I hadn’t seen Jaap Blonk since his participation in the Textsound Festival at Fylkingen in May 1993, and when I read that he was going to appear at Fylkingen in Stockholm I made sure to make it there. In the process I also persuaded a pal who had never heard any hardcore sound poetry to come along, and so he did; Hans Åke Runell, a photographer, graphic designer and advertising expert, running his own business in Shitville (Skitköping).
He brought his MD recorder and his minimal Leica camera, and so I handled the MD and Runell the Leica, and we got the whole performance recorded and photographed without anyone noticing. Just the day after or the day after that we had a CD ready, which both looked and sounded professional, and we immediately sent a copy off to Blonk, who had it waiting for him when he came home to Amsterdam!
Bootlegging is always a risky business, but Blonk didn’t sue us. In fact, he very much enjoyed the covert CD, and personally I believe that some of the pieces he performs on this CD are the best versions recorded of those works. Another quality that I like very much about this recording is the way the audience is heard, with laughter, giggles and applause. This is the only solo CD from Blonk with an audible audience, and I think this in itself is a quality, and one, which sets this CD aside from all the others.

I’m sure that quite a few people who learn about this CD through this text will want to have a copy. The rights rest with Jaap Blonk, though, so if you get an urge, write to him and ask him if he can fix you up with copy, or if he can instruct me to arrange for one. I don’t want to make any money from these kinds of covert audio operations, and I feel Blonk should decide in this matter.

1. ENTERING FYLKINGEN.

Track 1 I decided to call Entering Fylkingen. I know no other title. Blonk rushed into the room from back left, swinging out in a circle around the perimeter, eventually ending up at a microphone stand placed dead center, a couple of meters from the front line of the audience, where I and Runell were sitting, me with the microphone between my knees and the MD in a bag on the floor, and Runell holding his little Leica, which he operated without a flash.
Blonk’s introductory entrance piece was yelled and shouted and exclaimed, accompanied by Blonk’s priceless facial and bodily expressions, much to the appreciative amusement of the audience, which felt really benevolent right from the start. Blonk had filled the hall. There wasn’t one empty seat at Fylkingen, so I think most people came especially because they knew Blonk’s art and wanted to partake.

After he had completed his revelatory entrance, Blonk spoke:

2. RHOTIC.

Having said that, Blonk went straight into a magnificent rolling of the rrrrrrs, amply amplified, mouth tight to the microphone, those letters rolling out like bullets from a machine gun, bouncing off of the walls, ricocheting in mad trajectories, eventually filling up all available space with this concept of the R!
Blonk made historical, hysterical faces, having many attendants cracking up, almost falling off their seats with chuckles that shook their anatomies!

This is a definite performance of Rhotic, and definitely the best one I’ve heard Blonk do of the piece. In fact, you feel you’re inside a Lancaster bomber crossing the English Channel somewheres in the 2nd World War, the way Blonk’s articulation through the amplification reaches thunderous magnitudes.
Rhotic is a fairly long piece, sound-poetically speaking, and Blonk goes through a number of oral cavity variations, at times spitting and wheezing shadows of Rs, at times shoveling the saliva dripping offspring of Rs around his mouth, across the teeth and suddenly out in the open like escaping little devils… and sometimes his cheeks get all wobbly and loose, sort of rattling and shaking as his eyebrows rise high up and his eyes stare madly…

Then he winds down into a peaceful and hardly audible creaking and clicking, the velocity of a normal R slowed down dramatically into a percussive mode, woodblocks or chopsticks of this consonant masterfully pondered as Blonk looks introverted in the spotlight, his long and tall physiognomy looking absurd under the circumstances; the jester, the witty, incredulous jester, embarking on a regressive tour back to the days of crowing and prattling, into a pre-lingual state of pure mind, soaring inside this sphere of an R, soon after rebirth!

The R slows down so much it is reduced to sparsely spaced dots with wide spaces in between, sounding more and more like a slow-motion burp from way down inside the Blonk body; buddy Blonk!

