CD comprised primarily of work for radio done between 1990 and 1994, and primarily originating in the live radio performances concocted for Danger in Paradise. The other principal source was material produced during a residency at the Banff Center for the Radio Rethink project.
Text in French and English by Allen S. Weiss published in CD booklet: Phonic Gaps and Gasps / Tête a Trou.
Cover art: masks and dolls by Michel Nedjar. Used by permission.
Excerpts of the CD were part of the exhibition “Fear” at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, 1999. Curator: Paula Levine.
The title piece of the CD was commissioned by New American Radio and Performing Arts for the New American Radio series on NPR.
An audio installation version was presented at P.R.I.M. for “Les 15 jours de PRIM” (1993) and for “SAFE” in Finland (1993).
Scroll down for REVIEWS.
Phonic Gaps and Gasps
by Allen S. Weiss
Skull partitas, glottal toccatas, ear arias, bone blues, heart sonatas, nerve operas, blood symphonies—the audio inventions of Christof Migone evoke the disrupted and degenerate inner voice that so disquietingly haunts our thought and our speech. Through the piercing and obsessive acoustics of Hole in the Head, the possibilities of audio montage permit vocal organisms and electronic circuits to intersect, reflect and infect each other. These works therefore exist in a highly charged state of paradox and contradiction: they are impish and lyrical nightmarish and enlightening, abrasive and soothing.
Here, creativity occurs at that threshold where language disintegrates and electronics peaks outs; where codes are transgressed and nonsense elaborated; where sonorous distortions, interferences and noises establish a delirious, crazed, schizophonic art. The analysis of such works demands a teratology of the voice, whose monsters arise by means of liberating all those vocal “accidents” that hitherto blemished the pure sounds of bel canto and belles lettres: moans, screams, sighs, cries, chokes, roars, gasps, mumbles, whistles, yelps, slurps, groans, chortles, snorts, pops, clicks, wheezes, babbles, hisses, hums, whimpers, hoots, whines, puffs, drones, stutters, lisps, rattles, and countless other imperfections.
As Roman Jakobson suggests in his celebrated psycholinguistic studies on the relations between aphasia and linguistic structure, the pathological breakdown of quotidian speech—culminating in either the incoherent jumble of word salad, the inarticulate simplicity of one-word sentences, or the utter silence of aphasia universalis—proffers new modes of poetic form.
This research provides one paradigm for considering the origins and intricacies of Hole in the Head. But even more perturbing and compelling is the fact that Christof Migone’s work is inspired by, and inflected with, those écrits bruts —the varied schizophrenic and paranoid languages of madness- which so fascinated Jean Dubuffet, and which necessitated a thorough revision of contemporary aesthetics effects, but rather participates in that aesthetic and epistemological rupture exemplified by Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done With the Judgment of God and Gregory Whitehead’s Pressures of the Unspeakable. What is so disturbing about this genre of audiophonics is that it reminds us, with auditory brilliance and existential terror, that holes -real and metaphoric- exist in each of our heads, and that madness, just a mere psychic slippage away, is the sign of a radical alterity potentially within us all.
Hole in the Head constitutes a contemporary panpipe that entices us ever inwards. What we must remember is that Pan was the god who incites panic, and that his death, as Nietzsche reminds us, ended an entire civilization. For millennia he survived, hidden within our bodies. Now in a fin de siècle reappearance, he creates new possibilities of voice and new phantasms of the resonant, throbbing, noisy body expressed in Christof Migone’s oral and aural contortions, ruins, lacerations, abrasions and ruptures. This is the voice of a pandemonium that is, after all, the chaotic ground of all art.
Allen S. Weiss, author of Phantasmic Radio (Duke University Press, 1994), Perverse Desire & the Ambiguous Icon (SUNY, 1994), Shattered Forms (SUNY, 1992), and editor of Experimental Sound & Radio (special issue of The Drama review, T151, 1996).
Tête a Trou
par Allen S. Weiss (traduction de l’anglais : Chantal Thomas)
Partitas du crâne, toccatas de la glotte, arias de l’oreille, blues des os, sonates du coeur, opéras des nerfs, symphonies du sang -les inventions auditives de Christof Migone évoquent cette voix intérieure inquiétante, disruptive, dégénérée qui hante notre pensée et notre parole. à travers l’acoustique stridente et obsédante de Hole in the Head, les possibilités de l’audio montage permettent aux organismes vocaux et aux circuits électroniques de s’entrecroiser, se réfléchir, se contaminer les uns les autres. C’est pourquoi ces oeuvres se déploient à l’extrême d’une tension paradoxale, contradictoire: elles sont diaboliques et lyriques, cauchemardesques et lumineuses, déchirantes et apaisantes.
