MOUTHS WITHOUT A HEAD [ CD  Discreet Editions ]

Music composed in resonance with Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ (ca 1555-60), a collection of vocal motets that could be considered prophetic, because they posed new challenges to tuning. On the other hand, their sung text is an appropriation of ancient Greek Sibylline oracles, claiming these predicted the coming of Christ —a fictional revision of history that misses the revolutionary moment of prophecy, where an existing situation is broken open, made unstable, is destroyed even, and for a moment a desert looms in which every world, past or future, vanishes like a mirage. But, at the same time, here anything seems possible; it’s a challenge to start walking paths, instead of fixating on settlement and taking root.
As a kind of recuperation of the revolutionary moment I decided to read Lasso’s music the way an oracle might, adopting methods for divining earth, sky, fire, water, and using them for transforming the music in all different directions.

« When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence... It is once again like the desert, and speech is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert, to cry out and to reawaken the terror, understanding and memory of the desert... » (Maurice Blanchot)

reviews                                

BORING LIKE A DRILL  may 2021

     

"..Mouths Without A Head is a collection of 15 vignettes that work as a suite that coalesce into a quiet but disturbing progression of elements, finding stability before dissolving..The music is calm but never settles into a fixed tonality. Ambient washes rumble below the surface..electronic static crackles into life when things seem sedate.. New age sounds..nostalgic synthesizers.. are little more than illusions, repeatedly dispelled, most emphatically by the "Presocratic Grid", a long exercise in electronic noise that overlays its rhythms until verging upon voiced speech. Van Houdt manages these stark contrasts by making each change multiply and confound what has gone before.."

 

VITAL WEEKLY   #1295

   

"..Some pieces are pure piano pieces, something layered, sometimes with a bit of electronic treatment, or in duet with a guitar.. pieces with pure field recordings, pure electronics.. It means that the CD is all over the place, and it does that rather elegantly, I think. There is a lot of variation here, and yet it also sounds (strangely?) coherent. There is a certain slowness in this music, regardless of what Van Houdt does, connecting pieces like dots on a grid, and even when the pieces have different titles, you might just as well enjoy this as one long piece. That approach worked best for me. Every time I heard this, I seem to be discovering something new, unveiling new things. An excellent release!"

 

DUSTED  july 2021

  

".. an album on the relationship between speech and sound. It opens with swelling, wordless syllables, which disappear into the captured sound of the wind. Then, as the voice appears and vanishes, an acoustic guitar stitches an antique pattern that is patently incapable of confining that which it ostensibly accompanies. Piano and harp each take a crack at the job, and while none really seem to relate to the wordless utterances, the vocals, which are sourced from stutter therapy tapes and shortwave and numbers radio station broadcasts, grow ever less fixed. Creeping piano and flickering synthesizer passages manifest and then likewise vanish, blown aside by a ten-minute blast of stuttering electronics. In the home stretch, van Houdt’s piano seems to go out of phase with itself; the only clear message, it seems, is that nothing is stable or clear. I don’t know about you, but that’s how a lot of 2020 felt to me, and the sympathetic vibration between music and zeitgeist gives this album an impact far more forceful than one would expect, given the prevailing restraint of van Houdt’s playing."