This is, however, not enough, for this master articulator of body sounds begin to sound like a purring kitten rolled up on your swayback as you rest stomach down in the afternoon.
Soon after this purring incident he starts to mimic a serious crack-up, as if he was splitting both sideways and up-and-down, into woody Blonk fragments of tiny rrrrrrrs that spread across Fylkingen like wood ants…

At this stage he begins to appear agitated, rising up through the pitches in splintered growls, like a rabid dog in a cartoon, venomous saliva diffusing in a cloud of poisonous agents across the audience. You get a feeling of his insides trying to crawl out through his throat and mouth, as he shakes and twists his body as if at a snake ceremony in the Deep South of the U.S.A., while these regenerated and perverted offspring of Rs completely rule the poor sound poet in an R possession…

He reaches his highest pitches and turns into a weathered and forgotten old door that moves back and forth on its rusty hinges in the wind, somewheres remote… and the whole world of sounds at Fylkingen is choking in a suicidal inhalation of black hole magnitudes…

Resuscitated he takes on the shaman appearance of a growling bear, and I really do feel Blonk’s connection to shaman layers of existence, because how were he otherwise ever possible, this unlikely artist out of Europe?
A mad Goofy gurgling exercise takes us sweeping past our morning hygienics, down into deep Tuvinian khoomei timbres from way inside the body, and for a while Blonk travels like a yo-yo between the gurgling exercises in the higher pitches and the underworld timbres of the deepest kargyraa khoomei.

A wretched mouthful of spurting sounds take on a conversational imagery, as if a speed-freak monologue was transmitted across Blonk teeth out into the free world of jay walkers and tax evaders…
The conclusion of Rhotic is a series of sharp and short exclamations in the vicinity of R, contrasted with super-high whines that threaten to saw right through your – and certainly Blonk’s – skull… as some anti-vomit swallowing and a few very cautious and silent ant-Rs with trembling antennas bring Rhotic to its end. Formidable!

Blonk:

3. FACIAL

Blonk kicks off with a hasty percussive bouncing, a be-bop rhythmization of Bs and Ps bouncing off the walls, hitting the floor, the ceiling, the foreheads of attendants – and it really swings! The percussive bouncing soon gets an inquiring ingredient and a higher pitch, as if someone with eyebrows raised (Blonk’s were!) had something terribly important to ask. This gets right into a mumbling reasoning at lower pitches, intensely, inwardly. Right here, incredibly, the tone of “speech” – no, sounds! – is one of conviction and assurance, and in a tone at which some adults talk to little children.

It is truly amazing to note how fast – lightning fast – Jaap Blonk switches from atmosphere to atmosphere, from clearly identifiable accents of expression to other clearly identifiable accents of expression, comically and intriguingly depicting all kinds of walks of life from all kinds of persons’ perspective. I don’t know if I really did pick up all of these signals when I attended the performance. I think maybe – even though audiences at his performances are 100% attentive! - you need a recording to really pick out all these delicate changes in expressive nuance - even if you then miss the important body language - and the wonder of it is that the element you usually regard as the most significant property of language – the meaningful morpheme – never (or very seldom; Ministern beklagar) is utilized.

Blonk – also in his role as a gifted mime – manages, through his brilliant mastering of all vocal and anatomical nuances of expression, to convey situations of people at all ages and in all kinds of situations. He’s like a whole traveling theater company when he hits the stage, and he switches predicament and age and all attributes of a person and a life in a jiffy, in the wink of an eye! A Blonk performance is something unforgettable, and I can’t see anyone else coming even close in this exclusive art form.

