Once in a while an odd record comes along. Once in a good while something really obscure gets put on CD. This is really obscure!

America is a land of spoken word (Speech! Speech!) and of poetry readings (“I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, naked, hysterical, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix…”) and of commercial pollution (“I drink Doctor Pepper, and I’m proud, I used to be alone in the crowd, but when you look around these days, there seems to be a Doctor Pepper craze…”).
This somewhat mystical – or unidentified – CD, from Erik Belgum, may fit somewhere into a mixture of these American spoken word traditions, with the added oddity of sound poetry, which is a European tradition, of French and Swedish origin, but well and alive in the U.S.A. and Canada too since decades.

Erik Belgum calls this “Ambient Fiction”, and then provides an “explanation”:

“Ambient Fiction changes the smell of a room.
Ambient Fiction restructures the existing architecture.
Ambient Fiction is a weather system coming in from Detroit
or maybe Dallas/Fort Worth”

The second statement is what it’s about. It’s a restructure of the architecture of language. This is not at all a new idea, but I’ve never seen (heard) it utilized in such an extended work.
There are examples of the gradual restructuring of language in works by text-sound poets and sound poetry poets like Bernard Heidsieck, François Dufréne, Åke Hodell, Öyvind Fahlström and others, but… this is longer, much longer…

The idea is to tell a story that sounds coherent and a little silly, but then gradually change it around, taking lines and mixing them up, in shorter and shorter pieces, so that you after while have all the ingredients of the story, but in the “wrong” order, like you’re grinding down language to get an essence of it.
You have four pieces called “Monologues”, which they are. A male voice – a little hysterical or mannered – tells a story, some story, some soap-opera story, like reading out of a manuscript at an audition for a theatre play, a little nervously or maybe teen-age cocky, making you feel a little irritated. Then, after each Monologue, except after the last one, comes longer pieces, called, in order:

“Bounced Around”
“The Idea of Permeability”
“Sky High Lifestyle”

In these longer pieces the whole ensemble takes part, in layered speech, sometimes a fraction electronically manipulated. The main idea, though, is a classical text-sound, sound poetry method: the layering of sentences and words, where the sentences pile up on each other or spread out through the left-and-right speakers, with variations in volume as well as sound quality etcetera, but… layered.

I don’t know what to make of this record. I’m glad someone (American Composers Forum’s Recording Assistance Program) had the guts to release it, though, because this is something different, even though I’ve named a few influences above. It’s not going to be a best seller, but then again, no records in my collection are best sellers. This double-CD is a statement of sorts in the age of meaningless gibberish crowding us through commercials and self-centered egoistic utterances by murky politicians. Would I listen to this rather than Bach’s Cello Suites on a Sunday afternoon…? I don’t know, but there is a panicky statement in here somewhere that is long due… I think!

I didn’t expect this piece… That is a very good mark of distinction in itself!