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 illicit 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 available on Important. [Site]