Part of his performance is that of a stand-up comedian without words, a mime with a relentless stock of bodily sounds, but also that of a prophet with the seriousness of a Jeremiah as well as an Isaiah, and to take this biblical analogy even further; Blonk is like John at Patmos, displaying to us all the mysteries of the future in his wordless shaman utterances… and yes, I think his more serious role, which undoubtedly is inherent in his comical quality, is that of a latter-day shaman, a man with a tap on the secrets, a man with a definite connection with levels of consciousness and spirit that it takes a shaman to flow, and Blonk flows these lights and shadows from out of the beyond in magic performances that he travels the world with. It is not by pure chance that I get an urge to listen to North American Indians, Lapland Saamis and Tibetan monks after a session with Blonk.
Like all great art, Blonk’s is both humorous and serious, and he has sharpened his special talent to scalpel-like accuracy and blinding diligence.

Later on in Facial those obstinate signs on the paper talk unintelligibly at you, sort of twisting and twirling in the surface of the white sheet, raising their fists against you, and one of the signs take the lead, to have a serious exchange of views with the composer; the Blonk! This scouting sign leans towards Blonk and growls at him in ponderous, wordless exclamations - elastic, gluey - that seem to be fighting their way up out of a slimy pizza to deliver a serious Blonk overhaul…
At times these expressions sound like the cracking and breaking of thin bells, or like the self-destruction of vocal chords, and the impression really is cartoonish, from out of one of those almost scary cartoons that are broadcast these days on satellite television, to promote the malfunction of our little children’s defenseless minds…

Some views out of the sheet of paper are voiced in top-pitch voices that wheeze at you like fuel-saving jet streams at high elevations, carrying you speedily towards Europe… The giggling of the audience accompanies these utterances, countering their helpless expressions with lighthearted humor and warmth in the Fylkingen hall.

Loud, thunderous kissing sounds smack and klatch, in a formidable, grotesque funny mirroring of the more diligent and elegant kissing sounds of many new Stockhausen works rising out of Kürten. Simultaneously Blonk smacks his own cheeks with open hands, and pulls at them as well, looking distinctly insane, while the kissing in the air continues, ruthlessly. The audience cracks up in loud laughter.

Remember, though, that all sounds emitted are supposedly rising out of disobedient signs on a sheet of paper. This knowledge might come in handy as loud and wet farts – non-smelling, luckily – spurt out of the sound poet’s unforgiving mouth… and there seems to be no end to this diarrhea session, the shit running, streaming off of the white sheet, down on the Fylkingen floor up to a level of about one decimeter; enough to sink a whole ferry if it were to be distributed in this fluid state across a car deck… but seriously, this is like a whole geriatric ward on Monday (shit day; purgatives distributed Sunday nights – at least where I was working once…).
Have in mind, though, that Blonk said in his introduction that Facial deals with a number of rebelling signs, and sure enough the geriatric ward faecal day comes to an end, and another day dawns, in a flash. The sounds that now arise could well stem from a monk getting caught in a prayer wheel high up in a Tibetan mountain pass, his whining complaints soaring through the Bardos, echoing back and forth between death and rebirth like scarecrows for the inter-lives travelers.

More sounds from the vomit realms of the anatomy bubble up like acid stomach fluids through the oesophagus, and like the profuse distribution of fluid diarrhea faeces before, Blonk also offers generous amounts of rancid vomit… after which a jolly melody of clicks and hums rise from a more content sign on that white sheet from whence all these sounds supposedly rise… and small talk in the upper oral regions are countered by some deeper gusts of bodily audio, and Facial ends in absentminded kisses and hums!

Blonk:

4. A ISLA DA

This sounds so civilized and commonplace at the outset that it startles you. It comes in a guise that is an antithesis to the preceding, hopscotch madness of audio. Blonk sounds like an absentminded man singing softly to himself as he thinks about something else, maybe a woman, or something soft as a sub-tropic sunset… He emits a smooth upward glissando, time and again. He is soft-spoken, almost whispering, and the voice is clearly not directed at anybody else. It’s so withheld and under the breath, that the sounds that do come out are pure, involuntary side effects of a certain, inwardly absentminded concentration on something considerably personal. You feel like you’re eavesdropping on Blonk here, even though his stage presence for us who attended the Fylkingen performance helps alleviate that feeling.
This atmosphere is maintained for a while at the beginning.
I also get a vision of a craftsman of some sort; perhaps a sail maker, stooping over his work, focusing on his doings, oblivious of everything else, while singing this soft and unintentional song to himself and the gods… (a beautiful picture of Man)

