when spirits are hiding between old records...

i discovered the above drawing in a box that arrived in the mail yesterday. it was stuffed between two 78's as packing material. i bought a lot of 10 discs off ebay, most of which were terrible, but the packing job was an amazing bit of folk art, homespun sculptural ingenuity. it looked as if this stack came right out of a time machine - from the 20's into a shipping box.

some of the other things found between discs: some 10" square remnants of a 1927 sunday comics section (unfortunately it was torn in a way that no strip was complete), some 10" square remnants of some kind of paper laundry bag - a nice shade of blue and definitely also 1920's, and finally a number of 10" squares cut from a box of some sort, with a few of the remnants written or drawn on - including the masterpiece pictured - the highlight of the free stuff; particularly as it was the only thing not torn apart and fragmented. i am guessing it was done after everything was torn apart, but before the records were stuffed into a closet for 80 years.

the drawing brings up all sorts of associations from dubuffet and picasso, to early american indian drawings. note also the strange hans arp sculpture (or butterfly) flying in the air... sadly, the drawing was the best part of the contents, as the records themselves were HAMMERED and stinky...

before low-fi and free jazz...

"of course i had no experience whatever with the tape-recorder. it was only later that i became aware of the imperfections of my recordings, made directly on my amateur's machine, in comparison with those made by professionals. but, paradoxical as it may seem, i am not convinced of the superiority of the latter, in the same way that i often prefer poorly-crafted amateur's photographs to those of specialists. later, when i was in contact with technicians, i felt that all their precautions and installations counterbalanced certain advantages with a deplorable inhibitory effect and also that the recordings thus obtained, however much clearer they may be to the ear, however much freer from flaws and minor mishaps, do not speak louder to the spirit as a result. i believe that in all areas art has everything to gain by simplifying the techniques it is obliged to use... such an incredible number of extremely diverse effects can be obtained from the first instrument to come to hand alone that one wonders if it is really worth searching for others. where practical experience and good methodical knowledge of how to play the instruments used is concerned, i am evidently seriously lacking and the benefits of acquiring this knowledge are clear to me. it may be however, that in doing this there is also a risk of losing an advantage: that afforded by the improvised use of an instrument whose proper handling is not known, with the unexpected discoveries that this can bring about. having said all this, the records collected here are not presented in the spirit works with any pretentions of their own, but rather as the first experimentations of someone venturing into an area about which he knows practically nothing and it is in this spirit that i ask musicians to accept them."

jean dubuffet, musical experiences, 1961