The paranoiac-critical gaze: Dirty Dalí.

I finally managed to see this fascinating documentary this week. Since my TV broke down some time ago I refused to waste money buying another, partly for the reason that films such as this are increasingly rare and most of them have been shunted to minority channel BBC 4 which I can’t receive. Thanks to BitTorrent you can still find the worthwhile stuff, of course, but this often requires patience.

The Wines of Gala and of God (1977).

Dirty Dalí: A Private View was a reminiscence by art critic Brian Sewell about his encounters with Dalí and wife Gala at their home in Port Lligat in the late Sixties and early Seventies. What’s interesting about it is the first-hand light it throws on Dalí’s complicated sexuality which has been the source of speculation in biographies (notably Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí) but which is confused by the artist’s simultaneous revealing of his obsessions in his art and the veiling of his interests in public statements, not least the frequent declarations of impotence. Sewell confirms that Dalí was interested in both men and women although purely as a voyeur, and recounts how his first encounter with the artist led to his having to lie naked in the armpit of a giant Christ sculpture in Dalí’s garden, masturbating while Dalí took photographs. Sewell also examines Dalí’s affair with Federico García Lorca, the closest the artist came to a gay romance, and his subsequent relationship with Gala, which became one where the pair used the artist’s celebrity to attract delectable people of both sexes, like a pair of art world super-swingers. According to Sewell, Dalí’s physical ideal was the hermaphrodite which would possibly explain his attraction to (alleged) transsexual Amanda Lear during this time.

The Great Masturbator (1929).

As a piece of television the film struggles to fill out its running time by resorting to animating photographs, a persistent hazard for documentaries that lack the relevant raw material. All the footage of Dalí is lifted from previous documentary films including a large chunk of Russell Harty’s Aquarius interview, Hello Dali! (that camp double-entendre now seems very apt), from 1973. The overall effect of Sewell’s narrative is to add to Dalí’s already considerable feet of clay but that’s the inevitable outcome of nearly any biography; real lives are always messy. Sewell nonetheless ends by reaffirming Dalí’s principal importance as one of the great painters of the 20th century and, in an interesting side note, declares him to be the last great painter of a religious work with his Christ of St John of the Cross. A great religious artist and also one who produced hundreds of pornographic drawings, some of which are seen in the film. In art, as in the life, the contradictions are everywhere.

• Dirty Dalí at Grey Lodge
• Homage to Catalonia: Robert Hughes on Dalí

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Not before time. Thanks to Jay for the tip.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
TIM BUCKLEY
My Fleeting House
Documentary featuring rare performance and interview footage spanning his entire career

My Fleeting House is first-ever DVD collection of performances of Tim Buckley. This essential DVD features rare live performances from various television shows and interview footage spanning his entire career.

The DVD has eleven full-length songs, and three partial performances. This DVD also features insightful interviews with Larry Beckett (co-writer of many songs with Buckley), Lee Underwood (Buckley’s guitarist) and David Browne (author of Dream Brother: The Lives of Jeff and Tim Buckley).

The footage spans his entire career, from 1967 to 1974, and includes unreleased video of interaction with Buckley on The Steve Allen Show (1969) and on WITF’s The Show (1970). The footage is taken from various television programs from 1967 to 1974 right up to the time of his death in 1975. All but two of the musical clips are unreleased. As an additional oddity, the clip of Buckley being interviewed on The Steve Allen Show includes Jayne Meadows complimenting Buckley on his hair.

Despite having produced nine studio albums, three live albums, and many “best of” compilations—My Fleeting House is the first-ever authorized collection of Buckley’s visual performances. Several segments on this new collection have not been seen for over thirty years. MVD Visual has secured the best possible, first-generation video sources for the compilation, including footage from American, British, and Dutch television, and also a forgotten feature film. This DVD has the full approval of the Estate of Tim Buckley.

Buckley was an experimental vocalist and performer who incorporated jazz, psychedelia, funk, soul, and avant-garde rock in a short career spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. He often regarded his voice as an instrument, a talent most exploited on his albums Goodbye and Hello, Lorca, and Starsailor. He was the father of musician and singer Jeff Buckley, also known for his three-and-a-half octave voice, who died in 1997. Buckley released his debut album Tim Buckley on Elektra in 1966. A folk-rock album, it contained psychedelic melodies written with input from Beckett. He went on to release Goodbye and Hello (1967), Happy Sad (1969), Blue Afternoon (1969), Lorca (1970), Starsailor (1970), Greetings from L.A. (1972), Sefronia (1973), and Look at the Fool (1974).