The melody – or the short shreds of melodies – get a little more intense as Blonk changes syllables into nanana and naninanina, wawawawa and lalilalilali, nanion nanion, detatedeoo detatedeoo and so forth, bringing syllables around and back and forth and again, spiraling in changes along the progression of a soft-spoken inwardness… but the melody gets more melody-like and somewhat more rhythmical, gradually, cautiously, while the man obviously still busies himself with his handicraft, the sail on the table in front of him reaching all over the floor of his workshop in its virgin state, no breeze yet having touched its canvas sail-cloth with its loving force out of open expanses.

As Blonk gets into Ps, the work catches some percussive elements, in a prickly, dotted kind of way, supported by Ks and Ts. At this stage the sail maker, whom I’ve dreamt, half-rises from his work, which he obviously approves of very much, and gets into a dancing kind of mood, swinging his arms up and rolling his head, happy about the development of the work and generally happy about life, joy rising through his body as he comes back from his inward handicraft concentration and takes a step back to view his progress.

He takes some dance steps around the room, but notices something that needs a slight correction, and wheezing of S consonants he leans his face very close to the canvas, scrutinizing it with his expert gaze, as his hands fly over the sailcloth surface in an imposition that bring smoothness to wrinkles, preparing the pristine sail for its future encounters with the Westerlies.

Blonk rises again, rushing out into a more speedy, almost exclamatory spurt of Rs and Ps, while also rising though the pitches to further illustrate a more intense chapter of the work. This is immediately countered by a steep slide into a more silent and relaxed mood, where Blonk the Sailmaker ponders his work, once again inwardly, absentmindedly.
Apparently, his close pondering hits off well, as he once again speeds up and intensifies his singing, now swinging considerably, swaying his arms and shuffling his feet, maybe off to a break, reaching for a strong and refreshing fluid that will pamper his workday and spiritualize his soul.
The sounds he now makes come close to speaking with tongues or rapping (!), and Blonk is a Tahitian whirlwind, voodooing his way through shaman aspects of salty seas and sail making, evoking a blessing out of spiritual realms, and close to the conclusion of A isla da he demonstrates the timbres out of this spiritual beyond in a long elasticism of high-pitched vocals, flowing free and shrill along the perimeter of human existence. With a few almost inaudible comments to himself Blonk the Caribbean Sailmaker closes the piece.

Blonk:

5. RECITATION FOR SOLO VOICE NO. 11 (George Aperghis)

Mr. Blonk forces his way in amongst the parasol ladies with an ingratiating smile and a seductive melody, though perhaps too honey dew immersed. This is insane, perhaps even deeper in the swamp of madness than before, though this sound poet has a hard time topping himself off. Blonk repeats this most lenient lady smoother over and over, getting more and more eager, probably slapping those females on their behinds too… His voice mostly stays down in the alleged sexy American radio announcer idiom, but he slides and slithers up in a nervous recurrent giggle in between the almost hypnotic timbres of persuasion that he is ruthlessly capable of!
An unusual property of Recitation for Solo Voice number 11 is the utilization of real live words, real French lingo, albeit fragmented out of any viable context, for the most part.
The hilarious evolution of this make-believe monologue carries into an ever more agitated state of insanity, but in chivalrous gestures and articulations, though the slaps on behinds that I imagine get more and more brute, sooner or later rendering Blonk a straightforward smack on the cheek… and he’s so eager to have his persuasive talent come across in a rewarding manner that he starts sounding like a horny goat or a whole pigsty of nervous sexuality at the brim…
The audience’s laughter accompanies the poor sound poet on his rendezvous with them ladies.

