The Viral Tempest
After publishing my decades-spanning cassette retrospective Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) in late-2021, Chicago-based Pentiments Records has released HERE in early-2022 my Viral Tempest double vinyl
LP and Bandcamp tracks.
The audio on the first disk I made in collaboration with Andrew
Deutsch: OrlandO et la tempete viral symphOny redux
suite. It uses an anonymous reading of Virginia Woolf's Orlando as
a type of sonic signature that my virus-modeled artificial life audio material
(adjusted from the first movement of my 2006 viral symphOny:
the enthroning) reanimates. The second piece, pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague,
serves as a brother suite to the first and instead uses Antonin Artaud's
controversial recorded performance of his radio play To
Have Done with the Judgement of God as the sonic figure.
The LP is in an edition 200 with a full color gatefold jacket,
full color labels, an 11x11" 12-page full color exhibition catalog
documenting the paintings featured in my 2020 Orlando et la tempte art
exhibition at Galerie Richard (Paris) and an 8.5x11
insert featuring an interview with me by S.K.G. Noise Admiration regarding
my art of noise philosophy. The tracks were mastered and cut
by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates
& Mastering.
Excerpt from Pentiments Records Statement
While one can refer to Nechvatal's original viral symphOny recordings
as a preceding statement on open-ended process and immersion into detrital
dynamism, this pair of sibling suites can be understood more specifically as
elaborating on the rhizomatic re-conceptualizations
of identity and figuration within this dynamic space that feature prominently
in the series of virus modeled a-life paintings paired with these audio suites
and, generally, in his philosophy of noise art. The folding of the de-subjectified subjects of Woolf and Artaud into a
supra-individual, boundless space of chaotic viral energy reflects a process
and practice wherein, to quote Nechvatal, one of the
most important characteristics [. . .] is its sense of encompassing being
within a field of vibratory enshroudingbut an intertwined embossed shrouding
that places being at odds with closed, clich, visual-audio signals and
resituates us within open vibrancy. The particular matter of gender fluidity,
invoked by the Woolfian character of Orlando and
his/her preternatural condition of man-become-woman, is transfigured into
supplementary sensual material which Nechvatal
embraces and intensifies further within the context of societal and
environmental storms, for in his words, Storms have no gender and mean full-blown
fluidity.
A turn towards radical flux
and immanence and a noise-oriented rethinking of the Deleuzoguattarian body
without organs describes just as faithfully the more immediate the
sonic character of the works, replete as they are with relays of relativized
intensities, variations in speed and affect, creative-destructive
reconfigurations of language and signs, the passing through of various genre-becomings (spoken word, computer music, noise, shoegaze,
ambient), and so on. Through this teeming synergy of his audio, visual and
textual works, Nechvatal ultimately aims to present
the beholder with a new and more expansive way of theorizing and experiencing
the fraught relationship between the cultural-political and the sensate, one
that chooses to perplex and problematize with imaginative pleasure rather than
reduce, parse and codify through cohesive allegiances. As he writes, I have
come, counter-intuitively, to see the style of cultural noise as the necessary
art of todayprecisely because it does not cave into the supposed need for
immediately legible spectacle. Indeed, it restores art's responsibility of
resistance.