening to and feeling into lately, and you will do whatever you do with my gig posts over the course of today, I reckon. And that’s that. See you tomorrow.

‘The digital is often framed as a site of contagion—one can contract fatal viruses (or send them). One can suffer the pollution of good ol’ American values—the allure of exotic chrome and pixels from the Silicon Valley proving altogether too enticing. Indeed, the Valley itself was once good ol’ American farmland, before wresting technological eminence from Route 128 in Massachusetts. But one can also “go viral,” become contagion itself; one can colonize digital space as imaginative playground and bend its offerings to one’s own designs, just like a virus; one can even farm online. If the digital can be named any one thing, it is ever-replicating multivalence, which passes from vector to human vector, becoming at once a thing and its antithesis, simulacrum and simulacra, sanctuary from danger but also danger itself.

‘Ashley Farmer’s The Farmacist suggests by its title an affiliation with digital contagion—perhaps as an offering, a written prescription for our complicated diagnosis. Yet there is nothing prescriptive about its approach. Rather than tease a dichotomy between good and bad contagions, Farmer forces her readers to rethink both the charming idealism of a tech-utopia, as well as the privileges afforded “authenticity,” or the real. After all, does the computerized drip-irrigation of a farm render it unreal? And how much of Farm Town—an interactive digital pastoral available via Facebook—actually remains constrained within that fabricated digital?

‘At one point, Farmer’s protagonist is wearing a mask, the classical marker of (in)authenticity: “But when I pulled it off,” she says, “my real face was absent. In its place: an arrangement of hashtags. Put it on again.” There is no cathartic reveal, no affirmation of the real versus the unreal, or triumph of one over the other. There is not even a change of state—the mask returns to the face. There are no truths resting, hidden, behind it. Yet Farmer’s tale resists modernist nihilism as well, and the mask’s failure to unveil truth, health, salvation, does not fatally condemn its wearer, nor her world.

‘Every action in The Farmacist is hemmed in by margins of error, as characters seek “an approximation of heaven,” or are entreated to “walk towards me in beta” (emphases mine), though these margins are perhaps less boundaries and blankspaces than liminal incubators. Early on, the narrator insists that “This Bird of Paradise is not a bird,” a play on Ceci n’est pas une pipe; but where Magritte’s distinction is between pipe and mere image of a pipe, a Bird of Paradise was in fact never a bird, and has only ever borne passing, somewhat idiosyncratic resemblance to a bird. Whatever its image, it is a full organism unto itself; approximations of heaven and walks in beta are not only loose scrawls within the margins of error, but vibrant non-Euclidean spaces in their own right.’ — Mika Kennedy

 

Ashley Farmer’s Site
The Digitally Absurd: The Farmacist by Ashley Farmer
Ashley Farmer interviewed @ The Rumpus
This Modern Writer: Alone in the Dark by Ashley Farmer
Buy ‘The Farmacist’

 

Ashley Farmer The Farmacist
Jellyfish Highway Press

‘Ashley Farmer’s The Farmacist, a meditation on the Facebook game, Farm Town, explores the realm where the “real” world buffets the imagination, and the conscious mind courts the subconscious iterations of desire and distraction. It investigates the liminal space between log on and log off, between rural and urban. Whip smart and empathetic, The Farmacist is fiction crashing the lyric’s slumber party, a reified shibboleth for the age of social media, all of it rendered beautifully, the poet’s ear and the proser’s eye working together to encapsulate and expound. Using the digital farm as a metaphor for the incredible shrinking American dream, Farmer gives her reader the rare experience of understanding human ambitions and aspirations as both futile and necessary. Don’t ignore the invitation.’  — Christopher Kennedy

‘It’s rare to find bursts of prose so laden with the fruit of meaning: city and country, solitude and sociality, leisure and labor all get grafted together into a novel tree of Ashley Farmer’s making. This book is often stunning in its vision of western life, the internet, and alienation—as she writes for us, “These dreams aren’t even mine—I just idle in them.”’ — Ken Baumann

 

