If there’s one thing that expresses why you might (could/should/will?) find Flux de Bouche exciting, it’s this: for all the awesome shit that has come into music via technological advances, your synths and your samplers and your laptops, there’s still room for the exploration of what is probably the most basic way we have of making sounds — the human voice. We still don’t know what a voice can do!
The hilarious and perfectly representative cover of the album is a sequence of photographs of Jaap Blonk’s face captured mid-flow, bizarrely contorted with the exaggerated expressiveness of silent film. Comic and a little disturbing, it’s a kind of early warning for the extremes of Blonk’s grotesque and charming vocal athleticism. But it’s also an echo of a similar series of pictures of Kurt Schwitters, whose Ursonate, which Blonk learned by heart at an early stage in his career and has performed many times, was one of the main inspirations for Blonk’s own distinctive vocalizations. Blonk’s works belong to the category, such as it is, of sound poetry, but although obviously there’s plenty of use of literary techniques in the composition, Flux de Bouche is all about the performance. And Blonk also has roots in jazz; he played saxophone up until 1995, when he decided to focus solely on his vocal work, and has collaborated with various leading lights of the free-jazz scene. The sound poetry + jazz combination (reductive though that may be) emphasizes Blonk’s feel for the spontaneity of improvisation, the subversion of convention, and all that cool stuff associated with the two styles. But most importantly, while Flux de Bouche certainly isn’t brainless, it also doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Of course, just because Flux de Bouche is a solo voice record, doesn’t mean it all sounds the same — far from it. Blonk displays a monstrous kind of virtuosity far removed from the skewed adolescent conception one sometimes still encounters (y’know, that kind of virtuosity that involves people thinking that hitting as large a range of notes as possible as quickly as possible is a worthy end in itself). Instead, there’s a frightening array of vocal textures, unusual techniques powered by a lack of inhibition or respect for what vocal cords “should” be doing. Some more striking examples include the plosive sequence on “Popocatepetl” that resembles a kind of deranged beatboxing until Blonk erupts into a kind of (planned?) coughing sound, or the linguistics-influenced phonetic exploration in “Rhotic” that can invoke only jealousy in anyone who is, like I am, a non-rhotic speaker of English. Blonk also uses a multiplicity of different languages (Dutch, German, and English among others, as well as host of garbled in-betweeners), which results in post-Babel nightmare of semi-communication and mishearing. Language and meaning are put on trial: the semantic content of the spoken word is methodically stripped down to varying kinds of animalistic proto-expression. Some of the tracks are originals by Blonk, others interpretations of works by other poets; some seem wholly improvised (“Flux de Bouche,” for example, is “a more or less random fragment of the flow of my mouth at time I cannot help uttering,” according to the liner notes), others produced according to certain methodological procedures.
By my lights, particular highlights include the two versions of “Der Minister,” which descend from an intelligible sentence (“Der Minister bedauert derartige Äusserungen”) to nonsense by the systematic removal of consonants and vowels, respectively. These two tracks are also great examples of how in Flux de Bouche the formal principles behind the compositions are always rendered almost irrelevant given the corporeal nature of the execution, aleatory happenstance, and the limits of the body’s endurance. My personal favorite, though, is the album’s closing number “(brüllt),” an interpretation of a poem of Tristan Tzara’s and — speaking from experience — the track most likely to cause an innocent bystander, chancing across the unholy act of someone enjoying it, to question the sanity of both Blonk and the enthusiastic listener. The majority of the track’s nine minutes consist of Blonk shouting one word, over and over, his voice becoming increasingly ragged, until around the seven-minute mark, it cracks — and still continues this tortured repetition, right up until the almost offhand last words of the album: “der sich immer noch sehr sympathisch findet” — who still considers himself quite likeable! Fair enough, I’d say.
If you’re the kind of person who regrets the lack of “humanity” in certain kinds of music “these days” (no comment), you might be happy to know that, as the album proclaims, “no electronics have been used on the voice sound.” But Blonk’s recent work and certain collaborations have extended into sampling and other electronics. And even more excitingly for the technologically-minded Blonk fan, there’s an iPhone app, the YappoPhone, and its slightly more limited online predecessor, the Blonk Organ, both using sounds produced by his vocal chords. Blonk may work with a particularly primitive instrument and draws heavily on tendencies of an avant-garde now almost a century old, but he has an eye to the present and to the future. And, sound poetry never having really been enough in fashion to go out of it, Blonk seems to be finding intriguing ways of ensuring he doesn’t stay stuck in the past. There’s always something to be said for taking something as everyday as the human voice and turning it to something as weird and surprising as Blonk does.
You can hear the whole thing on Ubuweb.
