The Korean word "eloseu" means "sexual love, Eros, after-bargain treat."
Eloseu (Sexual Love, Eros, After-Bargain Treat)
The Korean word "eloseu" means "sexual love, Eros, after-bargain treat."
New Music Utilizing the Process of V-A Synthesis and the Paintings of Colin McCahon as Graphic Scores
I've started work on a new project which uses a process called V-A Synthesis which interprets and reinterprets visual data input, in this case the paintings of Aotearoa New Zealand artist Colin McCahon as sound art and music. Pictured above is McCahon's 1971 acrylic on canvas work: "The days and nights in the wilderness, showing the constant flow of light passing into a dark landscape," and his 1972 watercolour on paper work "Light falling through a dark landscape (A)".
Soundtracks for La Coquille et le clergyman and Un Chien Andalou
I'm back working on the sountracks for La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac, and Un Chien Andalou (An Andulasian Dog) by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. The Seashell and the Clergyman is an experimental French film directed by Germaine Dulac, from an original scenario by Antonin Artaud. It premiered in Paris on 9 February 1928. The film follows the erotic hallucinations of a priest lusting after the wife of a general. Conflicts between the clergyman (Alex Allin) and the soldier (Genica Athanasiou) symbolically examine the effects of authority and conformity on society. The Seashell and the Clergyman is widely considered the first surrealist film. I'll be composing and arranging both soundtracks in keeping with the central principle used in the creation of the surrealist films, that of 'Psychic Automatism,' the divining of the unconscious, the returning to the mind its deepest functions, beyond any form of control by reason or societal conditioning. I'm utilizing and re-purposing material from my archives for the soundtracks, including prepared piano and extended techniques by Achim Kaufmann, guitarchitecture by Chuck Hammer (David Bowie), piano, bass, and electronics by Eberhard Kranemann (Kraftwerk), drums by Keiron Melling (The Fall), modular synthesizer by Suzanne Ciani (Bryan Ferry), aeolian harps and electronics by Max Eastley (Brian Eno), soundscape by Hans Peter Kuhn (Robert Wilson), and many others, as well as texts and vocals by myself, Antonin Artaud, and Salvador Dali. I'm aiming to do a live performance version of the soundtracks for Un Chien Andalou and La Coquille et le clergyman, in conjunction with screening of the films, mixing, arranging, and re-composing them in real-time. This would take place at the cinema which both of the films premiered at, the Studio des Ursulines, in Paris, which still operates today. Pictured above is a still from Un Chien Andalou, from the famous "slicing of the eye" scene.
Music Compositions for Retro-Chronal Insertion Into the Temporal Matrix at the Annulus Point of the Year 1924 for the First Meeting of the Surrealists at The Bureau of Surrealist Research
Reposted from July 14, 2022: Late last night and in the early hours of this morning, between 11pm and 2am, I created a new music composition and rediscovered an older one which then I altered and refined. Immediately, with the first of these two sound compositions, I thought of an idea I had come up with several years ago to create music compositions for the express purpose of, when the technology had been invented, sending through time to transmit at the first meeting of the surrealists at the Bureau of Surrealist Research. The pieces I made last night, in part grown out of the sound track work I have been doing for the 1928 and 1929 surrealist films 'The Seashell and the Clergyman' and 'Un Chien Andalou' by Artaud and Dulac and Buñuel and Dali respectively, felt like a perfect fit for this conceived project. While the technology does not yet exist (or does exist but is not known to the public) to perform this operation, physicists have already been able to open tiny, pinpoint black holes in space and time. I predict the near-future development of this experiment and others into a Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole, through which transmissions of sound and word and image can be made. Or perhaps the Visser model of wormhole will be the one that is used. The occult Chaos Magicians say they have already been able to, with the use of retro-chronal magick, travel through time and change past events. There is also, in the Bible, an invitation to "step onto the Mountain of the Lord," the Mountain of the Lord having been interpreted as a