6. RECITATION FOR SOLO VOICE NO. 8 (George Aperghis)

Peculiar as ever, Mr. Blonk clears the audio field with a mimicry of French interspersed with evenly distributed clearings of the throat, which are there for pure decorative purposes! Do you love it or do you love it! I am spellbound, I do declare!
Then he shouts at a high volume, in a jolly tone: Eeeeh!, and returns to his mimicry, while the throat clearings more and more are recognized as decorations at the intersections between these repetitious but gradually transformed vocal gestures. The piece has a built-in acceleration to it, through which the sound poet soars in a pumping, bouncing type sound poetry, sometimes landing on a stretching note in the higher pitches. Finally he starts working this piece so fast that you can clearly take note of the figure of the work, almost in cartoon sketches across your listening imagination, in a more and more compressed space of audio.
If you allow yourself to step back out of the immediate madness, you may be able to place the goings-on in Recitation for Solo Voice no. 8 in a heated conversation in a good mood at a sidewalk café, two very French men gesticulating and talking in each other’s faces. That is one possible vision out of many, if you need one at all. It’s great acting, anyway!

Right after Recitation for Solo Voice no. 8 Blonk – without any introduction - throws himself into another completely hilarious work with political ingredients; Ministern beklagar (The Minister Regrets…).

7. MINISTERN BEKLAGAR…

This piece is delivered in Swedish! The sentence that is repeated over and over, in insane variations that get gradually more and more cut-up and permuted and… omitted, is “Ministern beklagar dylika yttringar”, even though I think Blonk meant to say: “Ministern beklagar dylika yttranden”. The first, probably misconceptions title, means: The Minister regrets such occurrences”, while the later one, which I think is the right one, means: The Minister regrets such remarks (or utterances). Ministers are known to voice their regrets and denials to the press, worldwide. Blonk takes this typical political behavior and laughs it hard in the face with this extremely comical sound poetic work. The audience went into a state of near disintegration with laughter at this bit!
As Blonk repeats the regrets of the Minister as presented by his spokesman over and over, he also, each time, omits some little part of the sentence; a letter here, a letter there, almost the way you can cut out sections of sound in a sound software in a computer, the sound up on the screen, you cutting away small parts, playing the condensed result back. Live with Blonk this becomes unbelievably funny! It’s not only that he cuts off parts of the sentence, compressing it, but he also sounds more and more furious, as if the Minister, through his spokesman, was more and more eager to persuade the public about his innocence or high ethical standards or what not.
Towards the end it’s just one irregular, straggly, stuttering spitting of consonants, shooting out like bullets or pebbles, interspersed with silences of increasing durations.

Blonk:

8. PHONETIC ETUDE NO. 2: FRICTIONAL

Almost inaudible – yes, at first really inaudible – wheezes start this piece, S-sounds that increase in sizZe and enter the audible part of the world. Small series of variations on wheezing are presented, rushing about in Blonk’s sanctified oral cavity like snakes in a sordid cave in Australia!
It sounds like he’s whipping up some eggs or some cream in a stainless jar, perhaps to make pancakes. There is a speedy rotating quality at work in this work at the first stage; little whirlwinds of Ss and SCHs etcetera, swirling about behind Blonk’s palisade of teeth.

A breathing motion is also easily noticeable, as Blonk makes these sounds both inhaling and exhaling.
These small, thin sounds grow into growling, snoring and screeching mouth sounds. It really sounds madly, obsessively frictional, as if someone – a beautiful Karelian woman with long blond hair in braids, pray tell - stands at a jetty in Lake Saimaa in eastern Finland, her feet in the water, cleaning a rag-mat of many colors that is spread out across the wooden jetty with a scrubbing-brush and soap, pressing the scrubbing-brush down hard while rotating it, making circular and spiraling trails in the white soap on the rag-mat.

