Jean Dubuffet, "Longue peine"

-- Liner Notes Continued --

As for the tape recorder, I was a complete novice. It was only later on that I was to realise that my recordings, done on amateur equipment, left a lot to be desired compared to those carried out by professionals. Strangely enough, however I am not convinced that the latter are really superior. Similarly, I often prefer photographs taken by poorly equipped amateurs than those of specialists. In my subsequent dealings with technicians, I felt that the downside to certain benefits of the care they took in setting-up their equipment, was an inhibiting effect; even if the resulting recordings were very clear and free of flaws and hiccups, they weren't necessarily any more evocative. I believe that all spheres of the arts could benefit from using simpler techniques. I also believe in getting down to basics, I am all for rugged and unaffected charms rather than frills and furbelows. There is another more important reason for my attitude. We consider that a good recording provides precise and distinct sound which seems to be coming from a close source; in our daily lives, however our hearing is submitted to all sorts of other sounds which, more often than not, are unclear muddled, far from pure, distant and only partially audible. To ignore them is to give birth to a specious artform, exclusively concerned with a single category of sounds which, when it comes down to it, are pretty uncommon in everyday life. I was aiming to produce music based not on a selection of sounds but on sounds that can be heard anywhere on any day and especially those that one hears without really being aware of them. My rudimentary equipment was better suited to this than the most sophisticated machines. Having decided to collect and use whatever kinds of sounds I came across, the sometimes unexpected sounds which in I, tape recorder played back to me were at least as interesting (and sometimes more so) than those I had actually intended to record. When the surprises were in my opinion uninteresting, I rubbed them off, but sometimes they were incredibly good. I transformed a room in my house into a music workshop and in the periods between our get-togethers with Asger Jorn I became a one-man band, playing each of my fifty-odd instruments in turn. Thanks to my tape recorder I was able to play each part successively on the same tape and have the machine play everything back simultaneously. I went about it step by step, recording over the bad sections and using scissors and sticky tape to cut, join and put everything together Such a method entails a lot of trial and error: as it was impossible to hear what I had already recorded when playing a new part, it was very tricky to synchronize them and, struggling to get exactly what I wanted, I had to start over and over again. Nevertheless, the fact that it was so difficult to keep things under control and that I had to trust to luck meant that the risks of failure were offset by the possibility of unexpected surprises. I later added a second tape recorder which enabled me to transfer material from one machine to the other, to play whilst listening to what had already been recorded and to make as many changes as I liked without spoiling the initial recording when the new elements proved disappointing.

Jean Dubuffet, "Coq a l'oeil"

-- Liner Notes Continued --

At the time, neither Asger Jorn nor myself were au fait with the output of contemporary composers and weren't even familiar with the instigators of serialism, dodecaphony, electronic music and musique concrète. Indeed I only learned these terms recently. My own musical experience was limited to fairly cursory study of classical music on the piano, which I played a lot as a child and teenager and gave up when about 20. Later when I was 35, I took up the accordion and its traditional music (with only moderate success) and went back to the piano for a year when I was about 40 to play music by Duke Ellington, interspersed with improvisations on the harmonium. There followed a period when I took a violent dislike to European music and only enjoyed listening to Eastern and Oriental music (I had become fond of the former during my trips to the Sahara).

Jean Dubuffet, "Temps radieux"

MUSICAL EXPERIMENTS -- by Jean Dubuffet

Towards the end of 1960, around Christmas time, my friend Asger Jorn, the Danish painter, invited me round to improvise music with him. I bought a Grundig TK35 tape recorder to capture the spirit of our get-togethers and the first recording of our recreations, done on 27th December was entitled Nez cassé (Broken nose). Many more were soon to follow as we were both so enthralled by these musical experiments that our improvisation sessions were very frequent over the succeeding months. Asger Jorn had a fair bit of experience with the violin and the trumpet; I had a singular experience of the piano which I had made much use of in former times. However the sort of music we had in mind hardly required virtuoso technique as we intended to use our instruments to obtain unconventional effects. In addition to a pretty bad piano, we started off with a violin, a cello, a trumpet, a recorder a Saharan flute, a guitar and a tambourine. We gradually added all sorts of other instruments, some of them out-dated (old-fashioned flutes, a hurdy gurdy), some exotic (of Asian, African or Tzigane origin), some more common -such as the oboe, saxophone, bassoon, xylophone, zither - and some of folk origin, such as the cabrette and the bombarde - basically, whatever we discovered as we went along. The musician Alain Vian, who has a shop rue Grégoire-de-Tours in Paris selling strange and rare collector's instruments, was of great assistance; he not only took part once or twice in our little concerts but also managed to find, and sometimes even make, suitable instruments for us.