Born in Washington DC, Tim Buckley lived for 10 years in New York before moving to southern California. During his childhood, he was a fan of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Nat King Cole, and Miles Davis, although country music was his foremost passion. He left school at 18 with twenty songs written with Larry Beckett under his belt—many of which later featured on his debut album. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black introduced Buckley to Herb Cohen, and he quickly got him signed to Elektra record company. He also met guitarist Lee Underwood around this time, who became a big part of nearly all of Buckley’s artistic endeavors.

On June 28, 1975 after returning from the last show of a tour in Dallas, Buckley snorted heroin at a friend’s house. Having diligently controlled his habit while on the road, his tolerance was lowered, and the combination of a small amount of drugs mixed with the amount of alcohol he’d been consuming all day to celebrate the tour’s end was too much. His friend took him home thinking he was merely drunk. He was put to bed by his friends, who told his wife that he’d also used some barbiturates. As she watched TV in bed beside him, Buckley turned blue. Attempts by friends and paramedics to revive him were unsuccessful. Reportedly, Buckley’s last words were “Bye Bye Baby,” delivered in a way reminiscent of the line in Ray Charles’ Driftin’ Blues. Buckley was just 28 years of age.

Arranged in chronological order, My Fleeting House traces the evolution of Buckley’s music, voice, songwriting, and backup bands.

DVD extras:
A 12-page booklet of unreleased Buckley photos
An album-by-album review by Underwood, Beckett, and Browne
Beckett (also a poet) reciting ‘Song to the Siren’

Tracklist:
Inside Pop—’No Man Can Find the War’
Late Night Line Up—’Happy Time’
Late Night Line Up—’Morning Glory’
Old Grey Whistle Test—’The Dolphins’
The Monkees Show—’Song to the Siren’
Greenwich Village—’Who Do You Love’
Dutch TV—’Happy Time’
Dutch TV—’Sing a Song for You’
Music Video Live—’Sally Go Round the Roses’
Boboquivari—’Blue Melody’
Boboquivari—’Venice Beach (Music Boats by the Bay)’
The Show—’I Woke Up’
The Show—’Come Here Woman’
The Christian Licorice Store—’Pleasant Street’

• Official Website: http://www.timbuckleydvd.com/
• Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHCccGEUMr0

Selection #: DR-4566
UPC: 022891456698
Street Date: 5/15/2007
List Price: $19.95
Running Time: 105 minutes

The riddle of the rocks
It was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous—and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dalí, the greatest surrealist of them all.

Jonathan Jones
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

I AM SCRAMBLING over the rocks that dominate the coastline of Cadaqués in north-east Spain. They look like crumbling chunks of bread floating on a soup of seawater. Surreal is a word we throw about easily today, almost a century after it was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Yet if there is anywhere on earth you can still hope to put a precise and historical meaning on the “surreal” and “surrealism”, it is among these rocks. To scramble over them is to enter a world of distorted scale inhabited by tiny monsters. Armoured invertebrates crawl about on barely submerged formations. I reach into the water for a shell and the orange pincers of a hermit crab flick my fingers away.

The entire history of surrealism—from the collages of Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone—can be read in these igneous formations, just as surely as they unfold the geological history of Catalonia.

I sit down on a jagged ridge. What if I fell? Would they find a skeleton looking just like the bones of the four dead bishops in L’Age d’Or, the surrealist film Luis Buñuel shot here in 1930?

Buñuel had been shown these rocks by his college friend Dalí years earlier. It was here they had scripted their infamous film Un Chien Andalou. Dalí came from Figueras, on the Ampurdán plain beyond the mountains that enclose Cadaqués, and spent his childhood summers here, exploring the rock pools and being cruel to the sea creatures. In most people’s eyes, this is a beautiful Mediterranean setting. It certainly looked lovely to Dalí’s close friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, when Dalí brought him here in the 1920s: in his Ode to Salvador Dalí, Lorca lyrically praises the moon reflected in the calm, wide bay.

Buñuel and Dalí shared a baser sensibility. When they composed that screenplay here, they remembered Lorca’s poem—and sneered at it. The opening sequence they devised shows a thin band of cloud crossing a full moon, a beautiful nocturne. Cut to a razorblade slicing an eyeball. Sitting on these rocks, you can just picture Dalí and Buñuel over there on the beach, watching the moon over the water, and sniggering at their hideous travesty of Lorca’s poetry.