This piece also reminds me of Swedish sound artists etcetera Sune Karlsson and some of his very frictional obsessions in his 12-hour work Phonia Domestica from 1988.
This automatic-sounding and forceful motion moves from near-silence up to infernal scrubbings and back.
Blonk begins to sound like a struggling steam engine by slapping his own cheeks while emitting wheezing sounds, and it looks as ridiculous – ridiculously inspiring! – as it sounds!

This railway percussion and the feeling of speed it transmits get quite intense, as in an old Western from out on the plains, the loco-motive roaring and rumbling past the depots along the tracks. The whole hall at Fylkingen thunders with this relentless rhythm, Blonk’s mouth in close proximity of the microphone. In other sections of the piece he adds sucking and slithering saliva moisteners of sound, dribbling and drooling all over the place like a bloodhound. Blonk reminds me of an old children’s song that my mother used to sing to me when I was little, about an Indian magician who transformed himself into a glass of lemonade, which he quickly emptied, thus disappearing! Blonk sucks and drools and wheezes himself right into these painstaking villains of sound!

When he gets into his hypnosis wheeze, he sounds like the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis); like you feel they would sound, rubbing against the upper layers of the atmosphere in the gusts of the solar wind… and the man can even sound like a whole group of golden high hats being whisked by a notorious jazz drummer!
As Blonk moves his air stream attention to the back of his oral cavity, things get more brute and throw-up-like… as he walks the thin line between adventurous throat and mouth audio and harmful self inflictions…
An intoxicated Donald Duck, forlorn and befallen to amphetamines, arise mad-eyed out of some final frictional frenzies, and a heart-stopping breathing exercise, outdoing any maternity practices, have the Fylkingen audience grasp for air and fear for the sound poet’s cardiovascular luck…

Blonk:

9. TOTENKLAGE (Hugo Ball)

This is a horrifying section of the concert, or, after you consider our destiny as such, perhaps a very honest dive into the timbres and horror of the Bardo journeys between lives.
Blonk begins his lament high up in the pitches, and I can’t help but picture one of these old women in scarves forever mourning their sons who have fallen prey to ethnic and other conflicts that flare up like torches ever so often, all over the globe. Blonk impersonates such a mother in grief, whining, stooping in helpless agony.
This high vocal pitch wobbles and trembles just like the light on the distant horizon of a Scandinavian midwinter pre-dawn; a single, penetrating note, boring through time and space and consciousness, echoing even through the Bardos.
Blonk lets each pitch line ring out into an uncertain destiny, and the subsequent pitch line arrives a little lower each time, but the feeling of complete resignation remains, immersing the sound with agony and grief and a gray hopelessness in the face of death of dear ones.

After a while the pitches begin to bend and bust at their seams, curving up and down in disparate motions and emotions, still in the higher registers… but then suddenly a horrendous deep rumble of an underworld voice grabs chilly hold of you and drags you through emotions so lonely and so scary that you can hardly listen. Blonk uses his deepest kargyraa voice to make your hairs rise on your arms…
His voice is like a quarry of granite talking at you, from the hardest, heaviest predicaments of life, from inside the unavoidable truth of an END, with yet no feeling of a BEGINNING; all lost, all gone; oh, TOTENKLAGE…
You cannot even hide inside the atomic jitter of matter in TOTENKLAGE; you cannot hide inside your head; foreign galaxies give no shelter, oh TOTENKLAGE…

This is the thunderous rumble from Hades, reaching for you across River Styx; oh TOTENKLAGE…
The long, stretching kargyraa lament is then broken up in an accelerating progression of rock breathing, granite in- and exhalations, in a catharsis of horror and truth; a quarry washout of desperation, until Blonk slows down again, into those anonymous walls of anguish that surround all the living creatures with their unavoidable, rumbling truth.

Towards the end Blonk appears in the auditive guise of an old man on his deathbed, uttering wordless complaints in a squeaky, creaking voice that almost breaks. The actual conclusion nears in Bardo hallucinations high up in trembling pitches that bore away into the purple haze of afterdeath and prebirth.
A horrendous piece, not comparable to anything I’ve heard anywhere, anytime!

