The Katharos Foundation was a collective of audio-visual artists and musicians from Tilburg, The Netherlands, established in February 1986. They used performative, conceptual and multi-media aspects in their work which incorporated transgressive elements. There were different musical guises of which a notable one was the industrial Sluagh Ghairm. That band would later turn into the tribal techno act Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia which would gain both domestic and international fame. Some band members were apparently part of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.
During the phase of the Katharos Foundation exhibitions and concerts took place a.o. alongside bands like Étant Donnés, Coup de Grace and Zombies Under Stress. The Katharos Foundation also functioned as an imprint releasing a number of cassette compilations during their short existence. All in all they can be viewed as another group of industrial culture representatives in The Netherlands.
Καθαρος - Emanation: Treasure The Fertile Soil In This Barren Land, And Receive is a compilation that brings together the different acts under the Katharos umbrella. It displays industrial electronics, home recordings, live recordings and performance sounds. It came with a large booklet with artwork which unfortunately is not included here.
To bring in some music from other realms I think it's nice to start this blog-year off with a longer piece of music that creates a different listening experience than let's say a cassette compilation.
El Diario De Jonás was a multi-disciplinary soundwork from 90's Spain that was written and imagined by the artists, scholars and music composers José Iges and Concha Jerez. At the end of the 80's they started collaborating on a series of projects called "Media Interference" that were combinations of audiovisual pieces, crossmedia concerts and performances.
In line with these artworks the piece El Diario De Jonás was created in the 90's with contemporary experimental musicians Belma Martín (voice), Pilar Subirá (percussion) and Pedro López (live electronics). Martín and López were founders of the Madrilenian CEDI Institute for improvisation and sound-research and published a magazine on music called Hurly Burly during the 90's. The musicians also released music on the Spanish Modisti label that tried to operate on the intersection of music theory, politics and free music expression.
El Diario De Jonás was recorded live on 27-9-97 at Las Cuevas de Canelobre (caves of Canelobre) in Busot, Alicante as part of the 13th International Festival of Contemporary Music of Alicante. The release was supported by the Counsel of Mallorca. Partially performance, partially soundscape and partially sound-poetry (in Spanish and French) El Diario De Jonás is an interesting piece of Spanish music from the 90's. It reminds me a bit of the Galvana album by Victor Nubla and Pelayo Fernandez Arrizabalaga from 1992.
From the liner notes:
"This work is shaped as a personal diary developed on internalized fragments. For that it's integrated by different episodes, linked from a certain subjectivity than the "diary" gender always suggests. Likewise, the understanding, the inverted commas or underlined, the monologue truncated on a word or the design or the linguistic gesture takes part of the expressive strategies of the piece. Making it we have gone to the bottom of our memories, on a time of speed and forgetfulness. As a Diary, its structure is given rather from the physical support -the diary- and from the graphy of the person that writes it. {..} The work is developed with three musicians performing live - a singer, an acoustic percussionist and an electronic percussionist, plus organized sound taped on 4 sources. All the material for the interpreters arised from 40 sentences, memories expressed orally, 20 coming from each one of the two authors. Different types of visual, phonetical and even semiotical interpretations of the sentences generated the ways in which the piece was performed. The modular apect assured that it would sound mainly the same during each performance yet always differ and show unprevisible elements."
Due to the nature of this release no download link yet.
Mother Zosima (the radical nun) was a feminist avant-folk project created by Kirsten Anderberg based on performances at Seattle (night-)clubs between 1983 and 2001. She took her name from the character Father Zosima who is one of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the story Father Zosima is some sort of guru as well as an ideal image of an orthodox Christian saint living in a monastry. He preaches for compassion and peace, basically as a reflection of Christ. During the course of the story Father Zosima dies and his holiness is called into question by the rest of the monastry because his body starts to decompose very rapidly leaving behind a terrible smell. This decomposing process is being looked upon as a sign of God prooving that Zosima was nothing but a mortal soul.
I suppose by inverting this character into Mother Zosima not only is Anderberg opposing Dostoevsky's approach of putting the man at a literary centerpoint - The "Brothers" Karamazov - as feminist critique, she is also shaping her own mirrored performative image as a radical nun that is preaching her own ideals. By choosing the title The Greatest Story Ever Sold she shows her cleverness of creating this image but also the self-irony she puts into her personification since Zosima is being looked upon as a mortal soul. And that's why this is some incredible music criticizing the American society. It is not at all stagnated into this contemporary gender and identity poltics debate we deal with nowadays, but it shows how cleverness, self-consciousness, lots of humor and appropriating commercial culture can actually serve the cause of the actual message. The music by Mother Zosima is straight radical feminism, criticism of politics, criticism of commercial culture, criticism of weird American morals and Christianity etc. but it doesn't directly attack its enemy. It's an approach of empowering the woman, not obeying to conformism and preaches for self-empowerment while dissecting the different corrupted aspects of American society with humor and with a lot of skill. It reminds me of the feminist beat poets of the sixties like Diane Di Prima as well as some other female protest-song vocalists from the revolutionary hippie times in the States. It musically also comes close to Care of The Cow and their singer Christine Baczewska's solo work and even of certain songs by Annette Peacock. The songs by Mother Zosima are still so extremely relevant today. It's like nothing has ever changed. Specially when we look at this madness with Trump and the current state of the United States. To me it's really important to see how Mother Zosima's music is not some cult music stuff from the glory days of hippie hights, but music from a much later era carrying these important messages whilst not yet fallen victim to today's infinite cynical and polarised political views. We can learn from this creativity today and understand how political hyper-reality doesn't help us further by fighting it's xenophobic symptoms, but to put forward a message in a very clever package without being distracted nor doing concessions to constant exterior confirmation. This is what empowerment looks like. This is what is so deadly important about Feminism. I hope that Archaic Inventions can sometimes show the link from the past to today and provide possibilites and/or show the potentials of emancipatory power. The Seattle scene of the 90's - aside from the birth of Grunge (an albino, a mosquito..) and stuff - was probably very very interesting and consisted of a creative diversity that was able to birth all of this legendary musical output. But yep, what a time we live in now! But we won't let our guard down. No worries. Enjoy Mother Zosima! (btw I wasn't too sure about the year of the release). Get it HERE