Excerpts

Little Bo Peep Comes to Farm Town

It’s God’s day, but I wear thigh highs beneath my Bible. Maybe that’s why He took my flock. My lambkin lost, I feel forsaken. I witness crooks and necks that crane toward this skirt impractical for tending sheep or even nailing up Have You Seen Me? posters. My heart bled once when the livestock lost their tails. Again when I looked out at the hills thinking that they missed me. (That night, I’d find their woolly nubs nailed to a tree.) I’m a girl on the go, owning nothing now, owing on this ridiculous get-up. What good is pretty, petty unemcumberence when you have no reason to be? I find a shitty dive with Photohunt a buck a game. It’s afternoon. In the dark I drink drafts and play addition or subtraction of body parts and black straps and wisps of hair on naked women. I’m foolish, but not so easily fooled: in one photo she’s whole, in the other incomplete.

 

The Wolf

Disguised as a lover, he was all clover. Dressed as a December hunter: a genuine risk. He waited me out in the snowy hedge. I said, Go home, predator, but he became a compulsive visitor. Knock knock, he called with his teeth. Knock knock, he called without knocking at all. He said, I saw those large snow patches and thought you’d need help melting them. I battened the hatches, eyed him through discount curtains. Beneath the moonlight, he poached field eggs, stripped wild grass, drained the milk keg, dismembered the rabbit hutch. He knotted the hose through the branches like sin. The mailbox spilled quills, spit fur at visitors. The Wolf shammed an exit but recurred while I dreamed of cartoon buzzsaws, of rolling pin pursuits, of tarring and feathering him. I discovered fire. You’ll like it, he hissed. But spring made good and caused the ice to crack. The Wolf tumbled toward the big sea coast. He floated out into summer because his mama never taught him manners and he never learned to swim. Autumn now. I still feel fangs through the door: Just this once, he asks without asking at all.

 

Gone to Waste

Purple hyacinths broadcast thirst: empty water droplets linger beside us. I materialize at the inn, beneath the severed heads of bucks to sip water standing up and watch pixilated ladies LOL and appear identical. I can’t tell myself apart any more than I might decipher how this town transmits me to me. There’s outside, and then there’s outside-outside: Saturday night at the reptile shop, the man beyond the Laundromat kicking a tree. These dreams aren’t even mine—I just idle in them. At the marketplace in the drunk of night, Dr. Doomsday’s demanding: are you lost or not? He means the opposite of friendship: he means economics. Just past midnight, I could beg a stranger home or hawk my crops, but I click myself into a tiny plot of rotting pumpkins only to identify the smooth, brown poverty as mine. A slab of river ends at my doorstep. No one I know knows how to move it.

 

Follow Avatar While Walking

Sky zeroed. The trees are bananas. I lose myself beneath them, pluck them up by the trunks and shift and shake them. My farm Population 0 and yet I somehow feel among the juniper trees my old heart beating. I scratch my initials into bark like a math problem: AF + AF + a white chalk heart around it. I’m nowhere to be found and it’s hushed here without me. I throw a cocktail party but don’t show up. I buy an above ground pool but the water surface freezes like a screen. I install a carousel, but the sun ruins the music and protest notes sour from green to brown in midair. Maybe I dipped my toe in the wishing well and fell again. Maybe I’m digging out from beneath something. Maybe I’m in the town square reaping late-night consolation. I wear my laptop like a locket: inside are pictures of myself in miniature. I’ve held ground against droughts, against crumbling acres, against gifts of hammers and roses from mysterious neighbors. I’ve stayed small against seasons. Now I’ve vanished myself against reason.

 

The Farmacist

 

 

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Christopher Kang earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in jubilat, Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, The L Magazine, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and Open City. He is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California-Irvine.

