The cassette tape is called Diese, Nichts & Solche and was released as FRAG55 on the Hamburg label Fragment Factory. We’ve previously received and noted a few artistic gems from this imprint, including tapes by Ice Yacht and the impressive conceptual statement Musique Inconcrète by Italian genius Torba. Unlike these, Eckloff’s tape is neither approachable, nor at all easy to decode. The disturbing, visceral collage image on the cover is one barrier to the unprepared civilian, harking back to the sort of gore and nastiness we used to get from industrial cassettes in the 1980s, but it’s also evidently informed by a knowledge of 20th-century visual art – whispers of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Bellmer, and George Grosz could all be traced in its torn contours, but nothing takes us past the initial shock of that image, the stark reminder of our own mortality.

Diese, Nichts & Solche may contain three new compositions across its two sides; the interior of the cassette I hold isn’t at all informative, and the Bandcamp page streams just two tracks. All we’re told is that Eckloff’s work is positioned at the “intersection of concrete music, language and field recordings” and is pretty much dedicated to reflecting, or expressing, the “sheer absurdity of our times”. Absurdity, I can dig – it’s one of the words I invariably reach for when I try and account for the bizarreries of Column One. The B side, which I’m streaming first today, could be read as an avant-garde sex tape – a female voice gasps and pants orgasmically, a male voice chuckles with ghastly triumph, and there’s a rhythm to the work that could only be described as “coital” – bouncing bedsprings assisted by beats from a set of bongoes. You’ve rarely heard such a joyless depiction of the sex act; emotionally cold, futile, grotesque, and mechanical. In fact the mechanical grind carries on much longer than it should, hardly bringing us any closer to a moment of jouissance. I don’t want to hear that hollow masculine chuckle ever again; it’s like some sadistic hunter from the 19th century savouring the death of his quarry the fox. This is followed by a shorter piece, spoken-word (mostly in German) with very strange sound effects collaged in; a didactic lecture of some sort perhaps, illustrated in an academic conference room from Hell with the world’s worst audio-visual presentation. A variety of speaking voices pass through this radio broadcast from another dimension, and the calculated genius with which Eckloff assembles his materials is considerable. He’s not interested in creating a messy jumble of disconnected edits, and instead juxtaposes his fragments with the clinical skill of a mad scientist. At this point, I may be grateful that I don’t understand German; it might drive me mad too.

Switching my attention (and shattered consciousness) to the A side, I can now see why it tripped me up on first audition; small, disconnected sounds scoring very high on the what-is-it factor, as if depicting an imaginary performance piece too extreme even for Otto Muehl, punctuated with some appreciative bleats from a contented sheep. We’re strapped into a barber’s chair to suffer the diabolical haircut (hear the shears clicking away), and voices arrive, and drift in and out, including the man who advises us we will “drift off into nothing” who also appeared on the B side. Surreal – to the point of sheer horror. Nurse With Wound never came close to achieving this degree of unhinged psychosis. With this tape, Jürgen Eckloff is indeed realising his plan to “deconstruct language”, and he does it by undermining the spoken word with these strange intrusions of sound art, field recordings, and very sharp editing. He doesn’t get his results through noise, shock, or outrage; rather through stealth, quietly sapping the listener’s sense of normalcy with his understated yet profoundly odd sounds. Evil genius at work.

Eckloff is also a film-maker. Seems he’s been making strange art movies since 2005 – some of them can be seen on YouTube. A lot of them appear to be quite short experiments, but Die Versuche des Naum Kotik is a full-length 92 minute item. At first glance you might think this is a genuine documentary about a very obscure artist or creator of some sort, but in fact the whole thing is a very clever hoax, albeit an extremely convincing one. Part of the hoax is to claim the movie won a prize at the World Film Carnival in Singapore for the year 2021; there is such an award, but this film was never nominated. The film-maker “Kärma Burg” is simply an alias for Eckloff, and the technical crew (also alias names) are friends and members of Column One. (The best fake name here is ‘Eyn Lump’.)

The highly confusing story is presented as a layered riddle of sorts, puzzling over the provenance of found photographs and cryptic inscriptions on them, expressed as a series of quasi-documentary narratives and anecdotes to advance the fiction about the creations of Naum Kotik Junior. Along the way you’ll be treated to some memorable black and white footage, showing Kotik wandering in the forest in between extreme close-ups of the bark of a tree (with a toothbrush in his mouth). Or the artist working at his desk on a mysterious project. All the voiceover material is served to us painfully slowly and spoken in a monotone, perhaps so we won’t notice that none of it makes any coherent sense. There’s also the sound and music contributions from ‘Robot Schaminski’, furthering our sense of descent into an absurdist and grotesque fiction. Not to mention the episodes of stop-motion animation using old 19th-century engravings, like a darker take on the hermetic movies of US artist Harry Smith. Again, plenty of 20th-century art and cinema quotations to savour, including Svankmajer for sure: Eckloff’s approach to stop-motion animation of dolls, metal, card, newspaper, and wooden objects is drawn from the same well of dark poetry and grim fatalism. There are also hints at a sexual perversity that would have made Hans Bellmer blush.

