KRÜSI, HANS - EX HK. (LP)

"While preparing a new edition of Anton Bruhin works, alga marghen discovered some misterious tapes by Hans Krasi. Fascinated by the raw and brut contents of those sounds, mixing field recordings of insects, sheeps and distant bells with primitive chanting, percussive noises and distorted radio folk songs, alga marghen started to conceive one of the most obscure editions in his catalogue. The Swiss-born, self-taught painter Hans Krasi (1920-95) was a wiry man who eked out an existence on the margins of society. Even among outsider-art experts, his work is less well known than that of his Swiss compatriot Adolf Wölfli, who died in 1930 and whose richly patterned drawings have become treasures of classic European art brut, or raw art, made by untrained, visionary artists. Krasi was orphaned as an infant and brought up on a farm in northeastern Switzerland by foster parents who largely ignored him. He scraped by with odd jobs (including gardening work) and eventually settled in the city of St. Gallen. There Krasi lived in run-down buildings. In his late 20's, he began commuting by train almost daily to Zurich, to the west, where he sold flowers and, later, his artworks, on the Bahnhofstrasse, one of the most luxurious shopping streets in Europe. Among the wall-to-wall clutter of Krasi's ramshackle lodgings, where pigeons flew in and perched, evidence of an unexpectedly experimental spirit abounded, including Krasi's old cameras and the second-hand tape recorders with which he liked to capture the sounds of birds, insects and church bells. The artist's inventiveness and fertile imagination seemed to contrast sharply with his humble way of life. Krasi took subjects from the agrarian world that he knew: alpine farmhouses, forested mountains, cows, birds, rabbits and cats. In his varied oeuvre, the folkloric and the psychedelic often appear to converge. Some works are even hallucinatory, with bright, brushy passages of acid green, lemon yellow or Pepto-Bismol pink in which watchful, lounging cats, clusters of dithering birds or watery human figures huddle or writhe. issued in collaboration with the Swiss Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau (the repository of the artist's estate)." (label info) After being out of stock for 15 years and following the many solicitations over the past decade, Alga Marghen decided to do a new edition to be included as the first record of the new Musique Brut series. Edition limited to 150 copies.