The Plastic People of the Universe & Agon Orchestra - Obesel ja poli pet (Obešel já polí pět) [2009, RIO, Avant-Prog, DVD5]

It's hard to decide on the spot whether Klima is a philosopher or a poet. Or is it?
Klima fits in both domains.
Klima can bewitch you and piss you off.
Every now and then someone grumbles to me about Klima having nicked a lot of stuff from Nietzsche. Even a chicken can see that.
His Czech is wild and beautiful, ageless, grammatically obstinate.
A long time ago, me and Hlavsa proclaimed the Year of Ladislav Klima. For a week we walked around Prague telling everyone about it.
When we told two secret cops at the U Supu pub, we introduced ourselves as Yagoda and Yezhov. With each shot we drank we stood up and introduced ourselves again. The next day we shook with trepidation.
Friends who'd been sitting in the corner kept trying to let us know that we were sitting at the wrong table, gesturing with their arms and legs.
But we'd been bearing important news: we'd proclaimed the Year of Ladislav Klima. Then there was the concert in Nova Viska. The spirit of Klima had materialised.
Vratislav Brabenec, December 2009
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Afterlife
The last memories of a shopkeeper from the city of E.
h, I was drinking at U sluncu, I drank
twenty Pilsner beers and eight shots of slivovitz.
When, suddenly, words sharply pierced my ears:
„Five fields I wandered."
A strange moment stirred my soul,
most of all a terrifying angst;
that ridiculousness and horror are akin,
that the world is a profoundly bottomless grotesque.
I walked out to the courtyard to watch the night sky...
When my hearing was again overwhelmed: „Five fields I wandered," I collapsed unconsciouss.
1. Where you off to, shopkeeper? Drinking up?
2. Yeah, half an hour more I'll stay.
1. And then? You're not going home?
2. Right. I will. I'll kiss my wife and climb into bed.
1. (laughter)
2. Why does the yellow horror guide me through
the countryside and the grass sings:
„The poor wretch, the poor wretch!"
1. Death is inside of you and will not be repelled!
2. All's in vain! I cannot escape! What do you want?
1. „Five fields I wandered."
2.I, the poor shopkeeper Matthias Lebermeyer!
What is all this? Where am I?
1. His lordship is at a hotel.
2. „Five fields I wandered."
1. His lordship did not wander through any fields.
2. Is it all a dream?
1. Should I bring you some strong coffee? It will fix your stomach and sober you up...
2. Bring it - and leave me be!
1. Now I must quickly leave this house, this town!
Sunshine is fading out,
and so is my mind;
stalks grow from the ends of my fingers,
stalks with heads of children that swing.
Perhaps I'll lose my sight as well...
Everything is swaying and falling.
Blood gushes from the sun...
It is quite unpleasant...
I still hear the hollow pounding,
- is it a dream?
Where have I dreamt all these years?
In which bed, in which courtyard, on which star?
Lord have mercy on the poor canvas soul!
Or are you only the imagination of a Dream...
Why this horrid comedy?
Am I not - being a God - able to know myself?
I will return into the town.
I will stand up, I will open my eyes. The hotel -gone!...
And my suitcase is gone - Lord, I am such a fool...
My collars, my socks - cotton for my sore ass,
the whitest cotton - all in hell!
Home, home, where my tasty dinner awaits!
My house, my shop, my wife!...
Again the hollow sound of wooden beams
that will nail me into the earth!
I, the poor shopkeeper Matthias Lebermeyer...
Never laid my eyes on a more horrid corpse -
on my own body - I am dead.
Is it all a dream? Is it - afterlife?
In a forest reaching towards the heavens,
the loud sound of thunder - once - twice -
I am disintegrating into atoms,
deep beneath the foul earth.
„Five fields I wandered."
