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Gwilly Edmondez, Max Kurt: Anatomical Disseminator

Gwilly Edmondez is one of several aliases I use to produce new music; using different authorial personae allows me to inhabit distinct aesthetic domains. The ‘Max’ and ‘Kurt’ of the title refer to two towering figures of 20th-century art – Ernst and Schwitters – who have long dominated my creative thinking; I pun on their remit to make the most out of minimal resources and scant opportunities to produce substantial works.

I have long sought to emulate Schwitters’ habit of having several collage works on the go, often carried in a leather satchel in which he also kept some glue with which to hastily improvise fresh content from what was to hand. From Ernst I learned to develop a regime of responding to the world by drawing from the imagination (rather than ‘life’), translating human experience into unconsciously telling flows. This I practice both through actual drawing and by carrying a cassette recorder with me everywhere to record impromptu voice and percussion ‘drawings’ (along with a short length of drumstick for recording spontaneous percussion).

I regard Hip Hop as a guiding paradigm whose ethos is consistent with how both Schwitters and Ernst worked. From Hip Hop I take the tradition of ‘crate digging’ – sourcing material from discarded vinyl records. In MAX/KURT I used a Yamaha SU10 pocket sampler, a Sony dictaphone, and my voice. Tracks were made on the fly, composing sampled materials into digital sequences then ‘performed’ onto the first two tracks of the Boss BR-1, pocket 4-track recorder, further elaborated by overdubbing vocals (either live or from a cassette dictaphone).

The resulting output, completed in response to an invitation from UBUWEB marries free improvisation and collage with a pop-music attitude and sensibility in a way that I have continued to pursue for many years.