For several reasons (some of which will be detailed below, others left for/to your personal discovery and/or interpretation) the 80th unPublic, in hindsight, was a truly fascinating experiment. It started out as an unfinished unPublic. Or rather: it began as an unPublic that was still-to-be-finished. Additional documentary pieces were performed and recorded by Yoko Miura in Fukuoka (福岡市), Japan, (two of them together with Koji Tsutsumi on double bass) using a number of slightly different 'hearings' of the recordings we made in the Espace Vitet in Paris, France on Friday February 25th.

Drastic times, drastic measures.

Yoko and Koji finished their contributions on August 17th 2022, and hence completed the second of the two linked spiralling sequences that make (form-at) this 'musico-sonic pamphlet' into sort of a double-stranded ubuesque cabaret: a bitter-sweet "Manifeste".

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(An earlier version of this text is available on Medium@SoundBlog.)

10 min read 🤓

"Manifeste"

march 13 - august 20, 2022

« Tout délire est expansif » ( ° )
« L'odeur numérique des choses flotte entre les arbres » ( °° )

Much of past century's artistic avant-garde bloomed on the ruins of war, denouncing our civilisation's diabolically destructive ways and rejecting the heritage of culture and tradition that made such contorted bloodiness come about: for all human history basically is but a continuing sequence of stories of the few exploiting and extorting the many. Being cruelly, profoundly inhuman while selfishly driven by greed for power and wealth, unfortunately, has proven to be an all too universal human trait.
History did not end.
It just took a turn for the worse.

At least since the days of our first modern world war (a little more than a hundred years ago), artistic avant-gardes longed, yearned and reached for the magic that would allow brewing a potion to re-invent mankind. A cleansing, a cutting of umbilical cords with our cultural pasts; a means for erecting a different-from-the-classical art, a carving out of virginal (or less tainted at least) paths into next futures.

Idle dreams, idle promises, promises. Artistic speculation never did and never will put an end to human madness. Probably that is a something only 'nature' can and will do. Some day. Meanwhile though, it did and does give us a number of interesting and entertaining ideas to pick up, to reflect upon, to spread and to enjoy, inter bella.

It was—par hasard—a mere day after the (already longish looming, but still sort of shockingly sudden) onset of a new War of Worlds ( * ), on Friday February 25th, that Marc Plas, Claude Parle, Arno Bisselbach, Léonore Boulanger, Julie Coutureau, Adèle Beaulieu, Gersande Schellinx, Rébus and I, gathered in the Espace Vitet (kindly put at our disposal by France Vitet) in the rue Pelleport in the 20th arrondissement for the 80th in our series of speculative unPublic events.

This particular unPublic event was intended to be largely voice-based, and inspired by a book that Magister Rébus picked up last summer in the book box ( ** ) in the small park next to La Générale, facing the 14th arrondissement's town hall: a copy of Isidore Isou's Manifeste pour une nouvelle psychopathologie et une nouvelle psychothérapie, that was published a little over half a century ago, in february-march-april-may-june 1971, as a special edition (N^os 18-19-20-21-22) of the 'Lettrism' monthly. A 1000 copies were printed.

Twenty-five years earlier, in the after-war Paris of 1946, Isou (1925-2007, a Roumanian immigrant, born Isidor Goldstein), a youngster as brilliant as he was self-indulgent, had declared the lettrist 'revolution'. Lettrism's aim was no less than total artistic and cultural renewal, a transformation of society through a new method of creation, la Créatique, and through this, a new articulation of all branches of knowledge, called Kladology.

(As an artistic movement lettrism failed to 'take off', not in the least due to Isou's monumental self-importance and -esteem, that led him into battles of frogs and mice with critics, avant-garde competitors, but also with many of his often longtime and dedicated collaborators and followers.)

« ... Words are the walls of a vast maze where one gets lost forever ... How many corpses in the maze of the dictionary? » [ " les mots sont les murs d'un vaste labyrinthe où on se perd toujours ... Combien de cadavres dans le labyrinthe du dictionaire ? " ]
« Our vocabulary is full of real corpses, a cemetery of men who died for words » [ "...et leur vocabulaire est plein de cadavres réelles, un cimetière remplie d'hommes qui sont morts pour des mots " ] ( *** )

It is no longer feasible, no longer possible to trust in words. Killed by propaganda, our languages' words need to be decomposed, deconstructed, atomised.