Ladislav Klima
from Jak bude po smrti 1919
Selected and edited by Vratislav Brabenec 1979
Translated by Jan Jonak
--------------
ETERNA
He walked steadily onwards with stubborn determination in a state of raving semi-unconsciousness, feverishly expecting that despite everything he would still reach the end. He walked for years, hundreds, thousands of years, an eternity - and still an immense plain lay festering before him. Suddenly a man stood up from the ground in front of him and said: "Here is the end of time!" "The vortex of eternity, of nothing, that is," he thought to himself and lost consciousness. When he came to he felt he was being carried along, on and on.
He found himself in a kingdom of fiery clouds, thundering with an unutterable exuberance of colours and shapes!
(He was dying) of delight from heavenly, extrasensory fragrances: he had no body, however, he'd become nothing but vision and dying, dying from fragrances!
It was a different, different world - oh, so familiar - and yet so unfamiliar! It became more and more enchanting - landscapes, constellations, towns and cities, people, nymphs rose up and immediately disappeared behind him as he flew along, things un-dreamed-of and yet so familiar kept being born from this world, again and again. "I am in the past again, having crossed the boundaries of time!" he grasped finally. And the enchanting world took flight hastily, some of the clouds condensed into bulky earthly mountains.
He walked on and everything was becoming all the more familiar; he could predict what was coming next - as if these things were actually appearing on his command. But even so a curtain separated him from them.
"And now I will arrive at a more extensive plain, in whose centre is a large chateau." He walked into the chateau. It was deserted; he walked down an echoing, semi-dark corridor, when he heard a woman's hushed sobbing behind one of the doors. His blood froze in his veins - suddenly something rushed out!
"Eterna!"
He pursued her through several rooms, the distance between them kept increasing - finally she disappeared from his eyes, only the sound of her feet stamping on the floor reached his ears, as well as - laughter... It grew noticeably dark, an eerie shadow approached from the mountain. - An evil-beckoning dread was taking hold of Selen.
"Eterna!"
He found himself in the last room. Had he ever beheld anything so horrible, as now was her countenance? She was still almost beautiful - but in such a sickening, disgusting way that no painter could imagine such a diabolical bitch-monster. Something horribly lewd, unctuous, rotten to the core, combined in her with an abysmal hatred and spite into an unspeakable whole. Half-mad he finally extricated himself and ran back - and the harpy pulled him down to the floor from behind -
In the waking world, dream cast its terrible shadow on Eterna.
"I am my own destroyer and nothing can stop my fall into the most horrendous metaphysical chasm." Mountains, now more ghastly than ever in their deathly pallor, were waking up menacingly in the heavens. The timid voices of two birds rang out from the hitherto black womb of the spirit's ether. And all this illuminated Selen's night-time soul - but also ' darkened it with its shadows.
"How beguiling it all is! How beguiling it all is! Nature, woman! Nature is woman! How beguiling and delusory and frightful!"
Eterna!
Everywhere the chasm gapes!
Everywhere the chasm gapes, undreamed-of suffering lurks within. It strikes and strangles everything.
0, nature, you are like my Eterna!
You are like my Eterna! How will it end? Never mind!
Everything hurts me and I'm full of regret.
Everything hurts me and I'm full of regret - I would just like some peace - just peace - just peace - just peace!"
----------
THE DRYAD SPEAKS TO DAYSTAR
Monstrously rolls the evil sun - my beloved murderer - rising higher and higher!
Cursed be the greenery of the trees, to which, through their consciousness, full of clarity and maniacal, I have been bound since ancient times - fettered, shackled, accursed! Damn you, fogs! You float around - and I lie here, as if made of lead, falling asleep and dying.
Not one of you, you slaves of the split second, has yet understood that falling asleep is death...
Blissful blind universe!
Seeing, but as yet as if through the darkest haze. Half-blind! Half-wood, half-human, half-dream and half waking, bat and skylark, the twilight of twilight, hybrid, amphidium, androgyny, abortion of the world - cursed!...
