The works for "Hans Castorp cycle" (12 pages long poem and 3 sound art pieces) is based on Jelena Glazova's research on "dictatorship of human body" - based on Thomas Mann reflections on this topic, expressed in his novel "Magic Mountain". Jelena starts her investigation with the effort to define the physicality of human life processes, asking questions on how life is actually possible - how inorganic matter becomes organic and how matter acquires possibility to think, the questions that are still not answered by the science. Jelena used excerpts from "Magic Mountain" as found material, altering the vision of Hans Castorp - the Doppelganger he sees becomes a female phantom, which adds reference to feminist discourse, as we observe estranged female body as an object from a male gaze point of view.
The album was created as a commission by HEM Archive project:
HEM is a non-profit devoted to sound, sound art, audio software, and art writing. Online are exhibitions of past archived work, new commissions, experimental audiobooks, and free tools for making music and sound art. IRL HEM offers artists and practitioners stipends, grants, and commissions to further their artistic labor
Curator's note: "Latvian poet, philosopher, sound and visual artist Jeļena Glazova cuts up Thomas Mann's sweeping Zeitroman on morbidity, temporality, and political twilight, The Magic Mountain. Posing as the floating phantom who one tubercular winter's night consecrated Mann's protagonist, Hans Castorp, Jeļena scrapes and carves out the emancipatory raison d'être of a woman Doppelgänger encountering her own exile in the zone of sexual capital, reclaiming —as Mann writes— "that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth" that is life's emergence from non-living matter.
For this, her first HEM Archive commission, Jeļena rewrites fragments of Mann's bubbling-over nineteen tens' science jargon, replacing Castorp's passive snow angel with an agent, recalcitrant "she".
Sonically Glazova treats us to a triptych of ecstatic, Radigue-inflected drones, each 20 minutes long. These slabs of sound develop as glacially as Swiss snowbanks. Corruscating in the twilight, they delineate floating veils of flesh. Rather than simply soundtrack her (inter)textual weavings and corporeal speculations, Glazova's visceral noise aesthetic serves itself as a kind of floating body; the map and trace of the artist's embodiment made by processing her own vocalizations electronically.
This piece is part of her ongoing research into dictatorial forms at the University of Latvia. Here she focuses on what she calls "the dictatorship of the human body". She interrogates the order of life: How inorganic matter becomes organic, how matter acquires the ability to think and counter-interrogate, and ultimately, how this order is controlled and governed by authoritarianisms both interior and international."
credits
released January 10, 2023
Cover photo credits: Kiki de Montparnasse (in movie "Ballet mécanique" by Fernand Leger), 1924, Man Ray | Courtesy of the Man Ray Trust
Jelena Glazova is sound artist/visual artist and poet based in Riga, Latvia. Experimental music activity field - noise,
drone, ambient, minimalist music usually constructed from processed vocals. Working in interdisciplinary areas of contemporary art, combining in her works image, poetic text, experimental sound and installation....more
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