VAGINA DENTATA ORGAN
Originally appeared on "The Sound Projector" # 11
Podés leer esta entrevista traducida y más data en castellano aquí
1 : Your records, especially those related to "sex and death", have a kind of LEGENDARY quality...everyone purports to know something about them, even without having heard them! Did you set out to create a modern
myth?
Perhaps it's true. We aim to go beyond logic, and have the intellectual freedom and the imagination of the Marquis de Sade. That's why VDO's records are so fucking brilliant. I work at random, and the recordings are the result of the theory of chaos. The final outcome it's absolutely unpredictable, it's what the mathematicians call CHANCE. I work mostly from real time reality. Raw authenticity always strikes a bigger blow to our inner psyche. It is more powerful and passionate the intensity of a
sexual groan, or a plane crash, than the artificial sound of a man made music instrument. Let me explain it in a different context. It is said that one image it's worth 1000 words. Well, I say that one small accidental sound it could be worth 1000 images, or even, 1000 music scores. I saw the documentary filmed by the two French brothers during the Twin Towers
suicide attack. What persisted longer in my memory, was not the hardcore images of panic and destruction, but the SOUND heard from inside one of the buildings of falling bodies from the top of the towers crashing to the open ground. I will never forget that crashing staccato noise. I have it on tape.
2 : Do you feel you have much in common with the spirit of the Surrealist movement - which Surrealist artists, poets or writers do you most admire?
Salvador Dalí is the only true Surrealist of the 20th century, not only as a painter, but specifically as a writer too. Anyone who writes : "The first time I saw a woman's depilated armpit I was seeking heaven", deserves to be a genius. Since I was very young, always felt close to surrealism, and very connected to Dalí's work. When I'm in Catalonia my home is in
Cadaqués, the epicentre of surrealism, a place with very strong cosmic and telluric magnetism. In fact, the landscape is like a painting by Salvador Dalí, he lived there.
3 : Un Chien Catalan, is to me, a piece of sonic poetry - Surrealist and Futurist, - even, (Speed and power, words in freedom). I also liken it to a piece of avant-garde cinema, and to a very extreme Hollywood road movie / biker movie. Can you add any comment?
Un Chien Catalan, it is surrealist, metaphysical, and mechanical, but has absolutely nothing to do with the Futurist, which I dislike. It is the sound of the engine of a motorbike during one long hour ride - real time - around the house of Dalí, in Port Lligat, Cadaqués, and Cap de Creus. The star of the show is the motorbike of my biker friend Eliseu Huertas i Cos. It
was recorded in a very cold winter night with strong tramuntana wind. I approached this recording as if it was an obscure film, or some kind of literary masterpiece about violent death. You have to read the titles of the 7 tracks to get the full impact and full picture of it. It's an absolute metamorphosis. The noise of the engine is transformed into a mantra. It's a paradox. The motorbike's rattle becomes dervish music with feed back. At some point, it sounds like a meeting in hell between Jimi Hendrix and Stockhausen. On one very memorable day, Un Chien Catalan, was played on the sound system at the Salvador Dalí museum in Figueres. Dalí's embalmed body lies at rest in a crypt beneath his museum. What more can I ask for?
Dalí, is the real Catalan dog.
4 : The simplest art actions can say so much, and remain memorable for so long. Why is this? You have somehow transformed riding a motorbike into an action that everyone can remember, but how?
First of all, it's alchemy. Also because of the transformation from real time reality, into metaphysical realism, which is the ultimate nature of reality. Somehow, we frame freeze the past, and then the past becomes immortal. People listening to VDO's records get this feeling of immortality, but don't know how to explain it. Another essential part of VDO, is the work made by my brother Marc Valls. Impossible to disconnect all the VDO discography, from his fetish graphics.
5 : Has anyone ever called your work "absurdist" - and what is your reply?
VDO is poetry without rhetoric. All of our records are absolutely different from one to the other. Nevertheless, people still feel the need to categorize VDO's work in one single word. We have been called "absurdist", and "bruitism", among other names. I say we're a cosmic vagina, but at the same time we want blood on our hands, against all the
putrefacts of pop music. I despise the blandness and all the pedantic sentimentality of these cretins.
6 : The new record - Perpignan - is so intense it makes me FEEL SICK, literally. Is that the intended effect?That's the greatest compliment I could ever have. Perpignan is a masterwork. My big selling point for The Perpignan Killings, is that it's totally indigestible. That's marketing for you. But you're not alone with your trouble. The director of the Art school of Grenoble, in France, vomited, while listening to Perpignan, on his own. I like my work to be physically and psychologically threatening. Perpignan is exactly what Breton said, about convulsive beauty. Incidentally, I would like to make the point
7 : Tell me a bit more about your blood paintings. Were they exhibited? Are you aware of Joe Coleman's painting made out of his blood, shit, piss, semen etc? Do you align yourself with body art / performance art of this visceral nature?
that it belongs to an extremely rare class of record.I started selling my blood for money in 1984. The blood was encapsulated dry under the transparent vinyl on a few picture-disc records of The Pagan Drums of Calanda. I sold each of the blood records for £100. Now it's worth £1000
each disc. I'm aware of Joe Coleman's, and also Franko B's work, but I'm more into pleasure, than pain. More interested in the work of Marc Quinn, who made his 3-D self-portrait with his own frozen blood. To me, Quinn, the Chapman brothers, Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst, they are the new shamans of the21st century. Of course, I'm only relating for now to what's near me here in London. Then in 1993 -1995, I started painting on big canvases with my own blood the portraits of fashion Supermodels. I have a catalogue of the paintings. For three years, once a month a nurse took my blood with
an hypodermic needle into several glass vials ready to paint. In 2001, I was invited by the Art School of Grenoble, for an exhibition of the paintings, all paid by the French government. Instead of hanging the paintings on the wall, the blood canvases were thrown to the floor on top of several white cotton bed sheets, just like dead bodies lie on the asphalt after a
motorway accident. Marc and Eric Hurtado of Étant Données, and my brother Marc who came from Barcelona, helped magnificently with all the production side of it. The exhibition hall was huge like a tennis court, we kept it dark with a white spotlight from the ceiling to the floor on the dumped blood paintings. On the day of the "private view", I invited all the art students at the school to paint vaginas, graffiti with spray cans, all over the white walls. At the same time we had six slide projectors projecting very fast, non stop, life-size colour photos of top Supermodels dressed or nude on the catwalk, on the walls all over the large room. Also two film projectors projecting at the same time on very large and different wall screens, a collage of the films I made with Derek Jarman, and Genesis P-Orridge, about my car crash. And other films of when I was in Spain, performing in "La edad de Oro", on T.V. Also, more films about the actual recording of the The Pagan Drums of Calanda. Meanwhile, the Hurtado brothers had a mixing table, re-mixing VDO's records full blast through the sound system. The whole night had the classic structure of an art's gallery "private view". We had a price list of the paintings, with impossible prices. A visitor's book for people to sign and write comments and impressions. A professional barman
serving free champagne and drymartinis. It was catastrophically good, and chaotic. A perfect VDO night. With blood on the floor.Translation to Spanish of this interview here (more images there)
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