The text by Jesse Glass which Charles Krutzen works with on track one, is submitted here courtesy of Jesse Glass. The copyright is Jesse Glass'. Please contact him if you would like to reprint these texts. Please also note that the original text is presented with varying and very expressive graphics, i.e. different size fonts and varying placement on the page. None of these attributes are present here, where only the bare textual content is presented :

The Mayakovski session commences with a scratchy voice out of a lacquer disc, or at least it is made to sound that way. It reminds me of, and recreates the feeling and atmosphere of, a recording of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the Opal sub label of British historical label Pearl (OPAL CD 9856), which, in addition to historical musical recordings also presents some highly interesting spoken word documents, like the recording with Lenin from 1919 which I am referring to, when he spoke on the subject: “What is the power of the Soviets?” The same CD sports recordings of Nikolai Vasilievich Krilenko in 1920 (“We have begun to build our state”), Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov in 1936, Leon Trotsky in Mexico 1938, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in 1941 and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in the most recent of the recordings on the Pearl CD.
Krutzen’s CD immediately falls in with that eerie historical documentary idiom, which connects us through wormholes in time, making all history seem recent, yes, in fact making it feel that everything happens simultaneously, that all places are here, all times now – which indeed is the only realistic and for that matter, compassionate, way to perceive life and the world. All that ever happened happened in the NOW of itself, and in the HERE of the ones it happened to. Every other concept of history (past or future) is a form of illusionary detachment.

The lacquer voice episode is very short, occurring right at the beginning of the piece, but it sort of sets the emotional standards, or the spiritually ambient atmosphere, as it were, for the rest of the work.

Charles Krutzen kicks in like some 19th or early 20th century classical Shakespearean, like, for instance, Lewis Waller reciting Hen. V: III/1 (“Once more unto the breach”) in 1911, or John Giellgud reciting the same piece in 1930, in fact both – together with many other old time Shakespeareans – found on another disc from Pearl; a CD titled Great Shakespeareans (GEMM CD 9465). Krutzen overdoes his part in the exact way, which was fashionable back then in the 19th century and the early 20th, with a dramatic vibrato that sounds mostly comical to our latter day ears, but which indeed has that patina of history to it! However, the text here isn’t William Shakespeare’s, but the prolific and wild Jesse Glass’!

This is also when Krutzen’s magnificent mastery of the art of electroacoustics and electronics is revealed, as a massive but distinguished and dense – but also transparent – wall of sound sweeps the plains free of any loose debris from recent brainstorms or any subconscious litter that might have surfaced on the shores of the consciousness or its close vicinity.
It is a privilege to have Jesse Glass’ texts at hand while listening through these sonic adventures, and if feasible they should definitely be submitted with the CD.

There is a feeling of circling, rolling, tumbling barrels full of herring in the electroacoustics, and a maddening forging activity of steely sounds, placing the scene in my imagination on the coastline of the Baltic, where there are steelworks and fish… but this is purely a creation of my personal associative tendencies, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the real fantasy of this piece…
Another sensation in the electronics is that of speeding down the track on a locomotive; perhaps one of Lenin’s old steam engines!

The voice of Krutzen - expressive, alive, spitting, shouting, whispering, pleading – weaves in and out of the wild and creaking commotion of the massive motion of moving steel and iron of the electronics, as the poetic intensity of Jesse Glass’ text seasons the experience with salt in sores, pepper in eyes, loud slaps of cheeks that are glowing red from the whisking palms of the poet, slapping for Zen enlightenment between the loudspeakers.

A Russian voice renders a special authenticity to the factory-poetic lashing out of the essence of the desperation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the rising steel-dust of planned economy and the subterranean crumpling of forbidden poems on scrap-paper being passed around like holy grails at the risk of execution paints a grueling picture of hardship with bortsj and black tea!

The relentless audio of Charles Krutzen hooks up to a tradition of distinguished desperation, into which the poetry of Jesse Glass fits like meteors through the atmosphere, flaring up and burning like torches inside this heavy sonic activity, under the awesome stress of auditive gravitational pull, which could easily break language apart, having loose fragments of morphemes shower down through the soundscape like utter sound poetry of the kind that Henri Chopin or François Dufrêne might equip us with.

I recall “Hey, Lenin, why are the comrades betraying the revolution?” by the celebrated late pioneering sound-poet and composer of electroacoustics and textsound pieces Åke Hodell from Sweden, who reveled in sarcasms in the piece mentioned. All the text of the piece is delivered in short pieces in three languages; Swedish, English and Russian. The build-up is fantastic. The piece has not been issued, but rests in the sonic dorms of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and in the vaults of Fylkingen Records. It was a huge mistake not to release it with Hodell’s other textsound works on the triple CD “Verbal Brainwash and Other Works” on Fylkingen Records in 2000 (FYLP 1018-1-2-3), since it is one of Hodell’s most important and most hilarious and seriously humorous textsound pieces.

The sheer aggressive force of Krutzen’s and Glass’ “Mayakovski is dead” calls to mind another acquaintance of mine, Israeli-Swedish composer and enfant terrible Dror Feiler, who has created massive sound works like “Intifadan”, “MAVAC” or “Schlafbrand”.

A label that publishes an great number of CDs in much the same desperate vein is Swedish label Firework Edition Records, procured by composers, musicians and performers Kent Tankred and Leif Elggren. Their CDs are being reviewed elsewhere on the Sonoloco site.

The second track on the CD – “Fantasy c/v” – is a work by Charles Krutzen himself, without collaborators. It was originally made for a CD on Rod Summers’ label VEC. Summers is an Englishman living in Holland since many years. He was one of the first Mail-Artists to concentrate on audio works through the mail. Summers compiled tapes sent to him by various Mail-Artists, and sent them out in the manner of assembling magazines. He was one of the first Mail-Artists to use the computer for graphics, and in the nineties he combined an interest in bird watching with his Mail-Art activities.

“Fantasy c/v” is a heavily munching mouthpiece of the Rabelaean, Gargantuan style, i.e. good old medieval Central European table manners, with wordings spoken in layers and permutations by Charles Krutzen in his own local dialect. This is European sound art at its exquisite best, with historical associations to fat-assed ladies and bowls of fruit, bottles of wine – and an ominous risk of the plague as a murmuring backdrop to the feast! Ah, I love the richness of smells and tastes in this piece! Magnificent!

The last piece – “Selfportrait” - is also solely by and with Charles Krutzen. It is short, just 30 seconds, and was created for a Rod Summers CD.
It is a frantic uproar of speech and doggish growls, again in Krutzen’s dialect. At the end it seems this dialect appears both backwards and forwards, and the heated argument that Krutzen seemed to have had with his good old self as he was having an extra voluminous shit calms down into reflection and consideration, and this extremely interesting and enjoyable CD has come to an end after just 15 and a half minutes.