#humument

The first side of the LP is the music; the second side is the words. The first selection might as well be a recording The Scratch Orchestra, which Phillips was part of, but is from Phillips’s opera IRMA. In the selection a chorus of bouncing wordless vocals are led by flute and some sort of child’s instrument (pump organ? glass harmonica?). Then there are two works for essentially solo piano that surprise by eliding romantic noodling with low drones and a waltz form. Think something between the searching, quietly transcendent playing of the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbro moving towards the more historically minded playing of Blue “Gene” Tyranny in his work for Robert Ashley. Then, a 15-minute composition of long slow tones recorded live in concert and described quizzically in the press kit as “acoustic and electronic instruments…played as extended shapes along a piece of paper.” These works are all pleasant, but they might as well be a Sokal Hoax for the 1960s avant-garde.  

The second side of the LP is simply Phillips reading from A Humument. He has a slightly fussy British accent and reads slowly and without effort for about twenty minutes. It is, no joke, one of the best things I’ve heard all year and does important work to remind how speech and imagination came into being when thought came slowly. “Page two-one-six…He could hardly breath, belated figures with feathers lying on his chest…two-seven-four, a strange day ago…he was there walking slowly, fifty people near her, judged the grass, he over took his old fantastic hours…page one-three-hour, ah how peaceful this place, ten miles away from your face.” One comes to this LP looking for more of Phillips beyond The Humument, but it simply drives the listener deeper into its genius.