Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Review: Eric Lunde's The fear of appearing monotonous prevents us from recording expressions which, upon such occasions, are all very apt to resemble one another

from Vital Weekly 1018 (Feb 2 2016):

Throughout all the times I came across the name of Marquis de Sade I never felt inclined to read any of his books and as I understand Eric Lunde that is probably a wise decision. Back in 1988 he released a cassette called 'De Sade' but immediately withdrew that release and I am not sure why. Among the texts found in the re-issue presented here that's something that didn't become clear. Maybe it was because the original was on AWB Recording, a perhaps not entirely correct label? Blake Edwards now re-releases this, with a bunch of original liner notes and new ones and Lunde complains here that De Sade is quite boring, 'dead on arrival'. At the same time he also acquired a very cheap biofeedback machine to record responses while reading De Sade. On the first piece of music it is a male 'engaged in sexual activity' (masturbating) while listening to a reading of De Sade and on the second piece a  female's 'biofeedback reading whole listening to this broken retelling of Champvilles' tales, while reading the text out loud and while reading the text in silence'. The booklet has some hilarious interview (no doubt a selfie) with Lunde about all of this and it supposed to [be] embarrassing ('did you or did you not masturbate while recording this?'), which is perhaps not so embarrassing. This is all classic Lunde material. The voice, the degradation of  the voice, ever a central focus in the work of Lunde is present here. None lead led to any particular sexual  arousal here, but I thought of this as another fine work by Lunde, presented with a lot of context about the project, then as well as now. Maybe a bit more focussed on the text, I'd say than some of his other work, but that's quite all right for a change." (fDW)