Through what infernal game did it transpire that a soul so hideous has dressed in such a beautiful, deceiving body?... Sleep, soul of mine, die! - What's that? Silver drops, sweetly thirstily ringing, sparkle all around. Are they my tears? They grow like moss, my wretched face is wet from them...
Shimmer on, silver beads of musical tone, sing little angels! Hover higher and higher up to the red of sunset like sacrificial smoke.
What have I glimpsed! For once she rose from out of it like an apparition, still illustrious, like a diamond that had just burst into flames...
All of a sudden bliss spill out within me, as it always does when suddenly I catch sight of you, silver drop, golden note of the heavens!
You, my star!
Daystar, you, my star!
You, true victory and game. You, Island of Bliss.
Sweet fluids pour forth constantly from blissful elves and sylphs, your only inhabitants, on the surface of a golden, cloudy sea, Daystar, which bathes you entirely, dancing, singing, fluids immediately healing the sick, unclean souls of earthlings, as soon as they rush into their eyes!
Daystar, you, my star!
You, the only one, the only joyous of all stars! Smile of night and its Overcoming!
Nightingale of black heavenly orchards! Luminous skylark of the night!
You, the star on which I step, whose name is Mud: everything that treads on you and flies above you, cursed it be to its very atoms. Even Dream, the Great Healer, on you became a Strangler of Souls, whoever is content here even to a slight degree, blind has been since birth. Whoever attains vision here, will perish immediately. To live a waking life in this quagmire is difficult. More difficult, horrifying, most horrifying it is to dream of this quagmire. Its name is hell.
Only its outer parts are known to people, that horde of slaves, which hasn't even begun to scheme about how to escape the Island of Outcasts. I know all of it, for I am it and its infernal madness. People do not see us nymphs, for our Terror would drive them mad. Human beings do not see us, for they do not want to see us, do not want to because they're not allowed, not allowed because - they do not want to...
Queen of the Heavens - you're not mud and clay, only glow and your solar golden aureole, only you are the True, Golden and Holy Dream and Eternal Mirth. Only the Nymphs are holy golden dreams, flitting around you, kissing you, without heavy clods of earth stuck to the appendages of their souls. When will I live on you, at a pleasant proximity to the sun?
Where are you? Let me glimpse you once more! It will bring promise that at least once, liberated from this muddy netherworld, I will come to rest in you, my Lady of Beauty, Lady of Love, Lady of Light! Where are you? The monstrous sun has just sprayed its deadly arrows above the horizon! I'm dying in their rain... And yet -
Glory to all the gods! I see you once again! Like a phantom, yet clearly even so!
My soul, what more do you want?... There's no darkness and no loneliness when you burn above me, Eternal Paraclete! You smiled at me with a forgiving and inviting smile, and in all deaths I will see that smile, that look of farewell. I see you no more - and - do not see - my legs - my arms - nor the sun - night - Eternal Radiance
Only peace - peace - peace.
Ladislav Klima
Fragments from texts Eterna and The Dryad Speaks To Daystar, selected and edited by Vratislav Brabenec 2002
Translated by Marek Tomin
------------------------------
I Am The Absolute Will
Have you cast off your shackles, the heavy shackles, but not the heaviest?
Have you broken out of life's bondage at all?
Have you become Free, a God: Free of all?
