Search - Hartmut Geerken, Art Ensemble of Chicago :: Zero Sun No Point

Farewell to the AEOC

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 01/15/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

"_Zero Sun No Point_ is a 2CD set of a pair of related radio musicworks (they're described in the liner notes as "plays" but that's nonsense: they're rather closer to John Cage's musicircus works, using an unconducted "time-line" structure that involves live musicians, tapes, internet participation, &c); it's a 1996 collaboration between Hartmut Geerken & the Art Ensemble of Chicago (after Jarman had departed the band, but only a few years before Lester Bowie's death). The two pieces are dedicated to Mynona (whom I hadn't encountered before: an apparently very strange German writer whose real name was Salomo Friedlaender, friend of the Dadaists & Expressionists, author of "Creative Indifference", "I-Heliocentre" & "The Magic I") & Sun Ra, both of whose writings are included, as tape-recorded material or as read (in various languages) by the performers or members of the audience. Two hour-long performances that also include taped fragments of Pound & Artaud, bits of Kant, a text written by Baraka especially for the performance, &c--my favourite thing was a deafening roar of swarming bees which was broadcast over the audience via loudspeakers. (This is in relation to one anecdote about Ra's oddball literalism: he claimed once to Geerken that his neighbours were constantly stung by bees because their last name was "Rose".) Though the liner notes are silent on this, there seems to be some post-performance manipulation, as some sections of the piece are subject to Burroughsian cutup (in particular, a medley of jazz performances on the 1st disc, including "I Didn't Know What Time It Was", is cruelly abbreviated; & on the 2nd disc, parts of Ra's correspondence with the US government pertaining to his incarceration for his being a conscientious objector during WW2), & Steve Lake's as-it-happened internet report from the stage doesn't quite correspond to the sequence of events on disc (where the Baraka text & the Ra text "the truth about the planet earth is a bad truth" come before, not after, a fragile waltz). Both performances end with the AEOC's great farewell, "Odwalla"; & Bowie's in especially good form on the 1st disc."