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Album Info
Release Date: 2021-06-12Label: Schallter
Thomas Bernhard's literature contains a certain mercilessness. The collection of short prose pieces that he called "The Voice Imitator" in 1978 combines the harshness of his world and misanthropy with poetic sophistication and extravagant narrative maneuvers; this series of anecdotes is one of the least known, but most exciting works of the writer. The almost surrealistic wit so typical for Bernhard permeates these short stories – there are absurd fables, laconic death case studies and abysmal local news. The horror of the narrations is kept in suspension by the sarcastic conciseness of the author’s writing.18 of the 104 prose pieces in the volume have been set to music here by Austrian experimentalists Modell Doo, in collaboration with the actor Robert Reinagl, who otherwise works in the ensemble of the Vienna Burgtheater. The result is neither an audio book nor a literary opera, but a completely new, possibly alien liaison of text and composition: 18 fierce sound miniatures in which prose performance and electronic avant-pop genuinely merge. Reinagl's ambiguous recitation reworks the protocol of the tragic-comic events that Bernhard unleashed with feverish insidiousness, while the music subverts both the acting and the text blocks themselves, thereby creating unimagined additional levels.
Limited to 300 copies, released on RSD 2021.
Contains a card with the DL code.
Sticker blurb is by Schorsch Kamerun (Die Goldenen Zitronen): "Precise and dizzy miniatures, happily put in a nutshell, breathtaking in times of full diffusivity: hyper state of the art."