Rocking endlessly out of the funk of futile disempowerment vibes November 2017's U.S. election created, after the mind-numbing Brexit, after year-long continued threat against women's rights in Poland, & the forests torn apart, sold, the sinister vibe continued viral untruth to swaddle or addle collective mental well-being. On one of those paroxysmal mornings of disgust with any browser bleating the non-news-news, an ironic dream-smith clanged in half-woken inner ear, kattaya-dada-yaya-yama-nyah, let us make dada great again!, as if in reply to the outrageous mockery of public service reps blowing orange tufts of hair dust. And the idea hatched for this edition of works on the theme of Dada, the title EXTREME CONTRAST coming much later, long after I proposed the idea of the compilation, then gave up, coming back to life after several fainting spells, and which now seems fit and feathered and ready to wing it's way out of the nine month midnight.
How to create in the spirit of Dada places horns of dilemma firmly on the mind. How to access this resource, if there is one, without casual mimesis or replication of gestures already emptied by repetition? Acutely aware of the dawning rerun potential for Debordian prophetic nihilism, digging deeper, even beyond Dada's heirlooms, seemed important archeology. While outrage is legitimate, humor also essential. Irreverence without cruelty. Magical formulae, spirited experiment, alchemical hybrid genre miscegenation & finding directions by mis-direction, meditation of zero, needless to say neologism, enchanted fragmentation, animations, animadversions. These were all clues but I didn't really ask anyone to listen to my personal spell-words or recipes. I asked people instead to create with their feeling of Dada or in relation to Dada as historic entity. Even a rant about the uselessness of Dada would go into the mill. Happily enough, I became aware only after reviewing the submissions that there were indeed constant themes and processes employed by the contributors, as if to say that these themes or processes implicitly have roots in the commonwealth concept of Dada. Two very common strategies or techniques of resort: the use of randomization toward renewal and rubbish collage. Although procedures such as cut-up are associated with Burroughs, industrial culture, and automatic writing with Surrealism, it was in fact Dada that first employed these measures as ways to freshen and shake-up the house. So, while it seems like a silly entertainers revolution the Cabaret Voltaire inverted as Hegelian tree on the Spiegelgasse in Zurich just downwind of Lenin's flat, as home-brewed hedonist pan-delirium of the highest order, it was instead, just another few months in the middle of war-time Switzerland that generated outlines for almost every other TAZ (temporary autonoumous zone) for the next century, opening a portal through which Africa as image-bank definitively enters European culture once and for all. And, in certain sense, I feel, art has been tribal and cultic ever since, even among the materialist with their cliques and clans, circles and jerks, as if a common clade. This is of course just my pov. One thing stands out however and that is the tension between the word and the meaning deferred, displaced. A consistent thread throughout all the pieces that employ language in this gathering have done so by stepping in the direction of Hugo Ball's lautgedichte, even if meaning is re-covered in the work in an ironic form and laced with attitude of critique, as in Chris Funkhouser's, the stretch has been made, toward fragmentation and scatter, the distance from the formal axes of discourse, created, only to be closed as gap again.
Throughout let's say there has been a focus of magical healing properties, a certain warmth, of humor, exasperation, sound in the search for the voice of voices, the word freed into sound or the sound that expresses pure joy and wonder. Some contibutors started out with almost no particular feeling about Dadaism at all while at least one other, Pickled Brains, writes
"... it is true - that growing up in Indianapolis - I didn't know artists where living beings - I thought they were all dead. And then somehow when my brother brought home a book on dada - and a high-school teacher had us pretend we were Marcel Duchamp and Rauschenberg - I felt like wow - this is 'magic' we can transform reality - and I became at the age of 17 a dadaist - and made secret magical actions in the basement - (of course a dose of TG and Psyckic TV thrown in) - it has been the forbidden fruit that has fucked up my life up until today..."
The one piece in our collection that seems very odd at first blush is "Olive-Eros", dedicated to the memory of Pauline Oliveros, her voice appearing there as she describes the events surrounding her first meeting with a male dominated composer's world. I've found this work suitable for this frame because of her essential role in haunting us with memories of where we have been and what we stand to lose to cultural amnesia brought in by down-sizing budgets for the arts and promoting the product instead of process and experience-oriented art. We should recall that Pauline Oliveros was one of the first people to introduce environmental sound to music, pioneering tape music, opening the field further; she was also the first to recognize this cultural amnesia in the early part of our century, saying that the 20th century seems to have already been forgotten & with it the paradigm of the open work, the search for freedom of expression. Her spirit obviously is not forgotten here in this Dada compilation, carrying forward the shango stick.
"...when I was thirty-two (years old), I began to set signal generators beyond the range of hearing and to make electronic music from amplified combination tones. I felt like a witch capturing sounds from a nether realm. In one electronic studio I was accused of black art, and the director disconnected line amplifiers to discourage my practice, declaring that signal generators are of no use above or below the audio range because you can't hear them... my present bulldozer has started and stopped again. A far away jet simulates a fifty foot tabla, accompanied by an infinite freeway tamboura."
-- P.O. in Audio Cultures, Continuum, 2005, pg 104
The contrarian impulses of Dada either predict or foreshadow many concerns of the entire proceeding century of art production and theory and persist into the present moment. Perhaps foremost among these is the ongoing battle between theory and the rationalizing of impulses, without actually touching them; the willful disintegration or exhaustion of language itself evolving into pure sound forms that culture has yet to find any use for, while all along preserving the private magical incantatory intentions of the dead & other invisible, yet to be named or even probabilistic sources.
Some of the sounds clips have been drawn from various video documentaries available on line. The Jean Arp poem, read so beautifully, is taken from the Bruno Art Group's "Dada on Tour" which is highly recommended. The voice of Marcel Duchamp was drawn from the 1968 BBC interview. All the manipulations and cuts in tracks 6, 8, 13 by the editor. Rights for all other pieces belong to the artists.
Special thanks and apologies to Thibault Delferiere, the only person who submitted a video and whose content cannot be uploaded to the bandcamp compilation in that form but whose audio I enjoyed enough to include. Please find the video here:
vimeo.com/210199161
If the compilation seems to end without conclusiveness, that is how I'd like it to remain. This shall be continued as new pieces arrive in the mailbox and as time allows. All proceeds will go toward the eventual publication of a physical release.
Thank you to all the artists for your works have been inspirations.
Thanks to Karolina Ossowska for the collages and life support <3
Thanks to all the listeners. Please share and enjoy and create and inspire.
Jeff Gburek
Poznan, Wilda
25.06.2017
released June 25, 2017
