The interpolation of recital and instrumental is intended as dialogue, making Baudelaire’s text an appropriate choice, with all of its juxtapositions, his universe of violence and tenderness, decay and delight.
[Release page] Jeremy Young is Szilárd and Spokes is his debut physical release as a solo artist. He characterizes it as a conceptual tone-cycle (thereof the spokes?) spinning off excerpts from the greatest work of Charles Baudelaire, the mid-nineteenth century poet of the new moral and aesthetic complexity brought on by modernity.
Against a shower of hiss, Catherine Métayer reads several lines from “Les Fleurs de Mal.” A short think piece on electric guitar is followed by a collage of field recordings, electronic disjecta membra, and a piano which seems as old and worn out as the tape on which it has been recorded. Through shimmering metal strands emerges the softly-spoken Aki Onda, himself an artist with no mean background in tape and voice experimentation. The romantic, almost Parisian mood with which Szilárd follows his reading is eventually sprayed away, as if washing the boulevard of the memory of what just happened.
Liam Singer calmly reads a beautifully sad passage, then steps back to make way for a magnificent, dizzing drone, a downpour of rain and outpouring of emotion on a beautiful, extended guitar solo. The only percussion on the album – aside from a distant pile driver heard in the background of the previous track – introduces a reading by Ella Joyce Buckley, which settles into another melodic train of guitar thought, before an unidentified male voice – Young’s I would guess – has the last word.
The interpolation of recital and instrumental is intended as dialogue, making Baudelaire’s text an appropriate choice, with all of its juxtapositions, his universe of violence and tenderness, decay and delight. Szilárd ably mirrors the poet’s words with his sound poetry.
Spokes is available on Palaver Press. [Release page]
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