WOLMAN, GIL - MEGAPNEUMES (LP)

"This third Gil J Wolman record released by alga marghen, bringing together mégapneumes from the 60s, shed new linght into the poetic revolution of the time, or a kind of organic infra-language. It's the physical poetry of a serial killer that we hear recorded in the two "Mégapneumes" as well as in the extract from the (last?) "Mégapneumes" (excerpt), the tape that was found still wound on Wolman's tape recorder after his death. "Les Callas", an astonishing piece possibly based on several super-imposed recordings of Wolman's voice at Radio Télévision Française (ca 1961), features a Lettrist choir recycling Rimbaudian vowels, while high-pitched screams "à la Artaud" emerge, culminating in a polyphony worthy of some tribe resistant to domestication. "Un coup pour rien", "Un coup pour deux" and "Tu vas la taire ta gueule", recorded at Radio Canada in 1965, are presented here for the first time on record, completing the program of this historical and radical anthology. In a conversation with Ilse Garnier, she told Frederic Aquaviva (the curator of this edition for alga marghen) that Henri Chopin had precipitated the end of his attempts at sound poetry with this definitive formula: "Le souffle, c'est moi!". On the other hand, in Gil J Wolman's record library, we could find this eloquent dedication by Chopin on his record "Audiopoems" LP, released by the English label Tangent in 1971: "For Gil J Wolman, evident in 1 (because the first), evident in 1971, evident in 2071, evident in 3071, in short to the sup-herbal Gil". The same Chopin in his book "Poésie Sonore Internationale" published in 1979, placed Wolman at the very end of the old poetic world: "This one - historically - is our hinge, since it goes beyond the phonetic poem made of letters. He invented his mégapneumes in 1951, poems in 'expectorations', without verbs or semantics, going from the point of view of speech to negation, from the point of view of breath to the concreteness of the air to be expressed". But unlike Isidore Isou, Wolman was not the sort of person to send out a leaflet in order to make clear what he had achieved with this new poetry, and besides, he himself had consigned Isou to the old world, with the new beginning represented by his mégapneumes, which in fact date from 1950, when he first joined the Lettrist movement. It is also a misunderstanding of Wolman's work to forget that he was undoubtedly one of the first poets to use the resources of the tape recorder and its varispeed, for example in "L'Anticoncept", in 1951, also used a decade later by Brion Gysin with "I Am that I Am" and Henri Chopin. Also, in 1973, François Dufrêne produced a manuscript on a torn silkscreen poster where one can read "Gil J Wolman is one of the most important phonetic poets"." (label info)