Dalí and Buñuel filmed Un Chien Andalou in Paris, and it is admired to this day as the most outrageous 17 minutes in cinema history. More to the point, from its opening image of an eye being destroyed, to its scenes of a man with his lover’s underarm hair in place of his mouth, its priests, and that cyclist dressed as a Dutch girl, it is funny; not drily amusing in an avant-garde way, but laugh-out-loud funny. “Irreverent” doesn’t do it justice; this is blackhearted cynicism.

When we speak of something being surreal, we mean something between funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. It is undoubtedly this comic dimension that made surrealism so popular in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and still does today. It survives as living culture, not as museum art. You would strain to discern the influence of, say, cubism in contemporary creativity, but it is entirely accurate to call the fiction of JG Ballard, the comic books of Alan Moore, the cinema of David Lynch and the fashion designs of Alexander McQueen surrealist. It’s equally valid to call TV’s Green Wing or Black Books surreal; after all, the surrealists adored the comedy of their day, especially Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. Dalí even collaborated on a film idea with Harpo Marx.

Surrealism had brutal humour at its core: the movement’s leader, the French poet André Breton, published an Anthology of Black Humour. And Buñuel said he was drawn to surrealism by a grotesque joke: “I was fascinated by a photo in Le Révolution Surréaliste [the movement's journal] entitled Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest.” That photograph still fascinates. The bespectacled Péret is shouting at a black-robed priest who turns in fury and shock; what is funny is the priest’s rage, the bad temper of someone not used to being addressed in that way.

Péret was a poet, and it was a group of poets in Paris in the early 1920s who invented surrealism. André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos and their friends had been involved with the Dada movement that sprang up in protest at the first world war. The aggressive humour so integral to surrealism is a continuation of Dada; nothing could be more Dadaist than insulting a priest. Started by German draft-dodgers in Zurich in 1916, Dada was a manifestation of contempt for a civilisation whose logic led to the Somme and Verdun. It fought against this by being chaotic, childish and irrational.

The terrible massacre of European youth made people want to rediscover Eros, to assert they were still alive: skirts got shorter, flappers flapped. The surrealists were at the forefront of this 1920s sexual revolution. They also took from Dada the belief that art is dead. Dada replaced art with readymade objects such as a urinal or a bike wheel. Surrealism added its own special intensity to the idea of the “found object” by emphasising the act of finding. A surrealist object cannot be just anything: it must be something that in the finder’s eyes is magical for reasons that can’t quite be put into words. “Only the marvellous is beautiful,” says the Manifesto of Surrealism, written by Breton in 1924. You see this appetite for the marvellous, as well as sex and black humour, in Man Ray’s iron with nails stuck in it, Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup, and Joseph Cornell’s dolls preserved in fetishistic boxes; work by all three artists will be on show at the V&A’s Surreal Things exhibition later this month.

The French poets and intellectuals who dominated the surrealist movement acted like an elite revolutionary organisation that met in cafes and apartments for long, bitter debates and miniature show trials. Breton’s Manifesto cites an amazing cast of surrealist predecessors, from Dante to Poe, but most of all Sigmund Freud. It might seem that what drew the surrealists to Freud was his insistence that sexuality is the driving force of personality. Yet what intrigued them equally were the Viennese doctor’s analyses of how dream images are formed and how the subconscious causes slips of the tongue.

The surrealists were inspired by Freud to try to tap into the unconscious, to find a new kind of image. Breton called this “psychic automatism”. He was amazed to encounter the work of the artist Max Ernst, believing that, working independently in Cologne, the German had discovered through collage a new “automatist” way of making visual art. And so Ernst became the first “surrealist artist”.

So many artists followed Ernst into the movement that surrealism is now remembered essentially as an art movement. Joan Miró, in the 1920s, made paintings according to automatist principles; their perfect sense of space gave depth and reality to an amoebic creature that’s just a couple of black lines and blobs in blue space. Belgian René Magritte painted in a deliberately flat, conventional style that makes images such as 1928’s The Lovers, with its veiled, suffocating faces, all the more obscene. And yet surrealism had yet to discover its full potential. It had yet to encounter Dalí.

The reason I am at Cadaqués is, ultimately, to try to understand the most famous surrealist of all, the artist who became its moustached icon. In the hard, clear paintings that followed Un Chien Andalou, Dalí turns his unconscious into grand opera, confessing to every deviation mentioned in Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. His paintings, objects and cinema are lurid and excessive, their Freudianism so explicit it can seem a cheap put-on.

