The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs/The Fine Art of Goofing Off (Important, CD/DVD)

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(03.22.06) An inventive sound collage artist, Henry Jacobs cut the way for many
of today’s young tape-splicers. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, Jacobs
was doing a great deal of work with loops and cut-up compositions,
pairing ethnic music with improvised interviews, sound effects with
illict field recordings. He made surreal collages that went beyond
musique concrete and into vastly stranger psychedelic realms. The
Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs
is a collection of audio material
rescued from beneath the floorboards of an old house Jacobs once lived
in; as well as three episodes of The Fine Art of Goofing Off as
prepared for KQED, a San Francisco television station, in 1972. All
in all, Jacob’s work is visually and aural arresting, but it is work
that requires focus and attention — otherwise it simply becomes
background noise, an annoyingly muddied and disjointed aural
distraction.

There’s a direct line from Jacobs to Negativland, to some of Meat Beat
Manifesto’s more experimental cut-up material, to modern dub
minimalism, to the recent ethnographic efforts of the Sublime
Frequencies label. The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs is a
surreal head-tip, a psychotronic transmission that opens up and
reveals its secrets when heard through a marijuana haze. It begins
with a thinly disguised conversation about “cigarette yoga,” drifts
into a strange on-the-air interview where Jacobs expresses a personal
terror for dead air, before wandering into a flute, guitar and
percussion (with single and double reverbations used “experimentally”)
demonstration of musique concrete. This is the first ten minutes,
mind you. Pass the bong. I need to make room in my head for more of
Jacob’s experiments. “Offbeat” is the theme song for a Martian be-bop
program that is hijacked by a hi-fi stereo salesman; “Every Drop” is a
clandestine recording of a beat poet as he wanders into the restroom
and mumbles a bit of poetry over his urinary expression. “Fluidoodle”
sounds like, God help me, I’m listening to a pair of plumbers in the
bathroom: one’s fixing the pipes and the other one is wandering from
basin to receptacle to drain, urinating.

The DVD, The Fine Art of Goofing Off, is Jacobs-ian cacophony
set to video. The three episodes ostensibly follow three thematic
variations: image following sound, sound following image and utter
fucking chaos. Claymation, stop-motion animation, continuous drawing,
cut-outs, freeze-frame montages, collages and layered video imagery
are all part and parcel of the Jacobs’ oeuvre. If your brain isn’t
fried enough to listening to his work, here’s an hour that’ll rewire
your sensory synapses. I can’t even read my notes; it’s like my brain
has invented a new language while I was watching the videos. Mad and
visionary stuff. I need a week in a white room to recover. A quiet
white room. With cotton in my ears and a heavy blindfold.

The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs/The Fine Art of Goofing
Off
is out now on Important. Buy it at Amazon.com.

  • Important
  • Press-Release