ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT and Caliban Sounds are co-operating on a limited vinyl re-release of Penny Rimbaud’s 1984 Acts of Love album and Japanese avant-gardist, poet and producer Mikado Koko’s 2022 Songs To Our Other Selves – an “exploration and continuation“ of Rimbaud’s original work.
We’re teaming up with Caliban Sounds to release a 180g heavy weight double vinyl, in a gatefold sleeve; Penny Rimbaud‘s ‘Acts of Love’ (1984) accompanied by Mikado Koko’s ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ (2022). It’s presented with a 32-page booklet and insert. The latter available on vinyl for the first time, these collector’s items are limited to only 1000 copies.
One Little Independent
Both the vinyl and digital versions of the joint album are available for pre-order from One Little Independent, ahead of its release on 22 September 2023.
Back in October 1983, after the Yes Sir, I Will tour had completed, Rimbaud had returned to Southern Studios to begin a personal recording project that was entirely unlike anything that Crass had written or arranged. A new album was to be based on fifty short, lyrical poems, selected from a larger collection that Rimbaud had written and kept on file over many years.
Musical inspiration came from the realms of electronica rather than from punk. Studio boss Loder had managed to acquire access to some cutting edge technology: the Yamaha DX7, a breakthrough digital synthesizer, only released by the company months earlier.
Keyboard player Paul Ellis, who’d by this point also recorded with Poison Girls and Annie Anxiety amongst others, was brought in to help craft the album’s unusual musical soundscapes alongside Rimbaud using a combination of the DX7 and two iterations of the Prophet analogue synthesizer. Libertine provided beautiful, beguiling vocals for 49 of the fifty songs on the album – with Ignorant voicing the last one.
Over a twelve-month period, and multiple studio sessions, Acts of Love slowly came together as – appropriately enough – a labour of love, with Rimbaud and Ellis sharing the credit for arrangement and production. The art for the album cover, and the fifty illustrations that illuminated the full-size, page-per-song booklet that accompanied the release, were all designed by Vaucher.
Despite the involvement of Rimbaud, Libertine, Ignorant and Vaucher, Acts of Love cannot reasonably be classed as a “Crass” album. The sleeve did not credit the band directly, while the record’s subtitle (“Fifty Songs To My Other Self”) and dedication (“In loving memory of Wally Hope”) made Rimbaud’s personal imprint clear.
Extract from ‘Do You Believe in the System?’ The Story of Crass, Let The Tribe Increase
Koko describes Acts of Love as a “perfect launchpad for her creativity and electronic experimentation” and intends, through her reinterpretation of the original ideas, to give the album “a fresh lease of life for a new audience”.
“Eve Libertine’s vocals and Paul Ellis’s Prophet-5/DX7 are brilliant, and I am always inspired by the artwork by Gee. Therefore, I reconstructed 20 tracks by several types of generative cut-up algorithms, with love and respect”. Koko’s production takes Rimbaud’s classic work to new sonic territory whilst maintaining the integrity and concepts behind Acts of Love.
For ‘To Our Other Selves’, Koko has selected twenty tracks to extend Rimbaud’s short haiku-like bursts of energy into a fierce juggle of cutups and electronica, each track becoming a piece in its own right, yet somehow maintaining the poetic intensity of Rimbaud’s originals. Koko’s adaptations maintain the dramatic intensity of Rimbaud’s work, in particular allowing Libertine’s dynamically expressive vocal performances to demand attention whilst introducing glitchy, mind-bending electronic elements, warping Rimbaud’s recordings into otherworldly, surreal sounds.Koko’s creation was inspired by Gee Vaucher’s artworks, Dada inversion and, notably, William Burrough’s cut-up wordplay, rearranging Rimbaud’s lyricism and Libertine’s performances to create new meaning and present new ideas, giving Acts of Love a fresh lease of life for a new audience. Koko has crafted a musical koan in which nothing makes any sense but its own, and therein life’s greatest riddle.
Mikado Koko, Bandcamp
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