Category Archives: Kathy Acker

A while ago I got the request to post the Project 91 cd, one I don’t have but the artists where familiar to me and I knew I had them somewhere and couldn’t remember where, and forgot about it. Now with moving and the second request by William, I finally found them, there on the Project One lp. This is a strange album filled with sound and text manipulation, spoken word pieces and experiment ambient to ambient noise. Strange and quit wonderful. Barry Anderson was born in New Zealand in 1935 and died in Paris in 1987. He was classically trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music. He founded The West Square Electronic Music Ensemble in 1973 and helped found and chari the Electro-Acoustic Music Association of Great Britain [now Sonic Art Network] in 1980. Later he worked extensively at IRCAM in Paris where he was instrumental in realizing the electronic part of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera “The Mask of Orpheus”. Kathy Acker (Karen Alexander) (18 April 1947 – 30 November 1997) was an American experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, and sex-positive feminist writer. One of the leading experimental writers of her generation. Acker’s formative influences were American poets and writers (the Black Mountain poets, especially Jackson Mac Low, Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs), and the Fluxus movement, as well as literary theory, especially the French feminists and Gilles Deleuze. In her work, she combined plagiarism, cut-up techniques, pornography, autobiography, persona and personal essay to confound expectations of what fiction should be. She acknowledged the performative function of language in drawing attention to the instability of female identity in male narrative and literary history (Don Quixote), created parallelism in characters and autobiographical persona’s and experimented with pronouns, upsetting conventional syntax. For Esplendor Geométrico we would have to go back to 1978 to find the origins of one of the most innovative and risky proposals of the Spanish electronic – industrial scene, and one of the few with international repercussion. In those days, a History student (Arturo Lanz), a prison officer (Gabriel Riaza) and a graphic designer (Juan Carlos Sastre) were forming part of a weird band called El Aviador Dro y sus ObrerosEspecializados whose, with a look near to Devo, a corporative – futuristic – revolutionary ideology and a music influenced by Kraftwerk, Pere Ubu,The Residents, the synth-pop of the moment and some industrial drops, would become one of the milestones of the Spanish movida madrileña in the early 80′s, and the first Spanish tecno-pop band, founding one of the first indie labels. But before they would become famous in the country, Lanz, Riaza and Sastre left the band in 1980 after releasing two 7”, due to the serious internal discrepancies with the rest of the collective, and quickly organized their own band, which they baptized with a name taken from a futuristic poem: Esplendor Geométrico. Andrew Lewis WALES, which acts as a focus for the creation and dissemination of (born 1963, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire) is a composer, principally of electroacoustic music. He read music at the University of Birmingham (England), graduating in 1984, and subsequently studied composition there with Jonty Harrison, completing a doctorate in 1991. He was one of the original members of BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre), and throughout the Eighties and early Nineties worked with them on many electroacoustic concerts and events. In 1993 he joined the staff in the School of Music at Bangor University (Wales), where is Professor, Head of Composition and Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios. He also directs Electroacousticelectroacoustic music in Wales an beyond. He works in a variety of media, from electroacoustic and acousmatic music to works for conventional forces (chamber, vocal, orchestral) with or without electronics. Robert Anton Wilson was the co-author, with Robert Shea, of the underground classic “The Illuminatus! Trilogy”, which won the 1986 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. His other writings include “Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy”, called “the most scientific of all science fiction novels,” by New Scientist, and several nonfiction works of Futurist psychology and guerilla ontology, such as Prometheus Rising and The New Inquisition. Wilson, who saw himself as a Futurist, author, and stand-up comic, regularly gave seminars at Eslan and other New Age centers. Wilson made both a comedy record (“Secrets of Power”) and a punk rock record (“The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy”), and his play “Wilhelm Reich in Hell” was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. His novel “Illuminatus!” was adapted as a 10-hour science fiction rock epic and performed under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Great Britain’s National Theatre, where Wilson appeared briefly on stage in a special cameo role. Robert Anton Wilson was also a former editor at Playboy magazine. Anyone any info on The Heights Brothers ? Z’EV is a conceptual artist, dancer, musician, scholar and poet, Stefan Weisser began playing the drums at age 4. Moving to New York City from San Francisco in 1979, and adopting the name Z’EV, his work with performance/noise percussion broke new ground and drew the attention of rock symphonist Glenn Branca, dancer Simone Forti, guitarist Rudolph Grey and just about everybody related to the downtown scene. These recordings from the early nineties were created in New York with the assistance of long-time friends and collaborators Wharton Tiers and Glenn Branca. Anyone some info on Peter Shyjka ? Project One was released on vinyl by The Produkt Korps ( PKLP 010) in 1987. Tracks 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11 where re-released on the Project 91 cd , Concrete Productions ( CPRODCD 013) and Hyperium Records ( 39100532 41) in 1991.

Tracks:

1. Barry Anderson – Electroacoustic Fanfare
2. Kathy Acker – Extract From “The Empire Of The Senseless”
3. Nocturnal Emissions – Shankini Nadi
4. Esplendor Geometrico – Zhyra Mansi
5. Boyd Rice – There Was Never A Moment When Evil Was Real
6. Unknown – Untitled
7. Andrew Lewis – Sonnerie Aux Morts
8. Robert Anton Wilson – Calvi, The Pope And The Brotherhood
9. The Heights Brothers – “You’ve Got To Laugh…”
10. Z’EV – Where Were You
11. Peter Shyjka – Ladbroke Grove, Sept. 23rd 1986

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