K Requiem. Duration: 67:34 (99 tracks!).
Participants: F. J. Ossang (1956) [text excerpts from Alcôve Clinique] – Thierry Madiot [bass trombone] – Pierre Gillet [trumpet] – Philippe Le Gris [tuba] – Philippe Dibetta [bass saxophone & tenor saxophone] – Jean-Claude Galoppin [bugle] – Artus [barrel organ] – F. J. Ossang, Dobra Sankowicsz, Piotr Zygan, Gregorz Zygan [voice] – Bernard Mertz, Vincent Labidos, Stéphane Sabourdy [Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles] – Frédéric Acquaviva [organ, electric guitar, electric bass, percussion, mixdown]
The front cover of the CD is very much in time with the present, like the Intifadan of Palestine, with this paving stone revolutionary lashing out at his Israeli oppressor och occupant.
This serves to create a certain mood, a certain artistic venomousness, virulence, walking the edge of contemporeana, politically, philosophically. French-speaking people have an advantage over us ignorant non-French listeners when traveling though K Requiem, as I believe the decomposition and reconstruction of F. J. Ossang’s text that Acquaviva has achieved is a hilarious experience on the morphemial level. On the other hand, perhaps the non-French have easier access to certain melodic, compositional, bulk- and chunk aspects of the progressing work, as we have no words, really, to screen off the bare transformations of sound. Anyhow, to me the best sound poetry is the kind that really succeeds in breaking down language into pre-morpheme sounds of the oral cavity, returning us to a pre-conscience kind of un-language, in a world of intuitive tendencies where our nerve-ends are, as Allen Ginsberg says, “connected to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”… Perhaps Frédéric Acquaviva can make this connection happen in K Requiem!? In any case, having the text in front of you when listening – at least one time – can be a rewarding occupation, giving you an insight into the construction of the shifting fields of vision, the sounding levels shooting in and out below and below each other, in a layer of words, sentences and instrumental sounds.
Acquaviva has determined that this work is not a text set to music, but music AND text, or text AND music, happening simultaneously. While listening I realize that Acquaviva, whether he would agree or not, is a link in a tradition, which in many ways truly is French. France has some of the most successful sound poets, and in the French contemporeana there is to be found just the intellectual delight of the vulnerable situation, the act of walking the razor’s edge, mentally or physically or artistically, like here in a lingual challenge with music, or a musical challenge with language. I can’t really se this happening any other place than in France, but I don’t know if this has any significance outside of, or beyond that observation. Perhaps it’s just because the French are better livers of lives than most people, because I know that Swedes, for example, are the best diers of deaths that there are, conversing everyday with each other about how the weather is, or how the weather will be, without being meteorologists or farmers…
There is a peculiar freedom of thought in French contemporary art, and Frédéric Acquaviva’s K Requiem is no exception. He is an intermediary of this sense of freedom and lingual/musical ingenuity in this work.