It is strange to stand here watching boys throw pebbles into the sea at Cadaqués. In Dalí’s painting The Spectre of Sex Appeal, he portrays himself as a child in a sailor suit on this same beach, looking up at a monstrous mutilated body whose pink rounded flesh is his remembered introduction to the world of adult desire. There is nothing wholesome about any of Dalí’s memories, or his vision of this landscape. One peculiarly shaped rock near Cadaqués lent its silhouette to his perverse composition The Great Masturbator.

Dalí saw no difference between the avant-garde and popular culture, and excelled at the art of sensation: when a surrealist exhibition was staged at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, it was Dalí who made the papers by giving a lecture wearing a deep-sea diving suit complete with brass helmet—and collapsing.

Dalí projected his dreams so clearly they fascinated fashion designers and Hollywood, where he worked with Alfred Hitchcock and even Walt Disney. He happily designed the lip sofas that feature in the V&A show and, in his one-man museum in Figueras, created an entire room whose furniture forms itself into Mae West’s face, with sofa lips. None of this was the betrayal of surrealism that Breton and his comrades accused him of after they threw him out of the movement in 1936, for confessing to a fascination with Hitler. Surrealism was an attempt to release “the marvellous” into everyday existence. Dalí, a clever man, saw that this connected it with architecture, which shapes our everyday environment.

His hero was the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí. At Figueras, you see Dalí’s desire to create a total environment of fantasy such as Gaudí’s rapturous house Casa Batlló. This is what Dalí’s Mae West room, lip sofa and telephone with a lobster for a receiver try to do: replace reality with fantasy, as Gaudí’s architecture does. Nothing could be more surreal. Dalí did it in a way anyone could respond to. Soon designers were making surrealist dresses, Cecil Beaton taking surrealist fashion photos. Dalí travelled far from home and, some say, lost his soul painting portraits of rich Americans. To track him back to his childhood haunts among the Catalan rocks is to discover his authentic surrealist soul.

As soon as you hit the Ampurdán plain, you start to sense how honest, how intense, an artist Dalí is. The obsessions that fill his art are all too real. Take Vermeer’s painting, The Lacemaker; when Dalí was old and rich and widely seen as a hack, he sat down to copy it in the Louvre and drew a rhino horn. Yet his fascination with this image of a woman working was perfectly real. In Figueras, there is an early painting, Woman at the Window in Figueras. Made in 1926, it portrays a girl working with her needle in front of a view of the Ampurdán hills. Vermeer’s Lacemaker itself appears in Un Chien Andalou.

The journey east from Figueras to Cadaqués takes you across an immense open space that, with its tall sky and fringe of hills, is instantly recognisable from Dalí’s 1930s paintings Spain and Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War). For Dalí, this becomes the plain of La Mancha across which Don Quixote wandered in his madness, a dry and dusty space in which he sees Spain’s tragedy. But it is only when you descend to Cadaqués that you realise something crucial. Whatever else he is, Dalí is Spain’s landscape artist. Like John Constable, he was in thrall to his “early scenes”. It is the persistent reappearance, endlessly metamorphosised, of the rocks and cliffs of this unique coast that anchors his art in a real, physical context of memory and longing. I collected a horny crab shell in a rock pool at Cadaqués; looking at Dalí’s portrait of the surrealist Paul Eluard, I realised a lion’s head in the painting is based directly on the shape of this crab.

Freud liked to compare his method with that of an archaeologist who digs down to expose layer upon layer of buried pasts all existing in the same mind. This image of textured depth could easily be a description of surrealist art. In Ernst’s paintings of swarms of barbarians, savage forests and lost cities, you get that archaeological sense of texture, just as you do in Giorgio di Chirico’s melancholy classical cities, where it is always a dead moment in a Mediterranean afternoon.

Surrealism is about time. It is about the tantalising and unreliable nature of memory, about the melting fabric of experience. The rocks at Cadaqués are remarkable not only for their biomorphic shapes at a distance, but even more, their layered, crumpled texture up close. These rocks are remains of a vast lava flow from an ancient volcano. Flowing between north and south, the white hot river settled in a series of layers that were then blasted, eroded and exposed along the seashore. The rocks are not only fractured in strata but perforated by huge gas bubbles made when the stone was hot and flowing. Telling the earth’s time in their apparent fluidity, they are Dalí’s soft watches.

