Multiple talents have come together to realise One Or Several Tigers (CELLULE 75 CELL-9), a true oddity which I am at a loss to describe. It’s performed by Vindicatrix, a London-based performer named David Aird who made some electronica releases for the now-defunct Mordant Music label, but the actual text was composed by Ho Tzu Nyen, a multi-media artist from Singapore who does films, installations and performance pieces. Lastly, Marc Richter of Black To Comm mixed the album.
Nyen is one who does his homework and researches historical texts (and other texts) for some of his pieces, and One Or Several Tigers appears to represent his take on the history of Malaya before it was colonised by Britain. Nyen has looked into the significance of the tiger in Malayan mythology; I found it fascinating to learn that there was a belief system about the spirit of tigers, in which human beings could change into tigers, including magicians, but also beggars and kings. When the British arrived in the later 18th century (Singapore wasn’t founded as a port until 1819), there followed a period of “ecological upheaval” – now there’s a euphemism – in which many Malaysian tigers were hunted and killed. So far I’m pretty much following Nyen’s narrative here, but it’s a strong one; he ends on an optimistic note, indicating that the Tiger will rise again, because it’s a “master of metamorphosis” and it will continue to terrify the hearts of pale English settlers, who later paid the price for their mistakes during the Pacific War.
There’s plenty more to the story, including Nyen’s audio interpretation of a historical engraving from 1865 which he has seen; the British went on a road survey trip into the forest in 1835, only to be attacked by one of our stripey friends; see the cover of the album for a realisation of this incident. What’s great about this anecdote is that the tiger didn’t eat any of the human beings in the party (most of them were native prison labourers anyway, so free from any taint of colonialism), but opted to smash the theodolite, the technology being used for this surveying work.
So far so good – enter David Aird in his Vindicatrix guise, who presents this complex work using spoken word and disquieting electronic music, which is mostly what you’ll hear on this disc. But he is also part of the theatrical installation version, itself a rich mix of shadow puppets, CGI, animatronics and motion capture; Vindicatrix’s face and body were brought into play, and we can get a taste of all this from the visuals printed full-colour inside the booklet. Most of these images depict a very English missionary-colonialist figure of the 19th century fleeing in terror from the tiger, or recoiling from its leaping body; other images show the rise of the tiger, its transformations into impossible shapes, at one point even assuming the very costume and hat of the colonist. The final image showing our feline friend leaping across the face of the sun is memorable; both as CGI kitsch, but also as a strangely stirring reminder of its magical powers.
I want to enjoy this record a lot more. The stumbling block for me personally is Vindicatrix, whose mannered and lugubrious voice is all over this record, projecting forth from murky ambient backdrops or recorded layers of his own spectral moaning. I appreciate it’s a theatrical work, but he just sounds like an actor in a Radio Four drama. There’s a lot of very dense text to be digested, but Vindicatrix doesn’t really put much effort into conveying its meaning, or emotional truths, although admittedly he does get pretty worked up during the ‘Weretigers’ track. It’s very evident there’s a lot at stake in Ho Tzu Nyen’s layered work, in which he asks deep and poignant questions about history, yet Vindicatrix seems to be doing his best to obscure it, make it less then completely intelligible. On the other hand, given the theme and subject matter, you could make a case for saying that a disembodied, ghostly type voice is perfectly suited for the mystical human-into-tiger spirit element, and that the atmosphere of uncertainty is also entirely appropriate for this backwards-look at Britain’s colonial past. In that context, the pronounced English accent of David Aird adds extra poignancy.
All told, here’s a unique-sounding work with plenty of intellectual content, and I guarantee you won’t have heard anything like it…outside of the far reaches of David Tibet’s catalogue, that is. From 21st November 2022.