Got sent a package of goodies from Jürgen Eckloff in November from his home in Großwoltersdorf in Brandenburg. Inside there’s a cassette tape, a BluRay of a movie, a number of postcards and promotional handouts, plus one sticker. I use the word “goodies” as a euphemism, as my flesh is beginning to crawl already. German genius Jürgen Eckloff was a member of Column One, that perplexing art project active 1991 to 2016, and we’ve heard some of his solo work on the 90% Wasser label, for instance Angeflantschte Fugenstücke which evidently puzzled me deeply in 2016 and I’m still not sure I’m any the wiser after all this time. Eckloff’s work may perhaps occupy some undefined area between installation, performance, and sound art; whatever ends up on the grooves does not entertain, nor does it explain itself. Yet I bring to mind a poignant French phrase “un intrus s’est glissé parmi nous”, as I try to account for how this non-musical sound insinuates itself into our membranes. Today’s blog post may make more sense as a visual one than a verbal one, so I will try and vous en met plein d’images to make my point.
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.