I took that horny Dalínian crab shell from the sea at Cadaqués, along with a sea urchin, perhaps related to the one on Dalí’s shaved head, in a photograph that makes him look like the inventor of the mohican; but by the time I got them home, they were just a pile of dust in my bag. Surrealism as we experience it today—when we speak of a surreal advert, a surreal sitcom—is just the dust, the shards of Europe’s last great revolutionary art.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883 and www.vam.ac.uk. Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or will feature in Dali & Film, at Tate Modern, London SW1, from June 1 to September 9. Details: 020-7887 8888 and www.tate.org.uk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Left: Igor Wakhévitch
and feathered friend.

Continuing the Francophile theme, I felt that now was a good time to plumb the mysteries of the enigmatic Igor Wakhévitch. Who? Well… in 20th century music there’s strange and there’s weird and then there’s off-the-wall unclassifiable which is the place where we have to file Igor’s compositions. After half a lifetime spent trawling record shops for unusual music these albums had somehow managed to remain off the radar until a CD reissue set, Donc…, appeared courtesy of Fractal Records and a friend with similarly outré tastes (hi Gav!). The obscurity of these remarkable recordings can’t solely be due to Monsieur Wakhévitch being French; Richard Pinhas, Bernard Szajner and (of course) Magma, have been given enough attention over the years.

So what does this stuff sound like? Thankfully the redoubtable Alan Freeman tackled the problem of describing the albums in Audion (reproduced below), a task I would have found rather daunting. Docteur Faust is probably my favourite, a crazily eclectic and doomy album which lurches from rock freakout to contemporary orchestral/choral to electro-acoustics and back again. Imagine the witch cult from Rosemary’s Baby jamming with Alpha Centauri-era Tangerine Dream while Peter Maxwell Davies and Amon Düül 2 slug it out in the background. The clincher is a great cover by French comic artist Philippe Druillet.

One other notable album that the Donc… collection omits is the 1974 recording of Salvador Dalí’s opera, Être Dieu. Dalí wrote the libretto in 1927 with Federico Garcia Lorca but the piece wasn’t recorded until Wakhévitch provided a score for it. The result is pretty much the same as Wakhévitch’s other work, with the added bonus of the Surrealist master declaiming and frequently shrieking over the music.

For more information about Donc… and Igor Wakhévitch see the Fractal Records review page.

Alan Freeman reviews Donc…, Audion 40, August 1998

Donc… innovation!

An unclassifiable talent, Igor Wakhévitch could be seen as the French equivalent of someone like Ralph Lundsten, or an explorer like Franco Battiato, a pioneer who proliferated in the Seventies with a series of highly original and unusual albums.

Igor Wakhévitch’s roots are obscure, though his name implies he is obviously of Russian ancestry, and apparently his father was a celebrated theatre set-designer. It was obviously in the setting of the theatre that Igor Wakhévitch saw new potentials in music. He was something of a genius as a young musician. By the age of 17 he had already won the first prize for piano at the Superior Conservatoire in Paris. But, not content to stay in the classical world, he moved on. His academic qualifications served him well. In 1968 he was working at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (then directed by Pierre Schaeffer) with access to some of the most advanced studio equipment around. There he learnt his craft as a sound designer, as a master of studio trickery and musique-concrète techniques. The perfect foil for his own musical talents, and as a way to play with the possibilities of sound and other musical forms. This fertile environment, at studios that were regularly visited and/or used by the likes of Pierre Henry, François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, et al, was the ideal springboard for the creation of a new form of music.

Pierre Henry had already become celebrated for his works combining rock and electronics in the early part of the Sixties, and particularly his music for the avant-garde ballets of Maurice Béjart. Igor Wakhévitch saw this as his oeuvre, being fascinated by the new forms of psychedelic rock that were making shock-waves in France. With the moniker “Ballet for the 21st Century” he worked with Béjart in an attempt to turn this underground pop culture into high art. Inspiration came from Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, and in fact Igor Wakhévitch worked quite extensively with Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine for a while.

At this time, Igor Wakhévitch also worked together with Terry Riley learning special tricks about tape delays and looping techniques. All this experience melted into the pot of what became a unique music, with a focus that lay in processing instruments, usually in a melodic framework, blending in rock and diverse classical forms, bringing different unlikely musics together, often in most perplexingly odd ways. Igor Wakhévitch thus became established at Pathé Marconi Studios and also did production work for other studios and labels, and as a result got in touch with the French up-and-coming home-grown rock scene. The seeds were set for a radical and unique new form of music.

