“CONTAGION CREATES US IN ITS IMAGE”
206pp b/w free PDF (May 2022)
Original 86-page paperback edition available via Miskatonic Virtual University Press
GLITCHHEAD .REDUX
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DI/ODE (I-L)
“staring the pyrocumulus dead in the eye
& cities brought to a stop
by nuclear disarmament placards
& flotillas & people high on possibility & not
potassium iodine?”
mimeo pamphlet, A4, 50pp, PDF, May 2022
DARK SEED
John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite virgin suicide transposed into a fully-automated electric ball Ophelia Botti donut machine à la Kafka’s penal colony?
38 pages. PDF. 2022
VITUS
“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
A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN EIN HAUS FÜR
“heimat / house / mat / haus / bau / dormir / a dor / mouse: / sleepwindow”
A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN was originally commissioned as a libretto by the Czech composer Ian Mikyska as a tribute to the work of the late German artist. Two incomplete versions were previously published, in Alienist & Cordite. The libretto was first programmed at the Barbican School, London (in an arrangement by Ian Mikyska for soprano), & was performed by the author & David Vichnar at Venuše ve Švehlovce theatre, Prague, as part of the 2017 Prague Microfestival.
A HOUSE FOR HANNE DARBOVEN EIN HAUS FÜR (2021) / 18pp / download PDF
GLITCHHEAD
GLITCHHEAD, “a chaotic inventory of aftereffects in the wake of VAMPYR,” by Louis Armand (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2021). 86pp. ISBN 9781667147192. Paperback available via Lulu.
Continue readingDESCARTES’ DOG
“To be caught dead is the first step to biography” / DESCARTES’ DOG (2000-2021) / 40pp / download PDF
VAMPYR
VAMPYR / A Chronicle of Revenge, published 31.10.2020 by ALIENIST. Read an excerpt from Vampyr at Burning House Press, SELFFUCK magazine, ExPat Press & The Collidecope. Watch the trailer. Full PDF available HERE.
“The mirror is empty. Surely this is a sign? The error is too consistent & gigantic to be ignored. One moment, History is there, replete, like cinema. The next: Void. Where purpose was, now doubt, trepidation. Something must be to blame. We are not speaking of merely vulgar misunderstandings or an emotional ambivalence. Every disappearance can only be considered a murder, caused by a hidden hand. A crime of violent omission. These accusations demand an energy of response, not bands of superstitious dilettantes. The world is not a psychoneurotic disorder. Those still living have good reason not to feel safe from the revenges of the dead, even w/ a sea dividing them. Their taboos are as a mirror held up to a guilty conscience. Originally, all of the dead were Vampyrs. Yet we do not come from the past, but from the future.”
Continue readingTHE GARDEN (DIRECTOR’S CUT)
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…
GAGARIN
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.
Louis Armand’s novella GAGARIN appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Three, available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon. Read an excerpt.
LOUIS ARMAND 