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The Science of Imaginary Solutions | ||||||||||||||||||||
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 Sonic Arts Network present the latest installment in their subscription CD series. 'Pataphysics is a curated compilation with 22 wide ranging tracks. As usual the music is supplied in a lovely 7 inch booklet with drawings and informative scribblings about the artists and some good texts about the history and followers of the movement. 'Pataphysics is defined as the Science of Imaginary Solutions. Outlined by the pistol toting literary madman Alfred Jarry, his work and ideas have long since been fuelling maniacs and geniuses around the world. To review an album that contains such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Boris Vian, Harpo Marx, Robert Wyatt and Gavin Bryars and is based on the work of Alfred Jarry is hardly fair. I would not hesitate to recommend this album to anyone. It is by default the best thing ever, merely because it pushes the secrets of 'Pataphysics and other Dada suicidal tendencies to a wider audience. This sort of stuff rarely gets bathed in the warm light publicity and it's all the better for it. Most of these contributors have been working away sure in the knowledge of their own genius and patiently waiting for everyone else to catch up, happily ignoring both fashion and reality. A lesson to us all. Starting off with the extremely good value for money silent track by Alphonse Allais 'Marche Funebre compose pour les Funeraillies'. This promotes the wonderful idea of plagiarism by anticipation, the idea that somehow John Cage's famous work 4'33 which appeared 70 years later, has been ripped off via accidental imaginary time travel. Jarry himself features on a couple of scratchy old 78 or phonograph transfers calling to us from 110 years ago through an absinthe soaked barrel organ. Boris Vian, more well known for his novels Froth on a Daydream and I Spit on your Grave delivers a formidable romantic torch song concerning a letter that he is writing to the President telling him that he refuses to go to war and is ready to be shot by the police for desertion. Time will tell who has left a more helpful mark on history, is it Harpo or Karl Marx? Pataphysicians all around the world have made they choice and this CD concurs that the former is clearly the one to lay your bets on. It could also be that Karl Marx never made anything as remotely frivolous as this boogie woogie ballet. Luc Etienne's phonetic palindromes are extremely clever and eerie poems that are the same when played backwards or forwards. Is this Plagiarism by anticipation again, but this time it's David Lynch's backwards speaking dwarf who needs to call the lawyers. The rest of the album is a mixture of pure unclassifiable strangeness, some of it coming from jazz or rock or poetry or electroacoustics, but nothing I believe as bonkers as Nigely Lennon's 'The Man with the Axe', which is a sort of sugar hill, trouble funk eighties New York bloc party celebration of Mr. Jarry. It has to heard to be believed and the lyrics, the lyrics! "Alfred Jarry, the Man with the Axe Modern civilization is what he attacks." If ever there was proof that Jarry's artistic heritage is still inspiring us, this album is it. His thoughts, playfulness and irreverence are still pertinent today. Long may such wonderful nonsense continue. Review by Mark McLaren
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