dimension outside of the strictures of time. I have, lately, been thinking about time, chronos and kairos time, and Time as an entity or organism or animal also. To me, while we percieve time in a linear fashion, must often elucidated by scientists and philosophers as the path of an arrow, I discern the movement of time being as a stone dropped in a body of water with concentric cicles emanating outwards and inwards at once. The first of the music compositions I have made is titled: 'Omnia (The Knife) / Retro-Chronal Visit To the Crash Site'. The first section of the work concerns the sexual abuse of the female character, Omnia, from my novels 'Monument to the Unimaginable' and 'Inexorable'. A text about the abuse is performed by a hybrid artificial intelligence and human actress, aged around the age of Omnia when she was abused, six years old. The work then jumps forward in time to when Omnia is in her mid twenties, in a relationship with the narrator of the book, Paul, who is both myself and not myself, an autobiographical duplicate and fictionalized variant of myself. This section utilizes a woman's sounds of orgasm as an operatic "aria." The final part of the composition moves through time again, to October 1970, not long before I was born (on November the 2nd) when my birth mother, Patricia, was in an automobile accident, and I myself was still a passenger in her womb. The sounds in this part of the composition always reminded me of crumpled metal in particular the twisted metal of the disaster vehicle, my mother's car, which in my unconscious and preconcious minds are fused with her womb, into a conjoint uterus-car wreck. The tissues and fibres and cellular network of her womb flesh is now outside and is a car that I drive, and the twisted metal, punctured plastic, and fractured glass, are the elements which now inside her body, are combined to make up the desolate ruins and disaster architecture of her ventre de voiture ("car-womb" or "car-belly"). I will upload these sound compositions soon and post a link to them here. Post-scriptum: If you are super-clever and/or hyper-astute then you may have noticed the word "annulus" in the title of this post, the meaning of the word relating to concentric circles like the ring patterns that are found in a tree, also relates to the description of my conception of time in the text: "the movement of time being as a stone dropped in a body of water with concentric cicles emanating outwards and inwards at once," and the concentric circles of the shooting target in the background of the photograph of the surrealists at the Bureau of Surrealist Research taken by Man Ray.
Pangalatic Graphic Score for Human-AI Interfaced Music Composition
Over 11 years, I've used a process I call V-A Snthesis (Visual-Aural Synthesis) where images are broken down and converted into units of computer data which are then interpreted and expressed in sonic form. Initially, I used algorithms to do this. Recently, I have been using artificial intelligence neural networks to reimagine the visual materials in aural form. Many of you will be aware of the new images captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The first of these, is one I am using as a graphic score to create new music. Part of the beauty of using this image as a score for composing music, is the sheer scale, in a spatial sense, it is pangalatic, in a temporal sense, it is 13.5 billion years (as the galaxies are billions of light years away, it has taken billions of years for the light to reach us). Looking at the image is literally looking back in time to not long after the creation of the universe. The AI I have chosen to work with has recently been updated with new features, so that instead of the AI doing most of the work, there are knobs and dials that can be adjusted in realtime by a human operator, altering the parameters, and playing the AI like an instrument. I experimented a little with this last night. I'll do some more work with it in the next few days and may incorporate some of the material into my soundtracks for Luis' Buñuel's and Salvador Dali's film Un Chien Andalou. Incidentally, working on these has also felt like a kind of time travel, communing with the writers, directors, cinematographers, and actors, while creating the music. There has been one of the most profound connections I've felt working with material created by other artists who are no longer living. It does make me wonder about the plasticity and malleability and porousness of time, and our capacity to move beyond it as a perceptual barrier.