I say but three words to you:
I Am The Absolute Will
It alone pacifies suffering
all is valueless, insignificant and for me futile
all is beneficial, good, holy, splendid, blissful
all, for me, is insignificant and futile
all is beneath me
all is beneficial, good for me
everything is only my noble destiny
dictated by the eternal Will
I Am The Absolute Will
I Am The Absolute Will
And to be a manic dance and the only sudden turn
and the most profound madness and foolishness
and sterility and stench and to be nothing -
and subsequently to be unyielding composure and somber reason
and an illuminating idea and the creator of new worlds
from the charmed singing blossoms manure
and from manure the blossoms grow
like its small daughter nature makes
Everything from Nothing, Nothing from Everything
I Am The Absolute Will
I Am The Absolute Will
Everything from Nothing, Nothing from Everything
the building and singing stench and illuminating manure
the sudden manure-like turn cast in iron
and the eternal silent truth that the cheetah painted Montezuma's Aeneid
I Am The Absolute Will
I Am The Absolute Will
Ladislav Klima
from letter to Milos Srb, November 4th 1917
Selected and edited by Vratislav Brabenec 1979
Translated by Jan Jonak
--------------------
In the history of The Plastic People Of The Universe, the music inspired by the literature of Ladislav Klima (1878-1928) holds an exceptional, but at the same time complicated position. In comparison to the fairly straightforward rock that the Plastic People were playing during the first half of the 1970s, and to which they returned after reforming in 1997, the music is not easily digestible and often almost tragically dark. It was written at a time when the musicians had already spent time in prison and every performance by the band had to be organised conspiratorially with extraordinary thoroughness.
The premiere of the Klima cycle entitled Afterlife (Jak bude po smrti) took place in October 1979 in a barn on a little farm in Nova Viska in the Chomutov district. The concert was introduced by Ivan Martin Jirous who read an excerpt from Klima's work the Bohemian Novel (Cesky roman). The musicians sat around a table playing cards and drinking rum to the accompaniment of perverted popular brass band songs (which they had pre-recorded at Vratislav Brabenec's place in Horni Pocernice and played on tape). Then they picked up their instruments and played the compositions Afterlife (Jak bude po smrti), Glorious Nemesis (Slavna Nemesis) and I Am The Absolute Will (Jsem Absolutnf Vule).
All three compositions were subsequently recorded by the Plastics at the start of 1980 in Hradec Kralove in the flat of professional sound engineer Lubomir Novacek, with whom they had already collaborated back in spring 1978 when he had recorded The Passion Play. They prepared for the recording session very responsibly: They had reached the conclusion that in order to profoundly penetrate the world of Klima, they would have to follow the philosopher's example in drinking near-fatal amounts of alcohol with the aim of attaining visions of "rum bugs". Apparently some members did actually see the insects, but even so the group was not happy with the end result of the session. The live concert recorded in Nova Viska was finally released as a gramophone record and CD in 1992, and subsequently as a remastered version in 1998 as the sixth CD of the collected recordings of the Plastic People.
Twenty three years after its first and so far only live rendition, the music inspired by Ladislav Klima returned to the stage. The new arrangement was presented on 15 December 2002 in Prague's Roxy club and was the start of a fruitful period of collaboration with the Agon Orchestra. Of the five members of The Plastic People Of The Universe who played in 1979, two members were missing - composer, bass guitarist and singer Milan Hlavsa (died 5 January 2001) and drummer Jan Brabec (left the band in 1999). The concert was given the title I Walked Around Five Fields (Aj obesel ja poll pet), which is a slightly distorted quote from the novella Afterlife. It was the third title given to the project (the concert premiere and definitive CD version were called Afterlife, the 1992 release was given the title Glorious Nemesis).
The music itself did not undergo any major changes, however. The greatly extended line-up of musicians made it more colourful and dynamic, as well as giving a more accomplished rendition, but the structures of Milan Hlavsa's compositions remained unaltered. The stage design by Arnost Goldflam was essentially inspired by that used during the premiere in Nova Viska. The musicians sat around a table below main stage drinking, Ivan Jirous read from Klima's books. When conductor Petr Kofron solemnly yet with the vulgarity of a loudmouth summoned the seven members of the Plastic People and fifteen musicians from Agon Orchestra to the stage, they began by playing the brass band introduction Brass band I (Dechovka I) which more than anything sounded like madcap Dixieland. The compositions were played in the opposite order to that of the concert premiere.
