A Winged Victory For The Sullen

Atomos

A Winged Victory For The Sullen (2011) / Atomos (2014) / The Undivided Five (2019) / Invisible Cities (2021).

A quartet of albums by A Winged Victory For The Sullen (Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran) that have been regular visitors to my CD player over the past couple of weeks, especially the second one Atomos. Wiltzie and O’Halloran have been active as A Winged Victory For The Sullen since 2011 but their discography is a small one so I’ve been doing my usual thing of looking around for lengthy live recordings to avoid over-playing the studio albums. What you have here are four different performances of Atomos, most of which don’t vary much on the visual side but, for three of them at least, music is the primary concern.

Atomos (2014).
The music was originally commissioned by Wayne McGregor as a score for a dance piece so I was pleased to find a recording of the whole thing at McGregor’s Vimeo channel. Atomos works well enough as a standalone composition but seeing it presented like this throws a new light on the music. This is also the only place you can hear Atomos IV which for some reason is missing from the CD and vinyl releases.

Boiler Room, Barbican, London (2014).
Boiler Room concerts are always good value, being long sets, professionally filmed and recorded.

Flèche d’Or, Paris (2014).
A performance filmed in a smaller venue with a single camera. The camera-work is from the amateur “hosepiping” school but the sound is excellent and you get a lot of close shots of the string players.

BBC Proms (2015).
Mary Anne Hobbs presents the group at the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, together with a performance by pianist Nils Frahm who, at the time, was sharing a label with AWVFTS. A few of Wayne McGregor’s dancers also appear in this one. Half of the session is devoted to Frahm but he’s very good so it’s worth staying with.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jóhannssonia
• More Invisible Cities (and an invisible author)

More Invisible Cities (and an invisible author)

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

Italo Calvino

The new album by A Winged Victory For The Sullen (Adam Wiltzie & Dustin O’Halloran) is a beautiful thing. This was originally a score commissioned for a theatrical staging of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, an adaptation produced by Leo Warner and given its first performance at the Manchester International Festival in 2019. I considered going to the premiere but was disgruntled by the way all the promotional materials for the event—posters, flyers, website—managed to avoid mentioning Calvino even though the work was obviously based on his novel. The author is similarly invisible among the album credits despite being acknowledged on the group’s Bandcamp page. I’m always surprised when people do this, especially professionals like the ones who staged the Manchester event, people you know would cause a fuss if they were denied credit for their own work in this manner. “Without stones there is no arch.”

Anyway, the music is very good, if a little solemn for something derived from a writer whose prose tended to the opposite. The late Jóhann Jóhannsson feels like the ghost at this particular feast. One of Jóhannsson’s final works, Last and First Men, had its premiere at the Manchester International Festival two years before Invisible Cities, and the latter’s choral harmonies, muted piano chords and grainy electronic textures situate the compositions very much in the Jóhannsson zone. As with Jóhannsson’s soundtrack albums, I wish some of the pieces were longer. Among the musicians are Robert Hampson—who I’d guess was generating some of those grainy textures—and Hildur Gudnadóttir whose cello-playing was a feature of many Jóhannsson recordings. Does the music work as a soundtrack for Calvino’s travelogue? A good reason to read the book again.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Invisible Cities: Miscellanea
• Seeing Calvino: Invisible Cities
• Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities
• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities
• Le Città In/visibili
• Mikhail Viesel’s Invisible Cities
• Bookmark: Italo Calvino
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

Weekend links 558

• One of the earliest posts here concerned The Suite of the Most Notable Things Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon (1776) by Filippo Morghen, a series of prints which depict the fantastic inhabitants, fauna and flora of the Moon. Morghen shows the Earth’s satellite to be a tropical place very similar to 18th-century conceptions of the New World or the Far East. Back in 2006 you couldn’t see copies of the prints as large or as detailed as this set at The Public Domain Review.

• “Last Call preserves the poignant irony that the trust and vulnerability that once made gay bars synonymous with gay community were also vectors of death, both in the form of murder and, later, HIV/AIDS.” Jeremy Lybarger on Elon Green’s study of the murders of four gay men in New York City in the 1990s.

• “No one in American letters ever pushed back against power over such a long time as [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti,” says John Freeman. Related: Ferlinghetti’s travel journals.

• New music with literary associations: Invisible Cities by A Winged Victory For The Sullen, and Star Maker Fragments by TAK Ensemble & Taylor Brook.

• Old music with no literary associations: The first of the forthcoming releases of live recordings by Can will be a 1975 Stuttgart concert.

• “The 120 Days of Sodom: France seeks help to buy ‘most impure tale ever written'”.

• The Joy of Circles: Vyki Hendy looks at some recent concentric cover designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Sculpted sushi made entirely from natural polished stones.

• My Hungry Interzone: Brian Alessandro on coming out and reading Naked Lunch.

• Andy Thomas maps Jah Wobble’s interdimensional dub.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 684 by Ben Bondy.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jim Jarmusch Day.

• Circles (1966) by Les Fleur De Lys | Circles (1970) by Blonde On Blonde | Carry On Circles (2006) by Tuxedomoon