Remembering Martin Emond
Martin was one of the most talented people I've met in New Zealand. He was also one of the nicest people. We both grew up in South Auckland, him one suburbe over from me. Both had violence in the home growing up. And we both wound up being successful in the arts overseas. I've felt sucifical many times myself and I remeber really clearly the day I heard Martin had killed himself. I personally feel Auckland has never been the same without him around. It's all the poorer without him there. I'm sure anyone who knew him would agree. Martin is know for his White Trash comics, which were incredibly detailed and dense. I remember the first night I met Martin, at a villa where one of my best friends was living, Marty and I had one of those drunken mind melds. I recall him saying he almost had a mental breakdown finishing the White Trash series. I said "I know exactly what you mean," because I'd been there myself working on some intense, experimental writing, which related to my stepsister Margery being murdered then raped after death. When I'd gotten back from New York, before I left Auckland to return to New York again, I bumped into Marty on K'Road, and he thanked me for inspiring him to move to LA, which he was just about to do. I was taken aback, as I didn't consider leaving NZ to be any great feat, I'd just reconnected and fallen in love with a woman who happened to living in New York (although she had also come from NZ, the same suburb as Martin). I guess I did OK in New York, artistically, I always found it easier there than in New Zealand. But it was there Martin committed suicide. He was in love and engaged to be married. His film deals with Disney where on and then off and then on again. And from the outside, he seemed to be doing great, at least from most people's points of view. I remember a year or two earlier I was sleepless wander through a deserted Auckland Inner City on a Monday or a Tuesday at 3 or 4 or 5 in the morning when I came across Martin doing the same thing. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was "depressed and just walking around." He said "Me too." We didn't say much more, because we understood, and just wished each other well, and went on out own respective way. I've got a lot of other memories of him. Going on tour with my friend who was doing music with my spoekn word performances, and Martin's band "Flame Job." Holding an avant-garde loft event in the vacant studio above Marty's downtown. But ultimately, I remeber him as a sweet, kind, beautiful person.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rtDWFQ_c1g
I Am Avoiding Talking About You
Tell students that, for homework, they should make love to the shadow of the photographer in the family portrait hanging in the cramped, airless, secret room underneath the creaking stairs. Then write a 400 word essay on the flirtatious play of morning light on the lustful crack in St. Patrick's Cathedral wall. Before Eve took a bite all was ever present eternity now everything after that is just our temptful thoughts - incessantly interupted by an endless series of single bites. Slender hands roll the grey-haired moon into its unmarked grave. The fledgling moon will be softly rebirthed between your zany thighs. The newborn moon is made of marshmallow. The famished mother takes a spiteful bite out of her squirmy baby's head. Can you tell I am avoiding talking about you? The April moon that chases the buffalo who gores the buttocks of the Buddha-astronaut who was stooping to examine the foamy hem of the sea with the eyes in the genital curtains that are blank with borrowed tears. If you deign to talk to him again, in the excitable throes of your mutual desiring, well-hid by etiquette and decorum, a single tear will slip from your morbidly dilating pupil. At which point, you will become his beddable tutee tied to the stake on a Tāmaki Makaurau traffic island. A man must kidnap a bride-to-be with goblet shaped breasts before they can be wed beneath a stelliferous empyrean. I'm still avoiding talking about you. But, then, maybe I've been talking about you all along. The coral branches tear into our skins as we make love for the first time. The coral branches pry open our bodies. The coral branches plunder our bodies of their wildest dreams. This is what happens when we suddenly remember the fragrant smell of our hyphenated surnames. Unzip your thrifted trousers and show me your predatory creature. I met her there on the stairs. "I'm mauving," she said, making a gesture of finger shushing by her womanly part. Wipe the fog from the bedroom mirror and tell me how you like to be read to aloud. Your cunt is a chameleon: one moment it is an open canyon, the next, it's an iridescent anther. An anther? The part of a stamen that contains the pollen. An anti-agression? A loving kiss. Let me cover your body with anti-agressions on the bare ground by the back stair. I can't believe you're allowing this... Your vagina: kaleidoscope chamber or roomful of teeth? Shall beauty not also have carnassial teeth? Oh, just let me fill your orifices with marshmallow. My love, pay no heed to my unfounded slander of your sovereign female person. Do not ever hear my bitter whispers in your sleep. I'm only poking fun at the deathless darkness. I wish you would believe me when I tell you my marrow is filled with love for you. You're blushing. Your lips are swollen red. Your eyes are black with poison. I want to lick the poison from your black eyes. It's such a shame you have your eyes closed. You're asleep. You're snoring softly... ZZZ-Zzzz-ZZzzz-hngGGggh-Ppbhww-zZZzzzZZ...