Logos (Rituel Sonore) (1970)
With such a background, and a concept based on Greek legend, Logos (Rituel Sonore) amounted to a revolutionary creation for a 1970 release. Even if you know works like Pierre Henry’s The Green Queen, which was weirdly comprised of rock and avant-garde musics fused together, you’ll still be in for a surprise. Here we have a soprano singer, strange orchestral textures and percussives (drums, cymbals, gongs, etc.) blended with effects and processing. As the ominous percussion sets off with drum-rolls and ritualistic tension, the mood is of a looming anticipation of what is to come. here we go through phases of weird swirling effects, vivid reverb and atmosphere. The tension becomes overpowering, yet we are led on. Here we have the key to Igor Wakhévitch’s sound, in a tension that becomes awe-inspiring.

The climax of the whole opus comes with “Danse Sacrale”, an extraordinary psychedelic instrumental performed by Triangle (one of the earliest French psychedelic bands) that has to be heard to be believed. A great band in their early days, this goes to prove that Triangle were not just Pink Floyd cum Traffic copyists. This all amounts to a unique fusing of psychedelia and the avant-garde, and an awesome experience!

Docteur Faust (1971)
This is the most obscure album of the lot. I’d never hit it before this release. Aptly in tune with the title, it is also one of the strangest. Docteur Faust was created for a festival in Avignon, and was later choreographed. Though, the mind boggles as to how anyone could dance to this. “Full of fury and energy” to quote a reviewer at the Avignon festival, it certainly is!

On one hand this is a more balanced blending of classical and dramatic musics, yet also it is much more extreme. There’s a wealth of sonic collage, dense musique-concrète, and bizarre musics that collide and fragment against rock structures. There’s also moments of pure classical avant-garde moving into ensemble pieces feeling like Henze meets Ligeti or Xenakis. The use of electronics is really vivid too. There are no rules or boundaries in what makes up a Wakhévitch composition! The rock elements return throughout this album and, although not credited, I would guess that again Triangle members are featured. The guitar reminds of Alain Renaud, and percussion is quite distinctive, backed-up with weirdly treated organ. Although a short album, it is so engrossing and weird that it would be too-much if it were much longer.

Hathor (Lithurgie du Souffle Pour la Résurrection des Morts) (1973)
Dating from 1973, shortly after working with Terry Riley on his Happy Ending soundtrack, there’s an obvious big advance in Hathor (Lithurgie du Souffle Pour la Résurrection des Morts), with greater use of keyboards, synthesizers, and looping techniques. But Hathor is no mere synth album, far from it, but is Igor Wakhévitch’s most powerful opus. Making use of the Paris Opera choir (no-less), along with weirdly processed vocals, his usual off-the-wall electronics, and even drum/sequencer drives unprecedented in any form of music before this. It’s another sonic roller-coaster ride, in which we experience an ominous bellowing God-like voice heralding something visionary.

As with his previous albums, Hathor contains a number of separate tracks that continue or segue from each other, amounting to what feels like one work. Here, we have surging electronic and percussion drives, a climax sparked off by lightning, thunder-crashes, a wealth of weird contorted voices, and much much more. Here tension gives way to intense power resulting in a kind of dark Vangelis—on the edge! With a weird Gothic choral number and another electronic rock opus to follow Hathor really flies! Only the closing coda offers relief, with a reflection on obvious Terry Riley influences, and hinting at the albums to come.

Les Fous D’Or (1975)
This is quite simply, the weirdest of the batch! Scored for ballets by the much celebrated avant-garde choreographer Carolyn Carlson. A big step away from rock, this album is the challenging start to the second phase of Igor Wakhévitch’s career. A very avant-garde opera in parts, starting with a warbling soprano and cello, you’d never guess where this album is going to take you. Synthesizers (in looping patterns) take us close to the feel of Ralph Lundsten at this time, which is not so surprising as Ralph Lundsten had also worked with Carolyn Carlson. Tape collage is also used extensively, along with ritualistic horns (sounds like Jac Berrocal), waves of sonic slurry, and a total disregard for conventional musical continuity. Admittedly, it took a long while to really get into this one!

Nagual (Les Ailes de la Perception) (1977)
Although a concept in its own right, Nagual (Les Ailes de la Perception) again features music for a Carolyn Carlson ballet. Arguably, it’s the closest to Ralph Lundsten, as a largely cosmic work, with looping synthesizer patterns, putting melody against dissonance, moving on from the darker edge of the “new-age”. The format is different to all the previous albums, in that this has 12 tracks (ranging from 30 seconds to 8 minutes) and features musics unheard of within the Wakhévitch oeuvre before, like piano works of a weirdly construed type (reminding of Ron Geesin) and what feels like a bizarre Celtic jig amongst them. The mood is generally mysterious and enigmatic, largely based around cycling patterns of keyboards and other instruments. The range is very diverse and surprising. But, having said that, typically Wakhévitch it is—as an uneasy balance that’s engrossing—still so enigmatic and fresh!