Ici, la créativité se produit au seuil même à partir duquel le langage se désintègre et l’électronique pointe; au point où les codes sont transgressés et où s’établit le nonsens; où les distorsions sonores, les interférences et les bruits engendrent un art délirant, affolé, schizophonique. L’analyse de telles oeuvres exige une tératologie de la voix. Ses monstres naissent de la libération de tous ces “accidents” vocaux qui, dans le passé, étaient supposés souiller la pureté de son du bel canto ou des belles lettres: souffles, soupirs, slurps, pleurs, plaintes, suffocations, rugissements, hoquets, marmonnements, sifflements, glapissements, gémissements, gloussements, reniflements, explosions, étranglements, clics, couacs, cris, chuintement, babillement, bourdonnement, geignements, piaillements, râles, vrombissements, zézaiements, bégaiements, hululements…
Comme le suggère Roman Jakobson dans ses célèbres études psycholinguistiques sur les relations entre l’aphasie et les structures linguistiques, l’effondrement pathologique de la parole quotidienne -culminant ou bien dans le brouillage incohérent de la salade de mots, ou bien le simplisme inarticulé de phrases d’un seul mot, ou bien dans le silence absolu de l’aphasia universalis -présente de nouveaux modes de forme poétique.
Ces analyses nous fournissent un paradigme pour nous aider à comprendre les origines et les intrications de Hole in the Head. Mais encore plus inquiétant, et attirant, est le fait que l’oeuvre de Christof Migone est inspirée et influencée par ces écrits bruts -les divers langages schizophréniques et paranoïdes de la folie -qui fascinèrent tellement Jean Dubuffet, et qui obligent à une complète remise en question de l’esthétique contemporaine. Cependant Hole in the Head ne se situe pas dans la lignée des expériences linguistiques de la poésie sonores, avec leurs effets de surfaces. Cette oeuvre relève plutôt de la rupture esthétique et épistémologique exemplifiée par l’Antonin Artaud de Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu et par Pressures of the Unspeakable deGregory Whitehead. Ce qui rend si dérangeant ce type d’audiophonie est qu’il nous rappelle, dans la jubilation d’écoute et la terreur existentielle, que les trous -réels et métaphoriques- existent en la tête de chacun, et que la folie, pur dérapage psychique, est le signe d’une radicale altérité dont la potentialité nous concerne tous, Hole in the Head constitue une contemporaine flûte de Pan qui nous entraîne toujours plus loin à l’intérieur de nous mêmes -Pan le Dieu qui incitait à la panique, et dont la mort, comme l’écrit Nietzsche, signifia la fin de toute une civilisation. Pendant des millénaires Pan a survécu, caché en nos corps.
Maintenant, en une ultime réapparition de fin de siècle, Pan crée de nouvelles possibilités pour la voix et de nouveaux fantasmes pour ce corps résonnant, palpitant, sonore qui s’exprime dans les contorsions, ruines, lacérations, abrasions, ruptures, indistinctement orales et aurales de Christof Migone. C’est la voix d’un pandémonium qui, au fond, est l’origine de tout art -le chaos dont il surgit.
Allen S. Weiss, l’auteur de Phantasmic Radio (Duke University Press, 1994), Perverse Desire & the Ambiguous Icon (suny, 1994), Shattered Forms (SUNY, 1992), et l’éditeur de Experimental Sound & Radio (The Drama review, T151, 1996).
REVIEWS
• New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (eds. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss), Leonardo/MIT Press, 2006, p. 113-114, “Electric Line: The Poetics of Digital Audio Editing” essay by Martin Spinelli.
[…] Christof Migone is the contemporary artist who has done the most to synthesize and extend the digital practices and aesthetics developed by his contemporaries and their modernist predecessors. Migone’s digital translations—or “machinations”—of the writing of the mentally ill in his radio/audio/CD project (1996) Hole in the Head share an attention to the microsonic level of the word-sound or prephoneme with Chopin and Chopin’s predecessor, Dufrêne.[fn 17] Migone, however, works with a broader range: in his vacillation between whole words—indeed whole and semicontextualized con- versations—and prephonetic fragments, we hear in vivid detail a movement from meaning to sound. This electrocution of spoken language is perceptible only in relation to the normative conversation that surrounds it. By vacillating between recognizable narrative or discursive speech and speech fragments, Migone develops a digital poetics for radio language: presenting the same [114] words and word particles as constituents of traditional meaning-making structures and as something outside of those structures, he produces transitions between analog and digital semantics that allow us to hear the shifts in the engagement we are asked to make throughout the piece. In Hole in the Head ‘s companion essay, “Head Hole: Malfunctions and Dys-functions of an FM Exciter,” Migone explains his technological efforts to amplify “the noise of the brain” and demonstrate the aesthetics of a gradually increasing demand for interpretation through different modes of listening (2001, 42–52).[fn 18] After a phonetic translation of some of Artaud’s French glossolalia, which exposes an acculturated mind’s disposition to slip back into analog semantics, he provides a summation that can stand as a definition for a wide range of digital poetic tactics: “They do not pretend to find universal meaning in a hermetic language but rather intrude, corrupt, and disarticulate the original. There is a certain paradoxical faithfulness in this approach, for it does not strive for accuracy, nor does it fabricate a neutral voice toward literaturization of the embodied text” (48). It is not a text or an interpretation or even a shift in modes of listening but a tendency toward meaning that constitutes the material of Migone’s poetry.[…]
• The Wire (January 1998), reviews of Hole in the Head, Rappel, Radio Folie Culture.