 

Christopher Kang Website
Christopher Kang @ Facebook
‘The Looms’, by Christopher Kang
Christopher Kang @ Twitter
Buy ‘When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, …’

 

Christopher Kang When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other
Green Mountains Review Books

‘Christopher Kang’s extraordinary collection, WHEN HE SPRANG FROM HIS BED, STAGGERED BACKWARD, AND FELL DEAD, WE CLUNG TOGETHER WITH FAINT HEARTS, AND MUTELY QUESTIONED EACH OTHER, resists easy classification. A daring, remarkable book that challenges on every read. These 880 stories taken together form a kind of sly, wondrous narrative whole, full in equal measure of humor, sadness, and brilliance. Kang is an ambitious writer, and this book is an achievement. Each of these stories contains a world, tilted on its own axis, strange, remarkable and bursting with heart.’ — GMRB

‘Christopher Kang’s brilliant first book, a steady accretion of Robert Walserian feuilletons, filled me with such quick strobes of delight and confusion and dismay and envy that, in the end, I mostly felt vertigo. This book is sly; it contains its own contradictions. It is a searing indictment of artistic ambition while being nakedly ambitious; it is self-reflective without a steady self to reflect; it is simultaneously starkly clear and confounding; and its intelligence is often punctured by humor and sentiment and near-aphorisms that ring so quietly and personally that I often wanted to write them in permanent marker on my skin.’ — Lauren Groff

‘Christopher Kang’s work is mysterious, lovelorn, philosophical and often very amusing. Its lyricism is matched only by its daring. A remarkable book.’ — Lorrie Moore

 

Excerpts

 

 

 

________________

‘The fin de siècle period in Paris is marked by scandals and remarkable events: the Panama scandal, the Ravachol case, Dreyfus, the fire in the Bazar de la Charité, the world exhibition of 1900. This is also the Paris in which the Norman Paul Duval lived for more than twenty years. He became known in literary circles as Jean Lorrain. This illustrious figure, a ‘dandy de la perversité’ with a taste for sailors and dockworkers, never had his fill of creating scandals. He felt equally at home in unsavoury bars and in the salons, between debauchees, addicts, devil worshippers and spiritualists, and fashion enthusiasts. He wrote scandalous articles in several periodicals about his adventures, repeating these chronicles later in his narrative prose. His style was influenced by idols such as Barbey d’Aurevilly, Huysmans and the Goncourts and their ‘style artiste’.

‘In 1892, Lorrain travelled to Algeria and Tunisia via Spain. In that year, he also opted for a northbound route that took him to London and then onward to Amsterdam. Five years later, he used these experiences for his novel Monsieur de Bougrelon. This novel starts with an evocation of the water that seemed omnipresent in the Netherlands, especially in Amsterdam, ‘the Venice of the north’: ‘it is all water, and houses painted in black and white, full of windows, with sculpted pointed rooftops and lace curtains: black and white, reflected in the water.’ He celebrates the northern peoples in a minor key: ‘Dutch men, by the way, are rather ugly, and Dutch women resemble them.’

‘Monsieur de Bougrelon appeared in 1897, at the end of Lorrain’s life, and although it did bring him some degree of fame, there was something ambiguous about his position as journalist with artistic ambitions. He would never hesitate to use texts (even those of others) more than once. His novels were collages of articles and chronicles that had appeared previously. After his death, the Bougrelon story was published a few times in illustrated editions.’ — Koninklijke Bibliotheek

 

Jean Lorrain @ Wikipedia
‘Monsieur de Bougrelon’ @ {feuilleton}
A dandy in aspic
Jean Lorrain @ goodreads
Buy ‘Monsieur de Bougrelon’

 

Jean Lorrain Monsieur de Bougrelon
Spurl Editions

‘In Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon, an eccentric, outmoded dandy leads ennui-filled French tourists around misty Amsterdam. Guiding them through sailors’ bars, whorehouses, and costume galleries, Monsieur de Bougrelon recounts hallucinatory stories of his past and delves into his “heroic friendship” with his aristocratic companion Monsieur de Mortimer.

‘Monsieur de Bougrelon is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls “imaginary pleasures” – obsessions with incongruous people, animals, and objects. These obsessions are often sexual or border on the sexual, leading to shocking, surreal scenes. Monsieur de Bougrelon also enthuses over his beautiful friend Monsieur de Mortimer, making this novella one of the rare works of the nineteenth century to broach homosexuality in a meaningful way, years before Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

‘Originally published in French in 1897, Monsieur de Bougrelon is now available in English translation for the first time. Its inventiveness and sheer Decadence find kindred spirits in the novels of Comte de Lautréamont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and even Louis-Ferdinand Céline, while the novella’s indulgent language and unconventional vision of art and sex embody the best of fin-de-siècle literature. It is, in the novella’s own words, a true “boudoir of the dead.”’ — Spurl Editions

 

Excerpt

Amsterdam, it is always water and houses painted black and white, all windows, with sculpted gables and lace curtains; the black, the white splinter in the water. And so it is always water, dead water, iridescent water and gray water, alleys of water that do not end, canals guarded by dwellings like enormous dominos; it could be gloomy, and yet it is not sad, but eventually it is a bit monotonous, especially when the water freezes and the gelid pewter of the canals no longer reflects the small, pretty dollhouses, upside down with front steps high in the air.