Let’s Start (1979)
This final album, from 1979, was created for the Batsheva Dance Company (for the festival of Jerusalem), and musically is the sum of many ideas from the two albums before, but in a more atmospheric framework. The grand opus here, the 21-minute “Let’s Start” itself, is a treat for those into the pioneering works of Terry Riley and Steve Reich in that this combines use of delay lines on keyboards à la Riley with phasing techniques on voices first explored by Reich. Not really systems music though, as the development of the work is not predictable, even the ending is a surprise where confused phrases organise themselves into a logical sentence! Extremely clever, indeed! The remaining works are Igor Wakhévitch at his most restrained and subdued, largely synth/keyboard based, and feel more like a hybrid of Deuter and Peter Michael Hamel, with a very film soundtrack type of feel.

As far as I gather Igor Wakhévitch sees Let’s Start as a return full circle to his roots, though such a progression or connection is hardly logical. There are characteristics and stylisms that one picks up on in Igor Wakhévitch music, but they are very hard to pin-down. Though I had heard rumour of other works, this seems to be his entire published oeuvre. It all amounts to a bizarre and fascinating trip with one of the true revolutionaries in new music, and a definitive set collecting it all together. The set is presented in a small red box, including a poster (with the album sleeves) and a 24 page booklet (in French, with a number of pictures), along with the 6 individually sleeved CDs. The original Igor Wakhévitch LP releases, despite being on major labels like EMI and Atlantic, are nowadays all pretty rare and collectable (most are reputedly worth £30+, with Docteur Faust reckoned to be worth £100).

In the vestibule, candles are arranged in the shape of the constellation Aquarius.

Hotel Tressants in Menorca
ArchitectureWeek
21 January 2004

When Italo Calvino wrote his 1972 novel about magical cities based on places he imagined Marco Polo might have visited, he was probably not thinking specifically of the Spanish island of Menorca (Minorca).

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary… And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons… – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

But when Menorquin architect Fernando Pons Vidal and Italian designer Chiara Fabiani conceived a “new” hotel in the renovation of old townhouses on that Mediterranean island, they had Calvino’s Invisible Cities foremost in their design imaginations.

The eight-room hotel was recently completed in the ancient town of Ciutadella, on narrow streets near the cathedral. It was built from two adjacent 200-year-old houses. But the site has been occupied far longer than that. During excavation, archaeologists found human remains thought to date back to ancient Roman times.

In renovating the aged structure, the architect retained old stone arches and vaults, but also brought in modern-day steel – though with substantial difficulty, given the restricted site.

Tressants (three saints) takes its name from the three streets that surround the hotel in the heart of the city. From the outside, the building resembles a rather ordinary townhouse for this part of town, with old terra cotta roof tiles and repaired facades of local stone. Once inside, however, the differences are striking.

Modern finishes and hand-painted frescoes were applied to recall both the city’s history and Calvino’s tales. In the reception area, candles are arranged on one wall in the shape of the constellation of Aquarius. There’s a window in the floor for viewing the illuminated pool below. An interior staircase is topped by a cupola with skylights.

Down a few steps from the entry are the main salon with a handmade floor-to-ceiling fireplace and the “comedor” dining area with arched ceilings. In the vaulted cellar, the spa features a 7- by 46-foot (2- by 14-meter) pool with an overflow edge along the full length. It is illuminated by color-changing, fiber-optic lights.

Throughout Tressants’ interior are fixtures of natural materials, designed by local craftsmen. Custom ironwork was created for the doors, balconies, and terraces. The rooftop terrace offers views of the cathedral, the old town, and the neighboring, more heavily touristed island of Mallorca.

Guest Rooms by the Book

On the middle floors of the five-level, 11,000-square-foot (1000-square-meter) hotel are the eight Calvino-inspired guestrooms. They are each decorated differently, representing one of the “Invisible Cities.”

For instance, Calvino writes:

“The traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down… the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms’ interiors with ceilings and floors…”

The suite representing the city of Valdrada features doors with blue underneath and yellow above, with stars in the children’s room, and a large painting behind the bed.

Also:

“The city of Zenobia… though set on dry terrain, it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks…”

“…If you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.”

