MAURICE LEMAITRE DADA-LETTRISME 3x7" ISOU-HENRI CHOPIN

$

137

MAURICE LEMAITRE

 Poemes et Musiques Lettristes 3x7"

Private

Special book cover

Limited Edition

Historic sound document containing sound poetry & lettrist experiments spanning from the period 1953-1970. Private edition in book like cover with fac-simile of lettrisme manifests.

Some info on the release:  See Broken Music book. Incredible set of 3 singles and printed fac-simile of Maurice Lemaître lettrisme manifests. This set (27 x 21 cm) was privately issued by Lemaitre in 1971 and covers his sound poetry and ultra lettrisme experiments from 1953 to 1970. One of the singles is the reissue of his very first single from 58. It also includes tracks by Isidore Isou. Beautiful early document concerning sound art, lettrism and sound poetry, a must for those into artists records. Disc 2 contains on silent grooves and comes with the instructions that the listener should scratch the record to complete the recording.

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism. Isou viewed his fellow countryman, Tristan Tzara, as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.

In French, the movement is called Lettrisme, from the French word for letter, arising from the fact that many of their early works centred around letters and other visual or spoken symbols. The Lettristes themselves prefer the spelling 'Letterism' for the Anglicised term, and this is the form that is used on those rare occasions when they produce or supervise English translations of their writings: however, 'Lettrism' is at least as common in English usage. The term, having been the original name that was first given to the group, has lingered as a blanket term to cover all of their activities, even as many of these have moved away from any connection to letters. But other names have also been introduced, either for the group as a whole or for its activities in specific domains, such as 'the Isouian movement', 'youth uprising', 'hypergraphics', 'creatics', 'infinitesimal art' and 'excoördism'. Gabriel Pomerand, François Dufrêne,  Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J. Wolman and Serge Berna,  Guy Debord,  Roberto Altmann, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satié, Michéline Hachette, Francois Poyet, Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Jean-Paul Curtay, Woody Roehmer, Mike Rose. Isou’s idea for the poem of the future was that it should be purely formal, devoid of all semantic content. The Letterist poem, or lettrie, in many ways resembles what certain Italian Futurists (such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti), Russian Futurists (such as Velemir Chlebnikov, Iliazd, or Alexej Kru?enych—cf. Zaum), and Dada poets (such as Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters) had already been doing, and what subsequent sound poets and concrete poets (such as Bob Cobbing, Eduard Ov?á?ek or Henri Chopin) would later be doing. However, the Letterists were always keen to insist on their own radical originality and to distinguish their work from other ostensibly similar currents. Fluxus artist Ben [Vautier] has openly avowed his indebtedness to Isou: "Isou, I don't deny it, was very important for me around 1958 when I first theorized about art. It was thanks to Isou that I realized that what was important in art was not the beautiful, but the new, the creation. In 1962, while reading L'agrégation d'un nom et d'un messie, I was fascinated by his ego, his megalomania, his pretences. I said to myself then: there is no art without ego, and this is where my work on the ego is rooted."

Condition: Vinyls lie in excellent condition, look to be very clean and play nicely. The cover lies in very good+ condition, looking a lit but dirty, possibly due to bad storage conditions and with a bend on the back.

Tracklist

SHIPPING & PAYMENT

Shipping: Shipping for this  3x7"+book is 7$ airmail in Europe / 9$ for the rest of the world
Registered mail: +5$
Insurance: optional
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Payment: Paypal 
Packaging: I am a collector too and i know