Wikipedia defines Home: "A home is a place where a person, family, or group of people live together. A home usually acts as a place to sleep and store personal property, and contains sanitary facilities and a means of preparing food".

I am happy whoever uploaded this tidbit of information placed "usually" as a precursor to the brief examples of activities that take place within a domestic dwelling.

It occurred this the week that 3 of my cultural obsessions of late all used 'home' as a basis for the work.

These being:

Graham Lambkin / Jason Lescalleet · The Breadwinner CD (Erstwhile Records)
Frans Zwartjes - The Great Cinema Magician 2DVD (Moskwood Media)
Jose Donoso - The Obscene Bird of Night Book (Verba Mundi)

For what it's worth, i will give a brief rundown of all as these 3 items which have provided me many fine head scratching moments over the past 7 days or so...

Graham Lambkin has been mentioned in previous posts, having made one of the more bewildering releases of 2007. I was looking forward to this collaboration with Lescalleet being another contemporary experimental human who released a recording which has long stored itself in my memory, this being the 2006 release "The Pilgrim". As is to be expected "The Breadwinner" further explores our duo's obsession with foreign sounds in the everyday.

Subtitled "musical settings for common environments and domestic situations" the instrument of choice is Lambkin's own apartment which results in creaks, groans (the apartment itself?), objects within (spoon hitting glasses, food frying?) along with individuals within (snoring?). I could be wrong on all of these counts as most of the sounds are unidentifiable, either obscured by aesthetic choice or lost in obtuse fidelity. This release has none of the classical samples that made Salmon Run such a curve ball but strange atmosphere lurks throughout this disc. These are crude domestic recordings where the sound of the mic touching a surface is not removed or disguised and the editing is far from sophisticated in the traditional 'musique concrete' sense. It's a curious approach which is situated far away from the rest of the field recording crowd. The sounds collected are at once familiar and foreign. The first track "Listen, The Snow Is Falling" is a matter fact reference to a natural event but the actual result is less than straightforward. A record (opera?) is playing somewhere in the back ground, the sounds increase in volume artificially (?), there is a sense of this 'natural' event being something else altogether and this displacement is the key to why the 'music' these 2 are making is so curious and compelling. The listener is taken on a journey throughout the house exploring the sonic nuance within, the result is a perplexing collection of wonderful odd.

Keith Whitman made a comment about this being an unusual release for Erstwhile records (a predominately improv record label) due to it's precise construction and post production. Erstwhile head honcho Jon Abbey then pointed out this not necessarily accurate and subsequently listed many releases which relied on studio manipulation of pre-recorded wares on his label. I think Keith maybe missed the angle whereby this seems unusual for Erstwhile being that it is so crude in it's recording and execution. There is no gloss and no sharp moves here, just a simple example of unusual sounds creating off-kilter atmosphere's based in a domestic setting. This 'no-fi' - 'low-tech' approach seems out of place amongst the recordings of Sachiko M, Keith Rowe etc...

Maybe this lacks the immediate charm of 'Salmon Run' but this is not to say I won't be throwing this baby on the player to try and work how, what and why.

LIVING (Frans Zwartjes, Netherlands, 1971, 16mm) "Living has an uneasy, indefinable atmosphere. This strange swaying of the camera and the music that keeps going on and on…"

I admit to not having heard of Frans Zwartjes prior an entry posted on the consistently rewarding "Esotika Erotica Psychotica" blog. I was instantly curious and managed to get hold of a copy this week. The down side is that 1 disc in a 2 disc set does not have sound, a problem soon to be resolved (i hope). Disc 2 provided enough exposure to Zwartjes output to once again place upmost faith in Esoterica's explorations.

Most of Zwartjes films are shot 'indoors', a single camera following human activities within these simple settings. Unusual camera movements dominate the form taking the viewer on a dizzying act of voyeurism. A couple of the films feature activities evoking the work of the VIenna aktionists, but whereby our Austrian friends were about embracing life and absolute freedoms to reach a higher plane of existence (or some such waffle) Zwartjes characters approach a level of detachment that is at once uncomfortable and completely engaging.