Blonk:

10. PHONETIC ETUDE NO. 3. LABIOR

Lips flying and fluttering like bats, Blonk brings the Fylkingen audience into the secret realms of close-up saliva worlds, mucous membranes and the inside of teeth palisades. Mind you, it sounds at first like the sounds of a closely miked vagina, seriously penetrated at the height of lust… but it’s a Blonk mouth menagerie of licks and slithers!

The spurting, farting events hooked onto that don’t make things less worse, so to speak! Blonk has loosened his last breaks down the intimate road of oralities… rivaled, in this, only by French sound poet Henri Chopin, infamous for his downthroatings of microphones…

Blonk talked about stereo effects when he moved to that double microphone, and now he has these wet, farting oralities pan wildly left and right, encompassing the Fylkingen space completely in his hideous, inconsiderate fart imitations…
On the other hand, the sounds that roll around the room could also be likened with early airplane engines; a Sopwith Camel carrying Biggles around the perimeter!

It looks and sounds very funny when Blonk’s left cheek, sound wise, ends up at the far left, and vice versa! The faces he makes are, as usual, indescribable! He is a face artist as much as a sound poet!
He ends this long lasting farting session and goes into a vibrant wiggling of vocals, in the high and low and middle registers, Donald Ducking and enfant terribling that tremendous night at Fylkingen. He introduces a nasal distribution of whines, still fluttering his cheeks, sounding like some cartoon alarm. A downward glissando takes us all the way down from on high, until we don’t know what to expect, which is when he starts sounding like a wet balloon being stroked, which speedily transforms into a contact-miked thermos flask which is leaking, in stereo, yes! After a while the balloon analogy is more to the point again, as if he was holding a full-blown balloon by the neck, letting the air out in tiny, high-pressured spurts, but all of this, of course, achieved through pure Blonk mouth work! Finally I get the notion of being present at a formula 1 Indy race, those machines moving at tremendous speed, loud Niki Laudas around the horizon!
The very last part of Labior sports Jaap Blonk’s mouthful of mimicry of crackling sparks of electronic percussion past his high-tension salivary secretion, as Donald Duck takes his last breath in an operatic cartoon death melodrama!

Blonk:

11. HOMMAGE À A. A.

Audible preparatory Blonk breathing is heard in this remarkably good, covert audio recording from Fylkingen, until the sound poet breaks into his Artaud homage with clicks and slaps and spurts that are thrown around like handfuls of mud in a mud pit, amongst playful, regressing adults learning how to stop behaving! (and isn’t this partly what sound poetry is about, the cleansing and refreshening of mind by regressing to pre-lingual – and sometimes, I think, even pre-natal – realms, to bring to the fore a pure, perceptive and radiant, creative mind, freed of all the unnecessary weights of heavy tradition, misconceptions and forced behavior that continuous and un-reflective living bestows on us.)

Blonk sets out on a ride of intense and contemptuous, impudent, shortcut utterances, emitted in harsh, explosive burst, which, however, without warning are replaced by a soft, humming melody, in which you can sense Blonk’s jaws moving back and forth sideways like a cow ruminating.
The humming melody gets more hasty, more lip-percussive, stuttering, in marked beats, until the sound poet gets more shrill and crude, like a goat voicing his rancid opinion.

Blonk has the high-string humming stretching out, bouncing around in the back of his mouth, in varied articulations of vocals, like organ tones flying around the spacious realms of a cathedral with walls moist with saliva.
The melody of humming gets gradually more hysterical, sounding like the poet has an object in his mouth; a pebble or an egg or something, or something that is too hot to keep in one place in the mouth, like a bite of a hot potato.
This is where Blonk breaks loose into a frantic donkey call that shatters and pierces, shrill and penetrating, but not so long thereafter he gets into a jazz-percussive mood, throwing the beats around his mouth, letting them fly around Fylkingen like loose bits of broken furniture! Perhaps he’s illustrating Artaud at his insane asylum drum-kit! Anyway, Blonk manages to fuse the impression of a baritone saxophone with the simultaneous impression of drums, in a saliva-spitting instance that really is hard to believe, even for the Fylkingen attendants. Jaap Blonk is a wizard of oralisms, a sorcerer of oralities!

