Recording session in Paris for Henry Darger exhibit with Philippe Solal from the Gotan Project

Recording session in Paris for Henry Darger exhibit with Philippe Solal from the Gotan Project

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Feloche's (Felix) producer at Ya Basta! records is Philippe Cohen Solal, composer for the Gotan Project which is a very big tango-electronica act here in Europe. Feloche tells me that Philippe has a session he wants me to come in on, I look on his computer screen and start to see the twisted imagery of Henry Darger. Philippe is getting different musicians together, incuding Calexico, to write music to be played during the new touring exhibit of Darger's work.

It turns out that Philippe was in NYC and saw a Darger piece at the American Folk Art Museum and was blown away. Then for some reason, he had business in Chicago a couple of days later with the very woman same woman who had been Dargers landlady and now had his life's work. She and her husband owned the building that had Darger lived in. They had let him live there for free. He was a local character in an old WW2 coat, digging in the trash. The new yuppies in the area thought he looked homeless and tried to get him kicked out of the hood. What they didn't know was that he was digging in the trash for images. He was writing and illustrating a 1500 page tome featuring little girls in a fantasy world engaging in bloody battles with adults.

Darger's tome could have been lost in the trash except the husband was a Bauhaus school designer who was amazed to find Henry's work while cleaning out the apartment. Henry had gotten to the point where he couldn't take care of himself and was in a home. The bed in the apartment was covered with years of illustrations, Henry had been sleeping sitting in a chair for 20 years.

I used almost every sound making device I had, to pull and pop texture and commentary into and onto the music Phillippe had written. It was an extremely successful recording session, recorded with my effected mic and a stereo pair ala Joe "Bass" Dejarnette that gave the whole thing a very dimensional sound in movement. I did a little wind. "That is like the wind in Chicago!" Phiippe tells me. He wants wind? I gave him wind that pulsed with the music tuning itself subtly up the scale as the phrase played. Roller chimes, canister music boxes, obnoxiophone, I kept discovering new things, the play-back was magic.

France is treating me very we