How Zwartjes managed to capture such an intensely strange atmosphere in mundane dwellings is quite an achievement. The films usually feature himself and his wife (he was a teacher at a university and yes the dodgy cat fell for one of his students whom he thought very beautiful and subsequently put her in all kinds of strange scenario's in these films). The film itself looks beautiful, again this is raw, with no gloss, kind of like a photocopy which is 2 generations removed from the master. It provokes an otherworldly feel. Zwartjes music is incredibly powerful and bleak, organs, de-tuned guitars all add to a mood of di-orientation and uncertainty. It's good freaky shit and we recommend you check it out. I will not say so much as you, dear reader, are much better off seeing these with no prior knowledge to the details. Suffice to say they are pretty stunning examples of 20th Century experimental filmaking.

The films should really be seen outside the failings of youtube as opposed to embedding these here is a short excerpt of our man Zwartjes noodling around with a piano:




"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters". - Henry James Sr
Intense shit written by way of advice/warning written by Mr James to his sons back in the day.

"In the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales there lived thirty-seven female inmates, five orphans, and a nun, Mother Benita, who looked after them. One of the young orphans, a fifteen-year-old girl called Iris Mateluna, became pregnant, and the old women in the Casa became obsessed with the idea that her pregnancy was to be a virgin birth".

The Casa (house) in Jose Donoso's "The obscene bird of Night" is the only mainstay in a story which throws the reader through a variety of convoluted plot lines and schizophrenic first person narratives (at times a male character, a doll, a dog, sometimes in the came chapter). Despite the complexity and deliberate means of shifting the reader through a variety of perspectives this sucker is actually easy to follow and is a pretty darn engaging head fuck indeed.

The book's plot has been described as such:

"For many years, Don Jeronimo Azcoitia and his wife Inés are unable to produce an heir. Humberto Peñaloza, Don Jeronimo's secretary and the narrator of the story, is among the few witnesses of the monstrous existence of Boy, the couple's eventual child. With the help of Humberto, Don Jeronimo hides boy away in a walled community of freaks collected from circuses and street corners. His goal is to raise Boy in an atmosphere in which he will never learn to recognize his own deformities as abnormal. The experiment fails, and grotesquely. Humberto is transformed into a deaf/mute named Mudito and inhabits a decaying Casa with a handful of decrepit nuns and wayward orphans. Mudito is further transformed into an old sexless nun himself, then an infant, and finally returned to a womb of sorts. The shifting persona of the narrator (who addresses his story to a series of women), the jumbled chronology, and the mutability of legend, memory and folktale are among the many halucinatory qualities of the novel. The whole is nothing short of astounding, while the individual sentences (in this translation) are individually beautiful".

Donoso was also completely unknown to me until a lazy day browsing the interweb i stumbled across somebody, somewhere singing his praises and simply had to follow this up. It took awhile to get this book, none of the 'reliable' stores here in London had this and amazon uk was out of stock and unsure when it would get again. A day trip to Brighton of all places lead to a quick stop by the local 'Waterstones' which not only had this on display on a table but also had the last 4 books i had read on the same display, somebody out there is mirroring my explorations in this seaside town!

This book is so off my personal radar that i have gulped it up in record time. The style shifts from traditional, almost mythological prose to contemporary gutter trash aesthetics so swiftly and convincingly that it is hard not to marvel at Donoso's headspace when putting this sucker down. It's often freakish and always obsessed with dirt, blood, lying, cheating and various other 'wrongs'. The Casa is a haven whereby corruption, greed and general malpractise has rendered this abode disgusting and almost uninhabitable.

"Home" is a strange concept at this point in time, not only as I am on the other side of the world to that which i am most comfortable and familiar but my immediate surrounds at this point in time seem very temporal. The concept of a firm base is abstract at best. Wikipedia goes on to discuss the psycological impact of home on a human:

"Since it can be said that humans are generally creatures of habit, the state of a person's home has been known to physiologically influence their behavior, emotions, and overall mental health. For example, in the introduction to the film Patch Adams, home sweet home, the concept of "home" is compared to the human need for peaceful sanctuary, the absence of it thus leading to restlessness. Such restlessness, as can be seen by that particular case, may lead to depression and, ultimately, to a loss of sanity" !!

Lambkin, Lescalleet, Zwartjes and Donoso have all managed to express their own version of "restlessness" whereby the "peaceful sanctuary" is ignored in favour of exploring the uneasy aspects of 'home'. I am not sure a loss of sanity has entered into this fray, but it's nice to indulge in such troubling works based around what is traditionally a comfortable setting.