• Revue et Corrigée (June 1998), France, reviews of Hole in the Head, Rappel, and Radio Folie Culture CDs.
• CMJ (September 28 1997), review by Robin Edgerton.
A 1991-1996 retrospective of Migone’s sporadic but enticing sound/language pieces, Hole In The Head is made up of familiar sounds far out of their context. In these 61 fragments, mostly arranged into longer suites, buzzes, clicks and static nervously dart around voices of various kinds. The vocal components are texts and noises, mostly, but a lot of frightened, filtered snatches of conversation, like the kind Scanner picks up, or quick inhalations and sleep-sounds. Drier than sound-poetry contemporaries like Paul Dutton and Anna Homler, Migone works with (and tries to approximate) the language of the insane– repetition, dissociation, non-verbal words. verbal non-words – arranged in a purposeful, composed, arty way (many of these pieces were made for art contexts).
• fader (vol.001 1997), Japan, review of Hole in the Head.
• Montreal Mirror (November 13 1997), review by Chris Yurkiw.
Students of psycholinguistics and sympathizers with Bertol Brecht’s ideas on interactive radio should recall Christof Migone’s sound breaking show on CKUT-FM, Danger In Paradise, whence a goodly chunk of this “schizophonic art’ is culled. Mics are misused, CD players skip, syllables are snipped and recognized languages lapse into what Allen S. Weiss calls in the liner notes “Migone’s oral and aural contortions, ruins, lacerations, abrasions and ruptures.” Great fodder for your answering machine.
• Rubberneck (No.26 December 1997), review by Chris Atton.
Christof Migone presents 61 tracks of close-miked vocal explorations in as many minutes, The shortest clocks in at four seconds, recalling Zorn’s hardcore excesses applied to the voice, though Migone offers much greater subtlety, variety and humour. An obvious comparison would be Henri Chopin, but whereas he prefers large-scale structures for his compositions, Migone’s strength is clearly as a miniaturist, focusing briefly but intently on particular vocal phenomena and semantics. It appears he does this on Canadian radio, too. Precisely why, he doesn’t say. You don’t need to be there, either.
• ND Magazine (No. 20 Summer 1997), review by J.F.
Migone exploits the technological possibilities of sound poetry with much emphasis on simple, linear editing over sound processing.. This, and the almost strictly verbal character of Migone’s sound poetry (word meanings are often unimportant) make me think of him as the polar opposite of Henry Chopin, another tech-dependent sound poet. Like Chopin’s work, Migone’s exhibits a kind of restraint that keeps the primary focus from being obscured by indulgent effects and clutter. In feeling. ‘Hole in the Head’ seems akin to sound artists like IOS Smolders and Ryoji Ikeda, whose work expresses a technological attitude that is post-heroic and which belongs to the blasé mood of the communication age. Quite intriguing and recommended.
• Exclaim! (September 1997), reviews of Hole in the Head, Rappel, Radio Folie Culture CDs by Richard Moule.
That Quebec has always had a strong tradition in electronic and electro-acoustic music is a given; what continues to surprise is the wealth, depth and scope of the work being created. The Quebec label OHM/Avatar seems interested in exploring sound sources and found sounds. At its core, OHM/Avatar seems to be following the esteemed traditions of people like John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Brion Gysin, and more recently Robin Rimbaud’s project, Scanner and Panasonic, in creating musique concrete and sound collages. Radio Folie/Culture uses samples from field recordings of nature, radio or random conversations and matches them with industrial noises that are carefully constructed to form sound pieces. If Radio Folie Culture‘s pieces serve as aural snapshots of fleeting real world moments, making the ordinary seem extraordinary, Rappel is about the art of voyeurism. Produced in collaboration with Radio Canada’s ‘Chants Magnetiques,’ Rappel is a collection of recordings from a little Bell branch office, and from answering machines. Sound experimenters have dropped in on people’s phone conversations, capturing their innocent exchanges with one another. The effect is at once banal and disturbing, catching these transmissions and monitoring them much the same way someone would from security services. In a world of instant communications and yet unprecedented surveillance, Rappel tackles issues of privacy and appropriation, and the lines that are drawn between the private and public self when you try to reach out and touch someone. Jocelyn Robert’s La Theorie Des Nerfs Creux is no less manipulative, but its intentions are more in creating waves and frequency-based glitches, similar in style to the German duo, Oval. Robert’s sound collages appear to come more from the electro-acoustic side of musical experimentation. Christof Migone’s Hole In The Head is a little more ambitious. Migone’s audio inventions are centered around the human voice, in particular the inner voice and how it haunts our thought and speech. Through piercing acoustics, Migone exposes the vocal accidents of speech: moans, screams, sighs, cries, chokes, slurps, wheezes, stutters and other imperfections. This is abrasive and at the same time humbling stuff. We often like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and enlightening conversationalists. But at base have we progressed as far as we think? Are we not, in the end just apes with haircuts? The mind reels.