Omnia's Journal
Starting a new canvas today. Mural-sized, it fills the space of the longest wall in my studio. I need the step ladder to work on the uppermost sector. My mind is as blank as the canvas is. Not the blankness of a Zen 'beginner's mind,' which might have served me well creatively, but rather the blankness of 'a white void staring back at me, exposing my obvious artistic deficiencies and my intrinsic lack of value as a human being.' This morning I am a petrified forest. Perhaps I will paint that. Trees with iron trunks. Trees with zig-zag lightning branches. Trees on the verge of weeping tears of amber sap. Trees reaching up to stroke the azure skin of the sky. The first mark is the most painful to make. The first mark is a wound, through which the rest of the painting is born. The first mark is anxiety-stricken. The first mark is full of love. I hope this canvas won't be too callous to let me coat it with my soul. Ahhhh. Sweet freedom. Making mistakes. Making mistakes into miracles. Making miracles into masterpieces. 5.00 am. My body aches. I work on in the darkness. It will be light outide soon. In my making, I am seeking the unnameable. Here, in the solitude and silence, I sense the presence of God. I add flames to the trees. With my palette knife, thick swathes of impasto red and yellow and orange pigments. The flames leap and dance and crackle. They tell no tales for children's ears, but if you incline your lobe to the weave of the cloth, you might hear them spill their secrets.
Omnia Visits the Sex Club
Image conceptualized, then text-generated via AI, then processed through a Rutt-Etra video synthesizer.
Tāmaki Makaurau: I
The original Māori name for the region of Auckland, New Zealand, is Tāmaki Makaurau, which means "the place desired by many." One interpretation is the name refers to the abundance of natural resources, strategic vantage points, portage routes, and food sources which first attracted Māori, and then other settlers. Another story says that the region was the home of a beautiful Māori princess. The word makau means "favourite, object of affection, lover, spouse, wife, soulmate."
Tāmaki Makaurau: II
The original Māori name for the region of Auckland, New Zealand, is Tāmaki Makaurau, which means "the place desired by many." One interpretation is the name refers to the abundance of natural resources, strategic vantage points, portage routes, and food sources which first attracted Māori, and then other settlers. Another story says that the region was the home of a beautiful Māori princess. The word makau means "favourite, object of affection, lover, spouse, wife, soulmate."
Tāmaki Makaurau: III
The original Māori name for the region of Auckland, New Zealand, is Tāmaki Makaurau, which means "the place desired by many." One interpretation is the name refers to the abundance of natural resources, strategic vantage points, portage routes, and food sources which first attracted Māori, and then other settlers. Another story says that the region was the home of a beautiful Māori princess. The word makau means "favourite, object of affection, lover, spouse, wife, soulmate."
Travel Plans and Feature Film
Good evening everyone :-) I'm in the process of deciding whether to stay in Christchurch for a few weeks longer or head to Auckland. I'm dealing with some challenges from a government department here, and if I can successfully negotiate my way through the bureaucratic challenges at hand, then I'll stay here for a few more weeks at least. If it's proving too difficult, or not worth my while to continue to engage with the energy drain and stress of that, I'll pivot and return to Auckland, which I was planning to do at some stage anyway. I've been feeling lately, it could be exciting to make a feature film, one which draws on the material you can see here on my blog, which has been over the past few years, expressed in literature and visual art and music, but to to take those topics and themes and plots and characters and explore them in the medium of film. A number of years ago, I directed a feature film project which never quite came together in feature length form, but instead crystallized in a series of video art works. These reason it didn't work out, is to me now, with the benefit of hindsight and distance. Namely, the process I used, one which I used on music projects successfully before, and adapted to the film, wasn't the process that was going to give me the process I've aimed for. I'll