split by KOMMISSAR HJULER / EMERGE

released July 24, 2013

Kommissar Hjuler, one of the best-known (or, to some, notorious) names in the international experimental/outsider music scene, makes his debut on attenuation circuit with a 17-part piece entitled “dansk piano sectioner”. True to his absurdist neo-dada approach, Hjuler collages spoken word parts in Danish, which may sound like sound poetry to anyone unfamiliar with the language, with little piano ditties resembling Erik Satie on bad amphetamines, and the occasional random plunderphonics from the airwaves. EMERGE pays homage to Hjuler by working the whole of his material into a half-hour track of his own.

Hjuler’s work (this time without his wife and long-time artistic partner Mama Bär) manages to beg the old question from the history of modern art: “Is this really art? Or are they just taking the piss out of us?” The answer that both tracks on this album seem to give is that anything can become art under the right circumstances, and that turning things into art is an important assertion of human freedom. The two artists show us two totally contrary ways of achieving this same goal, though. While Hjuler consciously foregrounds the lo-fi, amateurish character of his work, showing that ‘anyone can and should do it’ (namely, art), EMERGE totally transforms the source material into an ethereal, harmonic piece of electroacoustic music that sounds very pristine compared to the source material. Which seems to prove that art does not necessarily need specific materials and tools, but that everything can become source material for art provided that enough imagination is at work.