No Basement Is Deep Enough is a Serbo-Belgian cassette label run by Ignace de Bruyn and Milja Radovanovic. The label explores the fringes of music, art and poetry and focuses on obscure recordings of what they call ‘the semantic prisoners of the false prophets of the cultural hegemony’. No Basement Is Deep Enough packages their cassettes as wild, at times outrageous, art objects and releases them in limited hand made numbers. From now on Sea Urchin distributes those.
Sea Urchin publishes Yannis Livadas
Yannis Livadas (1969) is a Greek experimental poet, writer, jazz scholar and translator who lives in Paris, France. His translations from English into Greek include works by Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara and Ezra Pound. Livadas’s highly individual poetry incorporates an idea of experimentalism that is based on ‘organic antimetathesis’: the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. Livadas’s poetry thus stretches beyond the limits of individual expression and aesthetics. While remaining firmly rooted in individual experience and thought, it opens up new perspectives and creates unforeseen vistas in the solid and carefully chosen images of the poet’s personal surroundings.
The Sea Urchin chapbook ‘Strictly Two‘ brings together and at the same time opposes two of Livadas’s finest poems: ‘My bones in the soup of my grave’ and ‘A poem I once wrote’, both translated from Greek into English by Livadas himself. ‘Strictly Two’: two poems that run deep and carve their way through the basalts of truth.
Slowscan releases Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou (1926-1987) was a French poet, writer and artist affiliated with Nouveau réalisme and Fluxus. Filliou conceived the celebration of Art’s Birthday in 1963. He claimed that 1,000,000 years ago there was no art at all until one day, on 17 January to be precise, art was born when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Art’s birthday – which, by the way, happened to coincide with Filliou’s own – saw its first public celebration on 17 January 1973 in Aachen, Germany and in Paris, France. Filliou’s ‘Whispered History of Art’, now released on vinyl as Slowscan vol. 30, is a Fluxus mythology about the origin of art. The playful and humorous lecture was recorded by Ondine Fiore at the New Wilderness Studio, New York in December 1977 and is introduced by Dick Higgins. Courtesy Filliou recording: Archivio Francesco Conz. Verona.
Hand made Sea Urchin chapbooks:
‘The Bog’ and ‘A Wilderness of Dreams’.
Sea Urchin has just published two slim chapbooks that have been put together from a fine pick of papers and have been cut, folded, watercoloured and stitched by hand in limited editions of 15 copies. One is the expressionist poem The Bog (‘Das Moor’, 1913-1914) by German author Gustav Sack and the other the A Wilderness of Dreams, an opiate passage from ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’ (1835) by Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrations for both editions: Ben Schot. Only 15 copies of each available! See our catalogue for more information.
Sea Urchin distributes Slowscan
Sea Urchin is thrilled to join forces with Jan van Toorn‘s great SLOWSCAN label.
Dissatisfied with the limited availability on vinyl or tape of good artists’ recordings, Jan van Toorn founded his own cassette label Slowscan in 1983 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. In the first 10 years of its existence Slowscan produced 10 important releases, the highlight of which was an 8-cassette Fluxus Anthology box set that met with international acclaim. After having been dormant for a number of years Slowscan made a restart as a vinyl label in 2000. Since then the label has released important and rare recordings of artists and electronic music, such as Liam O’Gallagher, Le Forte Four, Richard Maxfield and John Perreault.