Isou's and lettrism's earliest and first 'attacks' were therefore directed at the art of poetry, doing away with the 'word walls', canceling semantics by only keeping the letters. And their sounds.

( « Destruction des MOTS pour les LETTRES [...] Il faut révéler le tout par les lettres [...] CRÉER UNE ARCHITECTURE DES RYTHMES LETTRIQUES [...] RENDRE COMPRÉHENSIBLE ET PALPABLE L'INCOMPRÉHENSIBLE ET LE VAGUE; CONCRÉTISER LE SILENCE; ÉCRIRE LES RIENS. » ((Destruction of WORDS for LETTERS [...] The whole must be revealed by letters [...] CREATE AN ARCHITECTURE OF LETTRIC RHYTHMS [...] MAKE THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE AND THE VAGUE COMPREHENSIBLE AND PALPABLE; CONCRETE THE SILENCE; WRITE THE NOTHINGS.))     [IAUNPEUNM] )

"E, P, A - Pa - PEP - [MERA (HKC)] - EPA - E, P, A - PA - MERA - (HKC) - LP - > - (S) (I) (J)- p -P - gP - S - J - EP - ≥ - T - P - E, P - EP - MERA - [HK (A,PH, S,T,Q) C (C,L,P)] - > L, P - E(S) - (1) - (J)] - PH - p - P EP - MA (anracr) - > - MA - (apracr) [ (MERA) (HK°) ] - p - p - EP - MA - MA - a p r acr - MA - apr - acr "

Rébus brought another book that he recently picked from the same 'book box': a copy of Des Nombres et des Lettres, French translations of works by our favourite Russian cubo-futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov.

Also Léonore Boulanger spoke and sang extracts from Khlebnikov's work. But she also brought Andrei Bely, Jerome Rothenberg, Antonin Artaud, Michael McClure and Tristan Tzara.

Julie Coutureau dug letters words and phrases from an interview with Silvia Ferrara—on her history of the invention of our writing—in an edition of the French 'Historia' magazine, and sampled bits of Gertrude Stein's Le livre de lecture.

Gersande, Adèle and myself, but also Léonore and Claude, sampled from the couple of extracts from the Manifeste pour une nouvelle psychopathologie et une nouvelle psychothérapie that I had printed for all to use.

« You are in the hypotenuse, while I am in the margin.
I replied
- Our hypotenuse is in an infinite increase and it will end up encompassing and embracing you. »
[ "Vous êtes dans l'hypoténuse, tandis que moi, je suis en marge.
Je lui répondis
- Notre hypoténuse est dans un accroissement infini et elle finira par vous englober et vous embrasser." ]
...

« Language results from the creations of all areas of culture and life, and to know all the possibilities, all the degrees of the circumference of language, one must have knowledge of all these areas [...] »
[ "Le langage résulte des créations de tous les domaines de la culture et de la vie et pour connaître toutes les possibilités, tous les degrés de la circonférence du langage, il faut posséder la connaissance de tous ces domaines [...]" ]

Marc Plas provided a colourful selection of texts, play- and dj-able on tape or vinyl, like—to name but one—a record on which the first ever (possible alien abductions and intergalactic adventures by former, long gone and erased earth-based intelligences excluded) 'starman' Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968).

In the more than an hour long continuous session in the spacious Espace Vitet, all these letters and words mingled with the music, sounds and phrases of Claude Parle's accordion, the noises made with voices, a variety of small tools, tape players, a mange-disque and an old record player (all among the things manipulated both right- and left-handedly by Arno Bisselbach, accompanying his vocal sounds) and the dictaphones brought along by Rébus and myself.

An un-finished unPublic

This is the temporary - unfinished - cover for uP #80, which was the one available online from March 13th until August 19th 2022.