While he pulls and tears at his cheeks, he sings a wordless song of sadness, a wordless lamentation out of the heart of a forlorn outcast, harvesting his pain as his Karma ripens.
Progressively, a madman’s laughter – like the cliché out of old horror movies! – rises from deep inside the Blonk. (I tend to think, more and more, about the sound-poetic side of Jaap Blonk as… the Blonk!).

After the laughter Blonk fills in with a conversational bit, or rather a monologue of made-up words in a furious burst of make-believe morphemes. The guttural quality of these linguistic long shots turn surreal, as Blonk hacks and cuts at the would-be morphemes, chewing them fiercely and spitting them out on the floor in nameless disgust! In the end he sounds like nothing but a chained and shackled werewolf in a basement, red-eyed, drooling, desperate…

12. MINISTERN BEKLAGAR… (2nd version)

Without an introduction, Blonk falls ahead into a second version of Ministern beklagar, at the merriness of the audience.
This time he sounds even more regretful, desperately trying to persuade the attendants of the feelings of remorse on the part of the Minister!
At the end he shoots up in the pitches, sticks his thumb in his mouth, curls up and sounds like a little child creeping up into his mother’s lap to get some consolation from the fearful demands of life and society, and of course these portrayed politicians of immense power in the end are nothing but babes in their mother’s arms, seeking approval and consolation and unconditional love and a place to hide – and rarely has this come across as clear as in the second version of Jaap Blonk’s Ministern beklagar…

Blonk:

13. SUAVECITO

Suavecito commences in the long, rocking movements of an ocean swell, as Blonk breathes in and out extremely slowly, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinhalations and eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeexhalations in a wheezing, soaring breeze of breath, and yes, it’s like lying beside your loved one, breathing into her hair that flows out on the pillow “like a sleepy golden storm”, as Leonard Cohen put it in Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye:

Some of the sibilant sounds are so low that they’re almost inaudible, and the wet licking sounds serve to render an impression of gluey, gleaming ecstasy to the piece, followed by soothing and calming, wordless assurances, as the couple take rest and refuge in their own midst, in a floating, focused situation of restful bliss, until the piece ends in a sudden, smacking, thundering kiss!

The scheduled concert ends here, as the audience breaks out in roaring applause, bringing Blonk back into an encore.

Blonk:

14. OBBELE BOEP’M PAM

Blonk shows no mercy what so ever here, throwing himself and us into a wild, rocketing be-bop rhythm that rages around the hall like fireworks gone haywire, like a bowl of pebbles turned upside down above a garbage disposal unit, like sugar cubes thrown into the café fan, shreds of hardcore audio shooting out in every direction, well, like a herd of moose driven into a 747 Pratt & Whitney JT9D engine at full throttle, sucked right through, coming out the other end in minute shreds and fire, the horns ready for delivery to the Japanese!

Eventually the rhythm gets clean, bouncing like wooden balls on a hardwood surface, floodlights ensuring good vision from all angles, Blonk at times leaving the surface of events to shoot up in high and loud exclamations of exhilaration!
As soon as he can, he lets loose completely and shoots throw a recollection of sound poetic manners and methods, sort of repeating and summing up the breathless sound poetry lesson that the performance at Fylkingen has been to the attendants; a shattering, revealing journey into the core of flesh and sound, into the tearing, pulling properties of anatomic sonics at a place in the space-time continuum that is pre-lingual and perhaps even pre-natal; a brainstorming washout of sordid cultural residue and stifling customs. Obbele Boep’m Pam!