There was a strong wind on the Amstel that day, a wind to sweep away the sweepers themselves. At the Dam, there was the spectacle (which we had already seen too many times) of the tram station and the crowds around it; of fur caps pulled down over violet ears, cabmen and drivers blossoming with rosacea, necks disappearing behind mufflers, and those strange little old men who, with eternal drops of frost on the ends of their red noses, hawk omnibus connections at the highest prices. But everyone needs to live, and the surprise of hearing dangüe for merci, and the surprise of gathering freezing snot from the back of their gloved hands is one of the pleasures of tourism in Amsterdam.

Oh, these people of the North! The Dutch man, by the way, is rather ugly, and the Dutch woman resembles him. Those old women in black velvet hats perched upon caps of lace, embellished at the temple with hemstitched medallions of gold, apparently work better in the old master paintings than they do in the streets. And the Zeedijk (the Rietdijk of Amsterdam) does not come to life until nighttime. As for the Nes – where good, shapely, strapping men, very blond and very pink, innocently approach you from dive bar entrances, their plump bodies bulging out of their long hotel porters’ cloaks and their faces radiant – it had lost its mystery for us: we had already visited it too many times as well. This is surely human ingratitude, because the Nes had so delighted us the first night!

We used to love those heavy doors that opened abruptly to reveal, behind a row of tables, a heap of flesh and spangles, raised like a dessert on a faraway, luminous platform. “Dames françaises! Come in, Messieurs, we speak French,” and this from the decent, chubby-cheeked giants, who bowed and smiled with full lips, but they were good, honest smiles, unknown in Paris; they did not release for a minute the doorkeeper’s ropes they held in their hands. Indeed, at every entrance on Nesstraat there was the same sudden appearance of nudity and dazzling fabrics, the same patriotic offer, dames françaises, and the same salute.

Oh, only French women on every Nes, from the Belgian fogs to the distant parts of Holland, they are in every region!

Oh! How we are happy to be French
When we travel to foreign lands.

Amsterdam’s red-light districts are relaxing and refresh the soul; there is a sense of geniality there that is unknown in the Latin countries, and these devilish exhibitors, these solid doorkeepers to hell, defuse malice with their good shiny faces and their good thick hands in fur gloves, looking like thoroughly honest major-domos under their gold-tasseled caps. But apparently we had seen too much of them.

Nes, Zeedijk, the Dam, and even the museum did not speak to us anymore; there are days like that in life. We wandered through the city like flotsam, along the frozen canals, hurrying around street corners, for the great wind, as I have already said, blew forcefully that day on the Amstel.

It was bone-chilling outside, savagely cold, and the many Schiedammers we had knocked back in every cellar on Kalverstraat had hardly perked us up – there are days like that in life too – and so we meandered under January’s north wind, pitiable and glum, when an odd sign captivated us: Café Manchester.

It was in one of those uniform black-and-white Amsterdam streets: a small old two-story dwelling, very low beneath an enormous roof that crowned it from its gable nearly to the first floor. The lodging seemed packed in on itself, as though squeezed underground, and we had to descend five steps to find the front door and the only window, hung with wide net curtains of taut guipure, which opened just above the ground; on the other levels there were small irregular dormer windows with closed shutters. Café Manchester! It had the look of a lantern. It even had a pulley at the top of its roof to raise supplies and furniture. What did they sell in this café? In this Café Manchester, where apparently they spoke French as well as English.

The cold was intense, the house dubious; we went inside.

