(TV) The Halal File

["leif joley" <leifjoley@hotmail.com>]

So now I'm the happy owner of Jutta Koether's "Tha Halal File", released by 
Standard Graphik Kvln in 1990. Or should I say the not-too-happy owner?

Never expected this to be a record featuring hitherho unknown Verlaine songs 
- but perhaps some background playing to some of his fiancie's painting 
expo's. No such luck.

It's 45 minutes of traffic noise, police car sirens, subway trains, a NYC 
train driver's brief announcing to passengers, people whistling, birds 
singing, sounds from an elevator, someone yelling in Spanish, someone's 
arguing in German, someone playing on a saxophone couple of seconds, sounds 
of shoes walking on sidewalks, sounds of shoes walking up stairs, a Lisa 
Satnsfield soul tune on a distant transistor radio, distant Chinese music - 
perhaps from a Chinese restaurant. It's all divided in one German Version 
and one English Version. You could tell, because a German woman - Koether, I 
assume - read sort of an artistic manifesto in those languages through the 
end of each part. The talking goes like "According to my state the world 
offers itself to me. According to my state color in space is laughing at 
me".

The reading is like a poem, interrupted by the word "Halal". Halal to me is 
the Muslim equivalence to the Jew's Kosher - even though I consider myself 
to be one of the more literate in this discussion group, I can't count out 
the possibilty that someone else could be more informed about the meaning of 
"Halal". But I think it has soemthing to do with purity - maybe it's the 
purity of art Koether's reaching for? (By the way, I've once visited what 
was called the world's largest Kosher slaughterhouse, in Iowa of all places. 
"No cattle killing today", one of the staff informed me prior to our study 
visit. "Just chicken killing." But we did get a demonstration of the cattle 
killing - our guide showed us the big, big sharp, sharp knife. A Kosher meat 
factory is like a bull fighting arena: you shouldn't go unless you're 
interested; you shouldn't go if you feel sorry for the poor animals, and 
hope for them to fight back or escape their cruel fate.)

OK, let's move over to the liner notes. Words and music are credited to 
Koether, with concept and production "with Tom Verlaine". It was made at 
Sorcerer Studio in NYC, familiar to all of us. One Reni Tinner at 
Can-Studio, Weilerswist is thanked, as is Peter Cadera. Unfamiliar to me, 
but a fast Googling says that the former has engineered some Holger Szukay 
records, and that the latter appear on a Kraftwerk discussion list, seems to 
do A&R work for some label and could be involved in some "spoken word" 
business. Standard Graphik Kvln is apparently a art gallery in Kvln, not a 
record company; the issue number is SG1.

The poem, or whatever it is, is printed in the eight-page booklet, in which 
red is the only decoration colour. One Hans Nieswandt (according to another 
Googling, a DJ and an painter) writes an essay about the content; he call it 
a "bizarre stroll", and he definitely have a point there. It's also a 
"universal city noise", a "collective improvisation by a gigantic band... 
even if the individual musicians are not aware of the others and no composer 
is present". It's also "the opposite of New Age ambient music". And it's 
"pop and has to be heard pop - loud".

This is an exclusive and obscure effort - and not only because of its 
non-commercial value but also since it couldn't be manufactured in very many 
copies. Not unless Koether is some sort of superstar in her home country, a 
celebrity that could sell just about anything. There's some puzzling 
mysteries that remains unsolved, too. I ordered it through the German Net 
record store CyberCD, and their catalogue contains not only "Jutta Koether: 
The Halal File", but also "Jutta Koether feat. Tom Verlaine: The Halal 
File". I ordered both, but only got the latter. Just one copy of it - the 
last one in stock; the not-with Verlaine isn't available at all anymore. But 
- the one copy I got doesn't say ANYTHING about it being a "feat. Tom 
Verlaine" item. Could be, but maybe not. One might contemplate over what the 
content of this record would be in an altered version, with more or less 
Verlaineian input. My brain just come up with an "error" if I give this 
thought a thought. There's a possibility too, of course, that there have 
never existed any other version than the one I've got. Because of... well, I 
don't know.

So this rarity hardly belongs in the catalogue of Verlaine music. Obviously, 
he was involved in the shaping of it, but there's no signs of it. None at 
all. Take my word for it.

Now I feel somewhat robbed. Not that it was too expensive, but it wasn't 
quite what I'd expected or hoped for. Although some expressed envy from you 
completists will make me feel a bit happier.

Leif J, Sweden

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