do things quite differently next time and be more hands on, instead of attempting to do the work globally in dozens of countries, with me directing from New Zealand through the internet. I did learn a fair amount from the prior film project though, and worked with many talented actresses, among them Anne Louise Hassing (Lars von Trier), Stefania Casini (Dario Argento, Robert De Niro), and Kate Moran (Peter Greenaway), to name just a few. Of course, with the source material for the new film being erotic, sexual, transgressive, surreal, violent, and on occasion, flat-out insane, it could have its own unique set of challenges. Finding collaborators brave enough to take part would be one challenge I guess. But then again, I have been, in speaking to many people recently about my work, I have been pleasantly surprised that people haven't freaked out, balked at it, and rejected it outright, running away screaming as fast as their legs will carry them, but instead have found the work, exciting, entertaining, and inspirational, and cathartic. Many people have found it disturbing and upsetting also, yet those people also found the work pleasurable in some way to experience and stimulating and thought-provoking. In fact "thought provoking" has been the most common thing said about the work. I had expected people to have knee jerk reactions and to react without thinking, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how people are, well, smarter than I gave them credit for being, at least the people I've come across anyway. So, to that end, if you're an actor, a performer of some kind, or a crew member who works in film, and the work here on this blog in some way resonates with you, or would be something you'd be interested in being involved in exploring in a serious (but hopefully still fun) way in a film project, then feel free to get in touch. paul.amlehn.mail@gmail.com OK. That's it for me for now. Have a beautiful evening you Southern Hemispherers and a beautiful day you Northern Hemispherers. Paul
I Got the Desire To... (A Song Written for a Woman To Sing)
I got the desire to buy every kind of lingerie
I got the desire to
Undress at the airport security terminal
(In order to be scanned from top to tail...)
I got the desire to
Shine your torch beam at my nipple
Aren't you curious if it looks like a strawberry
Or a little melon. I got the desire to
Send myself creepy texts from nonexisting people
Until every neuron in the lizard brain is excited.
I got the desire to pee with you a bit in the ocean.
I got the desire to
Sit under the pier and
Smell each other's salty skin and
Find my body full of chills.
I got the desire to
Eat, in crazy ways, every part of your c-u-l-o. I got the desire to
Scrape a country off the map.
I got the desire to
Puff on a cigarette with a busted lip.
I got the desire to
Let a big dog drink hormonal urine from my potty.
I got the desire to
Not get lost even a little bit behind the ear's lobe
As the lover's hair wraps around his index
When making the gesture of pulling you close.
I got the desire to
Stick an ice pick through your kneecap. Sometimes, my sweet little darling,
Sometimes all my desires are a little pointy.
I admit it.
Let's dance slow and talk about the meaning of life. Life has three rules: 1. Ignore nothing.
2. Do everything.
3. Don't get too much lost inside human.
The Siren of the Tower Block
Today, wandering through Freiburg im Breisgau, I saw her for the first time. In one of the tower blocks that was no longer submerged in the North Sea. Her gaze penetrated me deeply and delved into my person in a number of different ways. Some of these were really quite pleasurable, some of them were extremely unpleasant. The way she spoke, telepathically. The way my head read her words. "You are my little baby. Come to me. I'll take care of you. I won't let anyone hurt you. You have always looked for something of me in the world. And now you have found me. Here I am, waiting for you. I have waited for so long for you to arrive. Come to me. I sense a great sadness within you. Only I have the power to alleviate it. Come to me. I will protect you. I will nurture you. I will give you all the love your mother never gave you. Come to me. Do not be afraid."
Sapiosexual Courtship
The term 'sapiosexuality' refers to those who are attracted to another person's intelligence and believe this to be their most attractive quality.
Tasmantis. Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Crying Tree.