 

Jean Lorrain *

Jean Lorrain – Monsieur de Bougrelon

Visionnaire – Jean Lorrain – Lacaze — Beethoven Piano Sonate n°14

 

 

_______________

Think back to when you started writing. What’s an earlier influence you outgrew, abandoned, or turned against?

Mat Laporte: I’m always abandoning. I don’t think my way of doing things is the “right” way; it’s just the best I could come up with at the moment. So pretty much everything I’ve tried I’ve abandoned for something different, or “better,” maybe?

When a piece of writing doesn’t work out, what do you do with it? Discard? Fold it into another project? Salvage parts?

ML: Save it for sure. “The Experimental Boy” poems, for example, are made up of fragments of things I’ve written, or found and other people have written or found, cut-up and re-deployed. My writing is almost never a flowing, continuous thing but an assemblage of disparate particles of things I gather and save. When I end up making something that is cohesive, complete or unbroken, I’m shocked and appalled. I’m interested, right now, in the idea of the ‘serial’ poem. What I like about it is the idea that each poem doesn’t have to be a polished thing, that the point is to move on to the next one, the sequence will have its own narrative thrust that will take even the person who wrote it by surprise. One of my models is Ted Berrigan and especially his work The Sonnets which can be thought of as using a method similar to Cubist art. Fragments from different perspectives are collaged and refracted into a new take on perspective, multiple perspectives, or no perspective? The serial work is always changing and surprising you, the one who is writing it. I like that.

Do you plan out the piece beforehand or find your way as you go along? A combination of both?

ML: “You just go on your nerve,” Frank O’Hara said. Even when it’s a “conceptual” piece, with a pre-planned concept, I have to hit the ground running immediately or it fails me and I don’t want to do it anymore. Nerve, always.

 

Mat Laporte @ Twitter
Mat Laporte: Three Poems
‘Time and Resources’
‘Rats Nest’ reviewed @ Unnerving
Buy ‘Rats Nest’

 

Mat Laporte Rats Nest
Book Thug

‘Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, RATS NEST builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century.

‘This first full-length book by Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self–reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.

‘As the Kid descends the layers of a seemingly never-ending pit, its nightmares and hallucinations—recorded in stunning detail—unfold in twelve chilling chapters of unreality that will make readers think twice about what it means to be a human (or humanoid) on the planet we call home.’ — Book Thug

‘RATS NEST is a fragmented and extended transmission from ‘the world’s first 3D Printed Kid.’ It is a dissident, noir, cyberpunk diary that recalls the monotony of service/ office labour and projects that struggle onto the failed tropes of ‘what the future may hold.’ Here, the future is a recursive failure of both affinity and empathy, launched from the outer reaches of a space-time where both identity and narrative are in flux. This is a work that simultaneously calls to mind Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the prose of Philip K. Dick, both Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette and the riotous ‘cut-up’ novels of Kathy Acker. Has Mat Laporte eaten our dreams? Are these texts the cognitive–enteric-cybernetic remnants of a necessarily alienated posthumanity? ‘Bursting forth from the primordial/ id itself . a flickering/non–linear flood of fact and sensory data,’ Laporte has engendered for us an austere and gorgeous horror.’ — Liz Howard

 

Excerpt

 