Although the joint rendition of I am The Absolute Will, the shortest composition in the Klima programme, gave a somewhat impromptu impression, the climactic passages were almost monumental. The text compiled by Brabenec is composed of quotations from Klima's long letter to Milos Srb, dated 4 November 1917. It's part of an extensive philosophical correspondence published in full in 2006 in the second volume of Klima's Collected Writings - Hominibus. The music is strongly reminiscent of methods used previously in The Passion Play; the next two numbers performed revealed that Milan Hlavsa had taken a new direction in musical composition.
The instrumental piece Glorious Nemesis primarily bore the stamp of Agon; three of the seven members of the Plastic People were not even on stage at the time. Paradoxically, the musicians remaining off stage were those who played at the premiere - saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec, keyboard player Josef Janicek and violinist Jin Kabes. Here a qualitative shift in interpretation was already quite clear - Glorious Nemesis was a considerable departure for Milan Hlavsa away from his rock music roots and Agon was able to play this majestically static music more convincingly than the Plastic People had done many years previously. Presented for the first time at the Roxy concert was a collage of two of Klima's texts which Brabenec had selected from the collection Seconds of Eternity (Vteriny vecnosti), compiled by Josef Zumr in 1967; it was the only book of work by Ladislav Klima that allowed to be published officially between 1948 and 1989. Brabenec declaimed selected extracts from the fragment Eterna (part of Klima's Novel in Eternity first published as He Dreamt One Night (Jedne noci snil) in the collection entitled Glorious Nemesis printed in 1932, the rest of the novel no longer survives) and at the same time Eva Turnova read excerpts from the prose poem The Dryad Speaks to the Daystar (K Denici mluvi Dryada), which is one of Klima's late works of fiction. Music played an entirely marginal role here.
Afterlife is a powerful musical dramatisation of an excerpt from the novella of the same name written in 1919 and first published a year later. The musical rendition of the feverish dream of Matyas Lebermayer, a wholesaler with fabrics, recited by Kabes (who took over Hlavsa's section), Janicek and Brabenec, stayed true to the original arrangement; the orchestra was not given much room to manoeuvre until the very end of the composition. The combination of dread and farce, so typical of Ladislav Klima ("Comedy and terror are sisters, the world is but a bottomless grotesque play"), permeated the entire concert and it was an unforgettable experience in many respects, and that included the rendition of Magical Night (Magicke noci), added as an encore.
Jin Cerny wrote the following about the concert in World and Theatre (Svet a divadlo) magazine (No. 2/2003): "Besides alto-saxophone improvisations, the hypnotically gaunt Brabenec, whose portrait could only be rendered by the improbable combination of Marc Chagall and Cyril Bouda, also belched out Klima's texts with an equal emphasis on content and the melody of sentences. During provocatively demanding rhythmic "duets" with Eva Turnova, irresistible even in their imperfection, I kept lamenting: This cannot be just a one-off, surely it must be performed again sometime, if only because of the people who didn't make it today." For some time, however, it seemed that for financial reasons the resurrection of the music inspired by Klima would remain a one-time only concert. But then more performances followed: on 28 September 2003 in Kino Mir in Opava where the order of the compositions performed became fixed at The Brass Band I. - Glorious Nemesis - Eterna / The Dryad Speaks to Daystar - Afterlife -1 Am The Absolute Will - The Brass Band II. The Canary (Kanarek) and Magical Night were played as encores. A shortened version of this programme was played by the Plastics and Agon on 5 October at the re-opening Prague's Archa Theatre; that was also where another performance was given on 14 October 2002 (with four encores: Around The Window (Okolo okna), He Went for Blood (Sel pro krev), The Canary, Magical Night). After that the Plastic People and Agon Orchestra began working on a joint rendition of another important work from the 1970s, The Passion Play (the premiere was held on 24 April 2004 in the Archa Theatre). The Klima programme was played once gain on 22 May in Cesky Tesin, on 16 July in Hamburg, on 7 October 2004 in the Fleda club in Brno and on 12 June 2005 in Nuremberg.
Jaroslav Riedel, December 2009

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