Yoko Miura will finish the un-finished unPublic

That was another promise made ... and this one was kept! 🤡 ... As of August 20th 2022, we may write:

Yoko Miura & Koji Tsutsumi completed the un-finished unPublic

The documentary digital album for this 80th unPublic consists in two entwined threads, each of which (the pair one {uP's 418,420,422,424,426 and 428} and the impair one {uP's 419,421,423,425 and 427}) is one among many different possible hearings of the ubuesque cabaret that this "sonic pamphlet" became (with no intended meaning except for your ... own 🤔 ? )

The first one is based on a juggled balance between the three stereo recordings that were made, each with a different 'hear' on the sounds that were produced in the largish space (often by performers moving around with thieir sound-source). That particular mix was cut-up into six separate files, which in (almost) chronological order appear as the even numbered tracks: uP 418, uP 420, uP 422, uP 424, uP 426 and uP 428.

The second thread is based on a cut-up into five separate files of a differently balanced mingle, which, again in (almost) chronological order, will appear as the uneven numbered tracks: uP 419, uP 421, uP 423, uP 425 and uP 427. We sent this set of files to Yoko Miura in Fukuoka, Japan.

Yoko has been contributing as a performer to the unPublic series many times, from its very first edition onwards. She has been staying with us in Paris and touring Europe each year for a couple of autumn months since the early noughties, a tradition by default, that two years ago suddenly was interrupted because of the corona pandemic. Unless new disasters will prevent her from doing so, Yoko will be again 'live' with us and elsewhere in Europe for at least two months this autumn. To bridge that gap from now to then in time, Yoko proposed to perform and record in her hometown Fukuoka each of the coming five months along with one of these five 'uneven numbered' tracks that we recorded at the Espace Vitet on February 22nd.

She recorded the first of these, uP 419, on March 5th.

On April 2nd, Yoko recorded the second of her collaborative tracks, uP 421.

On June 18th, Yoko recorded the third of her collaborative tracks, uP 423.

...

On August 17th, Yoko, together with Koji Tsutsumi on double bass, recorded the fourth and the fifth of the collaborative tracks, uP 425 and uP 427, thus completing the up to then unfinished 80th unPublic.

... Each of the additionally recorded tracks replaced the until that moment empty audio file provided by the unPublic #80 Bandcamp digital download. Who downloaded the album was notified of such new additions and invited to update their files.

The album hence was finished on August 20th, when the tracks uP 425 and uP 427 were uploaded, and the 'unfinished' cover was updated.

...

When we started the recordings for this edition of unPublic, we had just learned of Russia's launching a 'special military operation' against its neighbour Ukraine (haha, so much of our world has slipped into administrative moulds and mechanisms totally like those of Orwell's Oceania, with so many not even noticing nor—worse—caring...). That event had begun one day before, on February 24th. We finished this uP about half a year later, with the insane war still raging, and seeing how tha general state of things in this world's getting worse. Day by day by day.

...

("The world is in a difficult situation due to the effects of the coronavirus and war," Yoko wrote in an email earlier this summer, "but the only thing I can do is continue to make good music by carefully building up my daily life."
Yes Yoko, yes, do do. It makes our world a so much better place to be. No joking.)

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Read the first version of the story on Medium@SoundBlog ...

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notes __ ::
(°) Isidore Isou - Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique (Gallimard, 1947) [IAUNPEUNM] [ ^ ]
(°°) "The odor of things is numerical", reads a line in the English translation of 'Plane Fifteen' ("[...] some songs in soundwriting [...]") of Khlebnikov's poem 'Zangezi'. (Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works Volume II, Harvard University Press 1987) [ ^ ]
(*) For those who wonder what will be the difference between a 'war of worlds' and a 'world war: there is of course no difference other than one of phrasing, a choice of words. [ ^ ]
(**) 'Book boxes' are the small cupboards installed here and there in town by individuals, (neighbourhood) communities or even the municipality, allowing people to put and take books. The printed matters that some want to get rid of, quite regularly turn out to be another's treasured random find. [ ^ ]
(***) (French) spoken in Isou's classic 'chisel' film Traité de bave et d'éternité ('Treaty on Venom and Eternity', 1951) [ ^ ]

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