Mat Laporte’s: Dance With Me Vendetta

| December Book Haul |

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** H, Thank you! ** Jonathan, Thanks, man. Finishing stuff for a show is always the best reason. Outputting art over inputting it forever. Damn that you’l miss Eileen. Man, she is everywhere. She just wished me happy birthday from the campus of my brief university Pitzer in Pomona, West Coast. I’ll go hear that Mary Ocher track. I should try the recent Jóhann Jóhannsson stuff. I got kind of bored of him at one point. I had not seen that video, and now I’ve seen the still-ish first few seconds, and I will return to unpack it when I get out of here. Ooh, writing by you. That will have first dibs on my unpacking abilities, obviously. Cool. Everyone, hit this link and go read ‘Going Dark’, a piece by the artist of sublimity Jonathan Mayhew, why don’t you? Cool, bud! ** New Juche, Ah, you’re back in ‘civilization’ with all its ups and vaunted downs. Welcome back. France does love lots and lots of paperwork, that’s for sure. Nope, I’m still a tourist who has extremely overstayed his welcome. But I do very much need to get some kind of residency status asap, especially given that whatever this year’s election outcome, the country will be swinging to the right, and the borders may not be as laissez faire even for Americans. But, of course, the paperwork and stuff re: getting French residency status is a big reason why I’ve been procrastinating. Sounds quite tough down in Thailand too. Thanks for the good words about my thing about Bresson, man. ** James Nulick, Thank you! Happy my Birthday to you! My birthday was nice. Zac made me cold sesame noodle, which is my favorite food if not even my favorite thing in the world, and we walked around the Marais and looked at gallery art — show about Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (good), 80s period Rauschenberg (meh), Omer Fast (bad), Gordon Matta-Clark drawings and films (great) — then we met up with Michael and Bene at Hard Rock Cafe where I stuffed myself sick with nachos and M&B gave me the new book of Bresson interviews, and then I came home and looked at my gazillion happy birthday wishes on Facebook. So it was good. My piece about Bresson is from both of those books. The sleepover still is from ‘The Devil, Probably’. The kids on the swing is I think from ‘Mouchette’. Jesus Christ, only one Bresson?! Well, ‘The Devil, Probably’ is my all-time favorite film so obviously I recommend that. But you can not go wrong in the slightest with any Bresson film, although I would save his earliest two — ‘Les dames du Bois de Boulogne’ and ‘Les anges du péché’ — for last because he wasn’t really fully Bresson yet when he made those. The song stuck in my head this morning is ‘Dunce Codex’ by Robert Pollard. On those terms you mention, the French don’t like silence either. Love back. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, Mr. E! Cherish your copy of ‘Antoine Monnier’ away from the eyes of the rest of the world please, ha ha. As I think I’ve mentioned, I was supposed to meet Humbert Balsam courtesy of my French publisher about a week before he died, but he cancelled. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you, Tosh! Yes, I was just given that book of Bresson interviews as a birthday gift yesterday! ** Steevee, Well, no Bresson film, but Zac made me cold sesame noodle, and I ate quite decent nachos last night. So not bad, not bad. Great, I really look forward to seeing ‘I Am Not Your Negro’. I saw a clip from it, and it looks really great. ** MANCY, Hi, man. Did you watch ‘Lancelot du Lac’? That’s my second favorite Bresson film. Cool, with synths. That’s exciting. Where are you in the process of making what you’re making? ** Montse, Hi, Montse! I did like that tumblr. It’s rich. Yeah, the Catholic wing of the far right are emboldened and starting to call for censorship left and right. With little success so far, thank goodness, but with the inevitable swing rightwards by the next government, I don’t know what will happen. Oh, I told James up above what I did on my b’day. It was quite nice. I was and am satisfied that my most recent benchmark in the somewhat unpleasant aging process was marked successfully. I didn’t have a cake, but I had more nachos than my stomach knew what to do with. Did you find out info about the animal shelter volunteering thing? Have a lovely day!!! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thank you for your birthday happiness generating! Yeah, tell me how the new ‘Trainspotting’ is, and I’ll keep an open mind until then. It’s a very good day that ends up with coziness. Yeah, I think that’s inarguable? I told Mr. Nulick up above what happened on my birthday. It was nice. And it’s not over yet because today I get to dig into the cold sesame noodle that Zac made for me. It’s my extremely favorite thing to eat in the world and a very rare treat over here in Paris. How did you spend your today? ** Frank Jaffe, Hi, Frank! How great to see you! Awesome of you to come on in here. A ‘mine or yours’ favorite Bresson day? Don’t tempt me, man, ha ha. I hope everything is really, really great with you and yours! Love, me. ** Jamie, You’re back! Hey there, buddy! Did you have really excellent