El Infierno Musical is Viennese vocalist, electronics player (the ppooll software), and composer Christoph Kurzmann’s tribute project to the late Argentine poetess Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). The project was born almost twenty years ago by an inevitable coincidence. Kurzmann was sitting outside a coffeehouse in Buenos Aires when his attention was drawn to a street vendor selling small books by Hispanic writers, and he chose a collection of poems by Pizarnik.
Kurzmann was drawn into Pizarnik’s idiosyncratic, dark poetic universe, obsessed with music (she was a fan of Janis Joplin) and sounds or the absence of them, appreciating the limitations of language, the nature of intimacy, and silence. Pizarnik took her own life in September 1972 after a period of depression and five months of hospitalization, summarizing her distress in the words: “It's so far to ask. So close to knowing that there is none” (from “Fragments to Master Silence”).
Kurzmann immersed himself in the writings of Piraznik and released his first homage to her poems in El Infierno Musical. A Tribute To Alejandra Pizarnik (Mikroton, 2011), after he was commissioned by the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels in 2008 to suggest a project. El Infierno Musical (The Musical Hell, 1971) is Piraznik’s last collection of Poems, inspired by a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The album used Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights on its cover.
Kurzmann’s second incarnation of El Infierno Musical was brought to life on the 50th anniversary of Piraznik’s death, with a new lineup. Ken Vandarmark, who played on the project’s first album, plays on the new one on tenor sax and clarinet, alongside other musicians associated with him and from the Chicago free scene - Dave Rempis on alto and baritone saxes and flute, cellists Katinka Kleijn and Lia Kohl, and drummer Lily Finnegan (of Edition Redux).
II features six experimental songs with Pirzanik’s poems (one of which, “For Janis Joplin”, was performed on the first album and performed on II in an acoustic version), structured as a claustrophobic suite that reaches its emotional, obsessive and almost inevitable climax on the “Last Poem / Último Poema”, where the poetry leads to utter silence and emptiness. Kurzmann sings and recites Piraznik’s poems - in English and Spanish - with great commitment, and often stresses a few lines of the poems as subversive, prophetic thoughts about the current global zeitgeist, trumping naked power over innocence, empathy, and compassion. The chamber ensemble embraces Kurzmann’s dramatic delivery with nuanced, thoughtful, and imaginative improvisations, and each poem receives a distinct, insightful arrangement, which, in its turn, highlights the dark, urgent tension of the poems.
Kurzmann’s openly vulnerable delivery, as well as his delicate yet unsettling electronics, only intensify Piraznik’s desperate, poetic messages, who writes on herself as one who speaks the night and the dead, and as a poetess whose almost whole poetic work is structured as a fragmented, suicide letter. In “Little Songs / Pequeños Cantos”, Kurzamnn repeats in English and in Spanish: “the center of a poem is another poem / the center of the center is absence”. “For Janis Joplin” contrasts Piraznik’s clear affection for Joplin with her desperate perspective about life: “... to sing sweet and to die later. / no: / to bark. / This is how Rousseau's gypsy sleeps. / This is how you sing, plus lessons in horror. / You have to cry until you break / to create or say a little song, / scream so much to cover the holes of absence…”, and Vandermark and Rempis add a short quote of Gershwin’s iconic “Summertime” in this song’s coda. As the album progresses, the atmosphere becomes more tense, chaotic and dissonant, intensifying Piraznik’s suffocating but sobering feeling of hopelessness as summarized in “Winter Story / Cuento De Invierno”: “... But the night must know the misery / that drinks our blood and our ideas. / She must cast hatred in our gazes / Knowing them to be full of interests, of disagreements. // But it so happens that I hear the night weep in my bones. / Her immense teardrop raves mad / and shouts that something has gone away forever. // Someday we will be again”. On the unsettling “Last Poem / Último Poema”, where Kruzmann shouts: “I am night / And we have lost…”.
A most touching, insightful masterpiece.
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