Limited edition of 200 copies. Fantastic sound-poetry piece by Hartmut Geerken, coming with an auto-photograph taken by the author during a four-week long isolation research program held by the Max Planck Institute in a bunker (!) in Andechs, Germany. Holiday Records presents Orpheus by Hartmut Geerken.
Fantastic sound poetry piece by Hartmut Geerken restringing the "Sun
Harp", the Ukranian bandura that Sun Ra gave him in 1971 when he visited
Egypt for the first time. The acoustics of his manual workings emerge
without any esthetic intention: the bandura's voluminous resonating body
forms the reverb of the room. Each manual action and each contact of
the tuning key with the wooden body is "reverbed". The instrument
creates its audio space. A mythic dream play is evoked: the myth's space
of reverb. An ear ready to absorb, hears the labor pains of voice and
string ahead of language and music. A human voice in search for language
and thus for communication. A string instrument in search for sound and
thus for music. Based on this phonemic pre-space, words do rise only
sporadically. Through certain techniques of vocal chords the phonemes
move close to the meditative Indian Dhrupad-singing, as well as to
lunacy and disturbance. Animal languages, signals, shepherds' calls,
silvered drum-language, ham-boning, calls, litany, subconscious
voicings, sirens: the search for Eurydike and the search for the
origin of letter and syllable, out of the breath. Besides one single
"superimposition" no further mounting, no computer-generated sounds, no
digital gimmicks, no remix or art mix do exist in this live-recorded
dream play
