condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (bumped corner)

No insert.

A collaborative multimedia piece staged in Boulder, Colorado in 1986, issued the same year as an LP on the San Francisco imprint Silent Records. The Sunday Associates, a local artists' collective, produced the project, with libretto by Jane Brakhage, film work by her husband Stan Brakhage (the cover photograph is a still from his film FireLoop), and the score composed and performed by Architects Office, the experimental music group Joel Haertling had founded in 1983.

The source material is a Welsh myth preserved in thirteenth-century manuscripts. Bendigeid Vran, the giant cousin of Caswallon, commands his men to take his severed head with them for eighty-seven years of incorrupt company before burying it at the White Mount in London as a talisman against invasion. King Arthur eventually digs it up. What follows, according to the record's framing, is the entire subsequent history of the Island of the Mighty.

Seven tracks, all recorded live in performance on three days in May 1986, arranged as Prelude / Prewar / War / Exhausted (Chorus of Pregnant Women) / Parly-Party / Epilogue / Postlude. Denise Judson takes the principal voice part. The texture is closer to electroacoustic theatre than to industrial music proper: tape collage, synthesis, ceremonial narration, electronics used for setting rather than aggression. Haertling would go on to perform the Faust role in Stan Brakhage's Faust film cycle (1987-89) and score five further Brakhage works. The 1986 LP is the first and most ambitious surviving document of this small but unusually literate Boulder scene.

When King Arthur eventually dig up the head 400 years later, the Island of Britain was soon after ravaged by Viking and Saxon invasions. The story of Caswallon is inspired by 13th c. Welsh manuscripts where he is known as Caswallawn, a chieftain who led the defense against Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 54 BC. In her play, Jane Brakhage describes the battle episodes, the 5 pregnant women in a cave, and of course Flower, or Fflur in Welsh, the beautiful woman with whom both Caswallawn and Caesar were in love. For this historical setting narrated by various voices (principally by Denise Judson), Architect’s Office conceived an ambitious soundtrack of musique concrète sounds, synthesizer and real instruments. The music would stand in itself as great electroacoustic music, yet it never interferes or distract from the narration. The extraordinary Postlude is a beautiful group improvisation by Claude Martz on bass clarinet with electronics provided by Corrigan and Haertling. Joel Haertling was trained as a classical musician (French horn) in Boulder, CO, during the mid-1970s. He began making experimental super 8 and 16 mm films while in high school. He founded the experimental music group Architect’s Office in 1983, the name possibly inspired by his own father’s trade as an architect, to which he later dedicated a website. Haertling published Zamizdat Trade Journal from 1984 to ’94, a zine dedicated to underground music, self-releases of post-industrial and electronic music. He played the Faust part in Stan Brakhage‘s Faust series of films, 1987-89, and contributed music to 5 more, including Kindering, Loud Visual Noises, I… dreaming, and Fireloop. The latter was Brakhage’s contribution to the multimedia show ‘Caswallon The Headhunter’, written by Jane Brakhage in 1986 for the collective of Boulder artists The Sunday Associates, of which both Haertling and the Brakhages were members. The project included dancers, singers, lighting, slide projections, costumes, films and music. Brakhage: “When I moved to Boulder, Joel introduced me to some very gifted young people and we formed a group, The Sunday Associates and started an Arts Series with shows every Sunday at the Boulder Art Theater. They were my chief collaborators on Faust […] I greatly admired Joel’s collage abilities – he did an amazing track for my hand-painted film, Fireloop, in which I use fire as a metaphor for the light and sound process that accompanies moving visual thinking.”