Omnia's skin is sun-bronzed, after the three weeks we have spent in Roses, a municipality on the Costa Brava, in the North-East of Spain. The purple circles under her eyes haven't gone away yet. The doctors say its a side effect of the sedatives. The fine blonde hairs on her arms are bleached nearly white by the sun and the sea. She is beautiful, but, her heart is broken, and in a way, she is all the more beautiful because of that. I am avoiding writing about it. The unnamed, cataclysmic event. My heart is also broken, and I wonder if it will ever mend. I am inclined to disbelief that it will. I thought the trip here would be tonic for us both. A change of scenery, a new language swarming in the air around us, a new condition of light in the structure of the eye. I think being here has made things worse than before. Perhaps this was a terrible mistake. She is devastated. Beneath that, a fury, unbounded, neither able to be quelled or quenched. We wander the town like twin ghosts, estranged in each other's company. She blames me, I can feel it, even though she denies it. She blames herself and God too. She went to the Santa Maria Assumpta on the day that we arrived, and hasn't set foot in a church since. I try to talk with her but its hopeless. Either she is utterly mute or howling with grief. Great gouts of sadness, pouring out of her, whenever she is not choking on them. Primal shrieks and yowls that sound inhuman. And at night, over the sound of the waves breaking against the cliffs, Omnia tells me she can hear the keening of the Keres. Even through our child is asleep in the womb of the earth and will never awaken, Omnia's breasts are still expressing milk. The mammarian issuance, exuded from the grape-like sacs of her alveoli, are a kind of tear also. A glacier is forming underneath her eye. A lacteal archipelago, at once saturnine and opulent. There is a flowering bush in the back garden that Omnia waters with her tears. The two Omnia's, the one I fell in love with, and her dark, deranged sister, that usurped her and assumed her place as my wife, like a changeling bride slipped beneath the sheets of our marriage bed, shed their doleful droplets onto the shrub, which Omnia confabulates as growing from the skull-mound of our unborn son. She has named this plant "The Crying Tree". She visits it twice a day. One at sunrise, once more at sunset. It is a solemn ritual which helps her re-attach her heart to her breast. If she does not go to the tree the pump of her heart beats stroboscopically, swells up like a pufferfish, rises high up to the ionosphere, then rises higher still and balloons to breaking point... and, finally, with a strange blissfulness, passionately bursts.
Cosomoerotica: Hourglass Nebula (Conjunctio)
A shift from the microscopic to the pangalatic scale... The "Pharmaerotica" series fused microscopy images of drugs with 1920s erotica. The "Cosmoerotica" series combines telescopy images of comsomolical phenomena light years away from our present location, with erotica through the ages from prehistory to antiquity to the present day. "Cosomoerotica: Hourglass Nebula (Conjunctio)" is the first of these works. Conjunctio is The alchemical stage where the Solar King and the Lunar Queen (the two opposing substances of sulphur and mercury (also known as Quicksilver)) are joined together. This union is usually depicted as sexual intercourse, and results in the birth of a child "the Red Son of the Sun," also known as the "Alchemical Hermaphrodite" who possesses both male and female attributes.
Pharmaerotica: Ketamine
Revisiting the Pharmaerotica Series, with a new work created March 28, 2024. The Pharmaerotica series is made up of micrographs (microscopy photographs) of a selection of different drugs mated with images of vintage erotica. The title is a portmanteau word comprised of "pharmakon" - "drug," with earlier meanings being "poison," "sorcery," and "remedy," respectively; and "erotica," from "erotikos" - "caused by passionate love, referring to love," from eros (genitive erotos) "sexual love."
Pharmaerotica: Psilocybin
From the Pharmaerotica Series created in 2022. The Pharmaerotica series is made up of micrographs (microscopy photographs) of a selection of different drugs mated with images of vintage erotica. The title is a portmanteau word comprised of "pharmakon" - "drug," with earlier meanings being "poison," "sorcery," and "remedy," respectively; and "erotica," from "erotikos" - "caused by passionate love, referring to love," from eros (genitive erotos) "sexual love".
Pharmaerotica: Methamphetamine and Mephedrone
From the Pharmaerotica Series created in 2022. The Pharmaerotica series is made up of micrographs (microscopy photographs) of a selection of different drugs mated with images of vintage erotica. The title is a portmanteau word comprised of "pharmakon" - "drug," with earlier meanings being "poison," "sorcery," and "remedy," respectively; and "erotica," from "erotikos" - "caused by passionate love, referring to love," from eros (genitive erotos) "sexual love".
Siaan (First-Class Passenger Riding on the Back of God's Immaculate Sperm)
The stories in the book works: Omnia's Journal, Tasmantis, and Monument to the Unimaginable, span three generations of characters: Omnia and Paul, their twins Venesia and Venexia, and Venesia and Venexia's daughter Siaan (pronounced See-Arne, rather than Sharn). Siaan is a redemptive, tanscendent figure, who surmounts the tragic legacy of her ancestral clan, and as such, is a personification of hope.
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