a Monstrosity Somewhat Submerged

If by chance, in polite company, someone would mention an Icelandic artist, as a rule, one would be forced to make an offhand remark about the virtues of pristine Nature. Of course: We are speaking about Iceland! And in our days of environmental angst, where all political efforts seem to take the form of an old Freudian nightmare -- the more I try to run away, the less I can move -- that island in the north comes to mind in either of these two guises: A sub-arctic paradise where unspoiled highlands represent the European's last chance to encounter nature in its undomesticated form, or even in its extra-terrestrial form(e.g. before the NASA astronauts headed to the moon, they trained on Icelandic lava). Or, conversely, an island of spirited nature, a pixy country, woven together by myth and rock, where earth and humans are intertwined in one harmonic Saga.

Now, as contradictory as these two notions are, they share at least one common (repressed) denominator: The thwarted desire to reclaim man's lost origin, as such a melancholic wish of the Beautiful Soul, indeed a fantasy about restoring one harmony to the world. Notice how Carl Sagan's forward-looking science fiction novel Contact resembles in this respect the arch-conservative Yeats' poetic hindsight. Through and through, this is of course an anti-modernist ideology, be it po-mo or otherwise. However, whereas good wits and irony would prevent anyone voicing aloud aestheticism of this sort, the subject of Icelandic nature seems to allow even the most hardened cynic to chime in. And many Icelandic artists have allowed their work to become a surface for this screen of fantasy.

It is therefore contrary to good manners, tongue-in cheek, that David Brynjar Franzson presents his piece, a Guide for the Dead through the Underworld. As someone who is intensely aware of the contextual background of the supposedly most abstract surface, i.e. in the auditory arts, he will invoke ready-made associations on a textual level, but dispel familiar enchantments on the procedural level, thereby creating not necessarily anything new as a concept, complete and self-contained, but a space wherein the new can take place. In this case a freak of nature: The monster.

As it turns out David Brynjar Franzson subverts the first assumption one would make of an Icelandic artist working with anything that has to do with nature, that is offering an alternative space on the periphery of the modern world. Instead he reveals a thoroughly modernistic problem in the concept of nature: The place of the ready-made as an auditory object between materiality and meaning. If one theorizes in line with a mechanistic view of the late 19th and 20th century that the physical impact of sound on the human skin is a clash of surfaces, then the referential meaning of that sound must be thought of as a monstrosity submerged in the surface. As if on the sea, an ancient image comes to mind of a wormlike Kraken ascending from the depths. But wouldn't it be a mistake to declare it a modernistic project to cleanse all things so hideously unseemly? Or how are we to understand the youthful cry of Artur Rimbaud "Il faut etre absolument moderne."? Must the Absolute mean here a zealous dedication to puritanism? Ever more abstractions? Ever more surface without meaning? Or must we understand the Absolute here with a Hegelian twist? i.e. as a progressive emancipation, not by pure annihilation, but by an assimilation of the contradictions? For example, what are we to make of Rimbaud's poetic synaesthesia, his call to the barricades: We must confuse the senses! And even more radically--because Rimbaud, as a child of his century, was still too bound to the "senses"--even more, must we not dedicate ourselves to the task of confusing the categories?

By extension, in the world of the visual arts, consider why it was Marcel Duchamp's project that ended up leading the way, rather then, say, Picasso's. Duchamp's idea of a ready-made object, snatched out of any given frame, did not only unlock the painting, it revealed how referential meaning is already and always embedded in the physical thing. Since then, of course, the history of the arts has been riddled by attempts to either abstract away the referentiality, or, not as persistently, the materiality. Whatever our opinion is on whether the abstract minimalist were successful in doing so in the visual arts, it remains an intriguing project for the auditory art world (if such a distinction is meaningful), to question as to what kind of a thing a ready-made sound object is.

An association that might come in mind, when one hears the title a Guide for the Dead through the Underworld, is Jules Vernes' story about the voyagers who descended down a crater of the volcano Snaefellsjokull and entered the underworld. But David Brynjar Franzson subverts that notion with a multi-layered reference. As he explains, the title is taken from Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings and is a mistranslation of the title of a work by the Swedish mystic sage Swedenborg.

"In his work," David explains, "Swedenborg describes extreme hallucinations that revealed to him the details of heaven and hell and all of the creatures within. In a way similar to medieval bestiaries, Swedenborg uses objects and animals from his everyday life to describe the unknown and indescribable, creating a monstrous image -- from known archetypes and objects -- of the realm that lies beyond the boundary of what is known."

"In medieval maps and bestiaries, unseen creatures-monsters from far away parts of the world-represent the unknown that lies beyond the boundary of the known world. In these bestiaries, the monsters are described using icons taken from the everyday surroundings of the authors such as animal parts or iconic structures-the Griffon, for example, is described as a lion with eagle wings and the tail of a serpent. Many descriptions of unknown creatures also share archetypes-The Chinese and European dragons, for example, share a similar archetype-they are both fire breathing aerial creatures-but each is constructed from animal parts that represent the culture from which the creature originates."

As per definition of monsters by Claude Levi-Strauss: A combination of objects (living or inanimate), each separately belonging to a natural category, but combined they form the "unnatural". David goes on to explain that in each part of a Guide for the Dead through the Underworld, there are sounds that are idiomatic to each instrument-or extended techniques-and are used as the primary sound material. The sounds are treated as found objects-i.e. as independent sounds rather than as gestural components in the traditional musical sense.

"Each sound is treated as an instance of any of a number of sound archetypes taken from my everyday life-such as the ticking sound of a red toy duck that I had as a child, the brakes of large trucks squealing as they grind to a halt on the avenue next to my apartment or the low rumble of the boiler in the basement of my apartment. In each piece I construct a musical surface from these archetypes-sometimes transcribing environmental recordings into the final musical surface, sometimes cataloging the sounds of the instruments based on these archetypes and other times I construct larger musical gestures from the isolated and disembodied sounds. In a sense, I construct unseen monsters from the disembodied sounds of the instrument and from different elements from my immediate environment. The order of the different parts of the project is left to be decided for each individual production of the project, mirroring the creation of the unknown from fragments of the known."

Valur Brynjar Antonsson