Heiner Goebbels - Shadow / Landscape With Argonauts (1993)

Tracklist

01. Landscape
02. Ye Who Read
03. Shall I Speak Of Me
04. 2 Dollar
05. I My Sea Voyage
06. The Year Has Been A Year Of Terror
07. The Stars Are Cold Signposts
08. Over Some Flasks
09. From An Unknown Catastrophe
10. A Dead Weight
11. Yet We Laughed
12. No Arrival No Parking
13. Or The Hapless Landing
14. And Lo
15. In The Back The Swine
16. And Then Did We

Heiner Goebbels doesn't shy away from the unusual conception. In SHADOW/Landscape with Argonauts he uses two texts, one by Edgar Allan Poe, the other by his frequent collaborator, the German playwright Heiner Muller. The former is sung, quite beautifully, by Sussan Deihim and backed by a band including Canadian avant guitarist Rene Lussier and noise drummer Charles Hayward. The Muller text, a surreal combination of quasi-Homeric myth and contemporary political screed, is giving multiple readings by passers-by on the street in Boston. These readings are often rather humorous, as the pedestrians grapple with difficult pronunciations, bizarre imagery and offensive content. When one gentleman comes across the line "My grandfather was an idiot in Boeotia", he doesn't get far enough to mangle the last word, but instead says, "No, I can't say that. I love my grandfather!" The stumbling readings, overlaid by passing car engines and sirens, are interwoven with the more strictly musical content, generally separate but sometimes overlapping. It's an interesting idea and succeeds to a point, but one might have wished for a more thorough (and hence chaotic) integration of the two worlds. As is, it's worth a listen for fans of experimental spoken word-music projects.

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