holidays? Oh, wait, you fucked your back up, shit! You may already know that I’ve had a shitty back since I was young and grew too fast, permanently making my back a recurring problem, so I’m ultra-sympathetic to back pain. In fact I’m just coming out one of my rebelling back problems right now. I’m doing great. Yeah, the decision on the TV series keeps getting delayed, and it’s driving us a bit crazy even though we keep being told how into the project ARTE is. Hopefully soon, but, yeah, it’s very annoying. Anyway, really great to have you back, my friend. I look forward to ongoing adventure- and art-related sharing. Big love, me. ** Jeff J, Thanks, Jeff. I wonder what the fuck is up with the long, long promised ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ restoration and release. Supposedly all the rights were secured and everything is green lit, but they’ve been saying that for about eight years now. I haven’t seen the official video for the XX song — ‘Wondering’ — if there is one, but, yeah, I think it’s a pretty safe bet based on the reason our video was rejected that it will be pretty expectable clip. How did you like ‘Silence’? Early Bernhard novellas? You mean the ‘Three Novellas’ book? Oh, they’re great, but to say they’re superior to his later novels seems like pushing it a bit. Certainly well worth reading if you love Bernhard. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks, bud. Yeah, Bresson is definitely not what everyone wants films to be. Oh, that sounds promising re: the V&A. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick. Oh, my great pleasure, and thank you for the birthday wish. Well, thank you for wanting to write that piece on my gif novels in any case. That would be amazing, and I’m honored by your interest alone. Take care. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! Greetings from pretty much halfway (or close) around the world. Yes, I think I’ll take the Mt. Fuji-sized mound of coke maybe, if I have a choice. Thanks! I too have a very positive feeling about 2017, albeit on the art and personal levels only. Mega love right back at ya! Oh, and your kid is so fucking cool and awesome. ** Ferdinand, Thank you, F. I look forward to your first 2017 poem. Short is good. A French visa? Yep, they are a dogged thing to apply for and be rewarded with, that’s for sure. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Thanks for the happiness! Nachos and Bresson. Wow that is a very odd combination right there, but it could work! Yeah, def., about ‘Balthazar’. Obviously I love that it did that to you. When Bresson does big things to people, I feel a soulmate kind of thing happening with those people. And thank you being so kind, Chris, and writing what you did. That makes me very happy, and, yeah, just thank you a lot. And don’t underestimate the impact of our friendship and thought/ideas sharing on my end too. Love, me. ** Ken Baumann, Ken!!!!! Just last night when Michael, Bene, Zac and I were celebrating my b’day at Hard Rock Cafe we were talking about you and remembering when the former two and I ate dinner there with you and you ordered half the menu. I’m real good, man, and I think I can say that Z is as well. It sounds like things are great with you over there. I’m dedicatedly and happily following what I can via ‘good’ old Facebook. Oh, wow, Aviva’s jewelry looks great! I can’t seen them before. Give her my respect and love re: that re: everything. You guys will be in Paris! Holy moly, at long last! Do you know when in March? Zac and I will be getting ready to shoot our new film in early April, but we should be here most of the time, and I can not wait to see you! That’s splendiferous news! Lots of love from me! ** Bernard, Hi, B! Thank you ever so much! And I finally read your great review of ‘LCTG’ on Amazon. As did Zac. We are very happy and honored. And, wow, I hadn’t looked at the film’s Amazon page before, and there are some seriously Trumpian bad reviews there. So that was fun too. Oh, … what the heck … Everyone, the great Bernard Welt wrote a really smart and nice review of ‘Like Cattle Towards Glow’ on Amazon, and risking self-horn tooting, here’s a link where you can read it if you like.. Love and yet more thanks! ** Matt Black, Hi, Matt. Thanks a bunch, and that is a really pretty and intriguing thing you wrote there for which I express my sincerest gratitude. Have a fine Wednesday. ** Sypha, Thanks a lot, James. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, George, and I hope the busyness and tiredness gets the fuck off your lawn on this very day! ** xTx, Hey!!!!! Yay, it’s so awesome to see you! Thank you, thank you, and happy birthday to my date brother i.e. your dad! How are you? I miss you! Lots of love, Dennis. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal! A sight for are eyes, you are! Thank you very much! How are you, and what’s going on with you? ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Thanks for wishing me the good birthday. No, I’ve certainly read/heard a lot about ‘Mr. Robot’, but that’s far as it’s gone. I’ll peek at it, at the very least, by whatever means I can find. ** Okay. Up there are four books I loved of late that I’m passing along to you as recommendations. You know what to do. See you tomorrow.