“to observe secret police activity in files
each projectile
a broadcast medium”
Armand’s writing is a testimony, recorded in shorter & longer texts, of “the megaphones of Prague”: based on observation of these mouthpieces-of-anything, with their past & lived present: a definition of the city by way of loudspeakers, of orders & distributors of all kinds of messages, in a combination of poetry, photography, installation, collage: also an evocation of what lies beneath the megaphone, its surroundings, but also its time, as well as our personal subjective time, the moment we pass under it, what mood is affected, & the sounds we imagine the megaphone to be making. The megaphone might be mute, but it still resonates with a spectral voice. And then there’s the systematic longitudinal record, covering 25 years, creating a specific mosaic of the city, captured by way of various approaches & syntaxes, commentaries & documentary impressions: a report on a psychogeography. Josef Straka
eyes lips dreams then night goes first nothing then night in the beginning before time in the confrontation of light & intractable unlight in the dawn of the word tangled in branches of TV static wake up they’ve been expecting you lying there in that solarised caress the very inverse of a woman prepared to mock her makers all aerials & elbows & hipbones & objectified spare ribs grubbying the seigniorial fingers licked till they gleam white as nativity talismans painstakingly erected out of so many test-patterned false starts white as an egg as a lamb’s eye as boiled testes she can almost taste them enough to turn a goat’s stomach what kind of thing was the beginning do the floodlights come magically on & voilà you’re lying with your legs spread in the middle of a photograph of Utopia…
The Orbital continues like this, night after night. Slant of cosmic rain slashing the blacktop. Dopplered taillights receding. Not alone then. The great migration to outer. Not the sole survivor then. Focus on that. Focus on the drift, the undertow, the invisible line reeling in. A distributed mass of alter-egos. Vanishing. And each time around the same again. The same vanishing again. The same slant. The same outer. Till none left. No others left. Only the survival to survive. Repeating. After night: night. Eons of undone time. Focus on that. The second before & the second after. Nothing between. Nothing from nothing, but the random propulsion of an idea. Focus on that. An idea of “nothing.” First one, then the other. Gravity’s re-birth. The fall. A flashing blue enveloping light.
100.
“À ces mots, il s’est tu. Assez de mots! Il c’est tué.”
“This book perfectly captures the unique personalities of the many artists, musicians, writers, performers and just plain kooks who made the 80s zeitgeist rock!” – Ann Magnuson
LOUIS ARMAND 