Artistic features in the ceiling and floor of Zenobia room reflect these sentiments symbolically, while the level changes and balustrade reflect the Calvino description literally.

In 1993, Menorca was declared a Biosphere Reserve, giving the entire island an environmental protection status. With architecture, environment, historic rock quarries, and colorful festivals, it is a special place to visit.

More pictures of Tressants (which is/was up for sale) here and here.

The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969

How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture being disturbed by noise. This reveals a lot more detail should you wish to scrutinise a favourite scene like the single dolly shot in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell makes a circuit of the “disc-bootick” before chatting up a couple of devotchkas.

The location as it is today, rendered safe and banal courtesy of McDonald’s.

The scene was filmed in the then very trendy Chelsea Drug Store on the corner of Royal Avenue and the King’s Road, London SW3. Since the whole film was shot using the same approach as Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville, with selective views of the contemporary world standing for a fictional future, there’s no attempt made in this scene to disguise any of the cultural products of 1971.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties A Clockwork Orange was unavailable on video or TV in Britain due to a bizarre embargo by the director. This means that Kubrick fans like myself who were too young to have seen the film in the cinema had to rely on bootleg videos of depressingly variable quality that did no justice to John Alcott’s superb photography or to the great soundtrack. Especially frustrating was spotting Tim Buckley’s Lorca album on one of the shelves in the record shop scene but not being able to make out what else might be there. This might seem like a rather fatuous complaint but there aren’t many places you get such a pristine snapshot of a British record emporium in the early Seventies. More to the point, you have a chance here to enjoy some sly Kubrick humour. So what does the DVD reveal?

Before Alex appears we can see two albums in the racks, Livin’ the Blues by Canned Heat and The Time is Near… by the Keef Hartley Band.

When Alex wanders in he passes a large rack of albums, some of which elude my occasionally sketchy knowledge of Seventies’ rock. I can recognise these: 1) U by The Incredible String Band, 2) Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, 3) As Your Mind Flies By by Rare Bird, 4) Get Ready by Rare Earth and 5), the one that started it all, Lorca by Tim Buckley.

Alex passes a booth stacked with magazines and newspapers. The one at the lower right is a popular film magazine of the time, Films and Filming.

As he passes the other side of the magazine booth he picks up a magazine and leafs through it as he walks. I’d never paid much attention to this before until I was stepping through the scene again and recognised the cover as a copy of Cinema X (The International Guide for Adult Audiences), a rather scurrilous title that existed solely to show people stills of nude scenes in any films currently doing the rounds. This is Kubrick’s first joke since Cinema X is exactly the kind of magazine that would attract Alex’s attention (even though he discards it a few moments later). The only reason I recognise the magazine logo is because I have a single copy, volume 4, no. 6, which has as its main feature……. A Clockwork Orange.

Alex leafs through the mag and passes a poster for Ned Kelly, a film starring Mick Jagger who’d sung about the Chelsea Drug Store only a couple of years before. No idea how I recognised this, it was a lucky guess.

Two more Kubrick jokes and a possible appearance from the man himself. On the left there’s a copy of the soundtrack to SK’s earlier film 2001: A Space Odyssey at the front of the album racks. On the right there’s a gentleman who looks remarkably like the director did at the time, browsing what appear to be classical records since there’s a Deutsche Grammophon cover visible lower down on the rack. I’ve not read a refutation anywhere that this isn’t the director so I’ll continue to consider it so, not least because right by his face there’s another joke, the sleeve of the Missa Luba album by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. This is an album of gospel songs sung by an African school choir that was released in 1959. The reason it’s there? The ‘Sanctus’ song from side two was played throughout Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant film If…. which featured Malcolm McDowell in his first major role playing another figure of rebellion. It was that role that landed him the lead in A Clockwork Orange so we can see Kubrick giving a nod to the earlier film here.

Alex ditches his Cinema X and passes a copy of the first album by Stray.

Arriving at the record booth we can see a number of albums on display. On the upper shelves there are copies of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles and another copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. In the racks at the front there’s a more prominently displayed copy of the 2001 soundtrack (in a different sleeve) next to John Fahey’s “fake” blues album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.

Lastly, that big graphic swirl above the booth is the label from Vertigo records.

Places like the Chelsea Drug Store were the magical homes of music before the corporations moved in and turned high street stores into warehouses flogging albums in bulk. In some ways A Clockwork Orange serves less now as a warning of the future and more as a window on a world that’s disappeared.