various
CD in regular jewel box
sirr
2004
“Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern writing. Remembered from the few distant relates and a clandestine photograph taken in 1922 as being tall, thin and cadaverous in appearance — Blanchot chose reclusiveness and isolation and refusal, but his spectre lingers on over contemporary thinking. Blanchot has avoided interviews, photographs, and academic affiliations; public knowledge of his life consists of a handful of minor anecdotes and of inferences built around the appearance of his books and essays. Sirr invited a hand full of sound artists to deal with his ‘obscurity’.”
incldues:Brandon Labelle/Maria Nilsson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Julien Ottavi, Steve Roden, Paulo Raposo, Christof Migone and Stephen Vitiello.
track: thomas sat down and looked at the sea 7’37”
- reviews:
NOLI ME LEGERE … TO MAURICE BLANCHOT (CD by Sirr-ecords) This is the second compilation by Sirr-ecords, dedicated to someone. The first one was ‘Sul – Dedicated to Chris Marker’, a french director. Here the dedication goes out to Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) a French writer, about whom nothing much is known since he didn’t give interviews, lectures or even photo’s. It’s hard for me to tell what his writings are about, since I didn’t read any of it. The title ‘Noli Me Legere’ means ‘Do Not Read Me’ and that ‘problematizes the border between writer and reader, and between writing and reading, and beyond its enigmatical interdiction, it forces one to take a hermeneutic shift and abandon all traditional exegesis’. Seven different musicians pay hommage this writer and his writings. One would assume a lot of spoken word on this disc, but that’s not the case. Only in the Brandon Labelle/Maria Nilsson piece there is spoken word (Stephen Vitiello uses field recordings of a demonstration). Other pieces have faint typewriter sounds or use the eyes (!) as source material (Christof Migone’s beautiful perceptive piece). Steve Roden’s piece is the most musical one, using a guitar and humming and Toshiya Tsunoda recorded a cicada chorus resonating a bottle inside a bottle. A lot of these pieces deal with how things are perceived, but each from a radical different point of view. This varied disc makes it altogether interesting, also if Maurice Blanchot doesn’t belong to your daily literature. (FdW)
frans de waard, vital weekly
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