I personally found this curio somewhat repellent and horrific at first, but I’m slowly coming to appreciate the sheer dogged oddness of it all, the relentless way the creator follows every turn of his twisted imagination to the bitter end. The clever part of the hoax has been to refer to the real-world Naum Kotik, a Russian crank scientist who in 1908 published his findings about the non-existent N-Ray, some form of invisible electro-magnetic radiation or energy field that could emanate from the human mind or body; although completely nonsensical, it preoccupied the brains of French scientists for a while. As the fictitious grandson, Naum Kotik makes not a few references to this force and how it influenced his photography and film-making. In the end, the point of this film is not to take us in with its deception; rather I expect it’s intended as another metaphor, or series of metaphors, for what Jürgen Eckloff is doing with his work – particularly the part concerned with the deconstruction of language. Here, he seems to be doing his level best to subvert several targets and cultural assumptions at once – history, fine art, cinema, the science of physics, and common sense itself. Prepare for a bewildering ride, an intense well-crafted psychological melee from this latterday Surrealist.

From 2nd November 2022.

Harvey’s preoccupation with much of his work is to do with how we perceive history; his contention is that we focus on visual and textual data, and overlook the auditory information. This idea informed his Noisome Spirits project, where (using his imaginative powers) he created a convincing audio portrait of 18th century Wales, starting from the writings of a Non-conformist minister and its vivid descriptions of the rugged countryside. When it comes to coal-mining in Wales, Harvey points to the “engravings, drawings and paintings” that have conventionally been sourced to tell us its story, noting how what began as a cottage industry grew into a “large and complex means of production” after the mid 19th-century. But what about the “distinctive acoustic character” of coal-mining?

Enter the 1930 film from British Movietone, South Wales Colliers Go Down the Mine, which is the primary source used by Harvey in creating this work. The date is significant; we didn’t have sound cinema until about 1927, and it was only in the mid-1920s that electrical recording equipment had been brought to the point where making an accurate sound documentary of work in a coal mine was even technically possible. Thanks to the work of the AP Archive, it’s possible to view this movie on YouTube. John Harvey waxes lyrical about its documentary qualities – the direction, the editing, the narrative skills – and he has used the soundtrack of the working environment as raw material for this record. Not just machinery (hydraulics, drills, wheels, cages) but also the voices of miners, and musical interludes sampled from the documentary chapter headings, all appear in some form. Interestingly, British Movietone seem to have adopted a different approach to their contemporaries Pathé News; Pathé tended towards spoken-word editorialising, often supplied by an announcer with a plummy voice, subtly “directing” the audience’s perception and standing open to a charge of patronising. Conversely, this South Wales Colliers film allows the miners to speak for themselves; the voiceover is provided by the pit overman, someone who actually knew the work, describing it in their own words. That said, the story on the film is mostly told in pictures and sound.

Deploying his typical skills and methods – collage, time-stretching, overlays, reverse tapes, varispeed, and digital synthesis – John Harvey has carefully created a highly simpatico sound-portrait of his chosen subject, one that is arguably very true to the original film, the work of the miners, and indeed true to a part of the country in which he grew up and knows very well. The results are not only beautiful to listen to, but can have the effect of stirring up a nostalgic feeling for the past, even if we’ve never been to Wales. I mean there’s a deep connection to the subject matter here, and it makes the record somehow more direct and accessible than his Aural Bible projects, which (much as I love them) might seem somewhat abstracted in comparison. John Harvey even adds a closing note to bring us up to date on the realities of fossil fuel extraction and its significant contribution to climate change, reminding us that this “romantic attraction” to the past does need to be framed in the context of the 21st century environmental crisis. (24/10/2022)

Quite different to the above is Seven Prayers for Stephen Chilton: Requiem (GENCD006). With his Aural Bible projects, Harvey was dealing with complex and wide-ranging ideas and themes, to do with religion, the spoken word, and printed texts; here, it’s all about one person, a former student of his whom he knew personally, and who committed suicide in 2014. As such, it’s obviously a deeply personal statement, and at one level I feel it would be too intrusive to even comment on it. There’s a religious dimension, an aspect that might connect this release to the Aural Bible works; Stephen Chilton was a painter who realised his faith through his art; he regarded his work as a “visual representation of prayer”. There’s no doubt Chilton was extremely devout. His work led him into “solemnity, exultation, lament, certainty, and doubt” as he tried to magnify God with his art. There’s a musical dimension too; Chilton listened to records of devotional works by Gorecki, Arvo Part and Thomas Tallis, and produced a series of paintings as direct responses to these musical pieces, as he worked hard to select suitable colours and hues to match the specific pitches in the music.

John Harvey was Stephen Chilton’s art tutor at Aberystwyth University and evidently became very close to the work. The record we hear is Harvey’s simpatico – that word again – attempt to restate the colour and light of a Stephen Chilton painting in sound. I refer you to the booklet notes, where he indicates the precise and methodical ways in which he achieved this “sonification” of visual information. In a way, perhaps we could regard this as the culmination of a lengthy and mysterious process – the music of Tallis and others inspires Chilton, who later recasts his spiritual insights as fine art paintings; later still, Harvey recasts these paintings as layered, abstract sound art. If there’s any point to my banal observation above, it’s just to point out the purity and beauty of the distilled music that you’ll hear on this CD. The inclusion of an unknown choir singing and sampled from the radio on ‘Prayer 4’ should bring you to the point of tears, and if it does, perhaps this record can be regarded as a success. But it’s also tragic, and deeply melancholy; as further proof of his compassion, John Harvey has dedicated this work “to all men who are challenged by mental health issues or have chosen to leave this life prematurely”.

Images of Chilton’s paintings appear on all six panels of the digipak, and there are his diary extracts reproduced in the notes; again, making me feel I’m intruding on private grief. Tremendous honesty in this release, as the creator faces up to a difficult subject and doesn’t flinch from the hard work of expressing his grief in a heartfelt and appropriate manner. A real achievement. (30/05/2022)

John Harvey’s Intersections site

The Sound Projector radio show,
originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM