Description

Caliban Sounds in association with One Little Independent Records are delighted to present a 180g heavy weight double vinyl, in a gatefold sleeve; Penny Rimbaud’s ‘Acts of Love’ (1984) accompanied by Mikado Koko’s ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ (2022). It’s presented with the ‘Acts of Love’ 32-page booklet and ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ insert. The latter available on vinyl for the first time, these collector’s items are limited to only 1000 copies.

In the mid-1960s, Penny Rimbaud started work on a series of Zen-like haikus which five years later were to become ‘Acts of Love – Fifty Poems To My Other Self’. Inspired by Rimbaud’s efforts, Gee Vaucher set about creating a series of artworks to illustrate the poems which were then presented in a 12” box of the kind sometimes used for record releases. The instructions inside suggested that you make your own music, a pre-DIY action, MYOM. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, UK.

Having in 1977 co-founded the anarchist band Crass, by 1984 Rimbaud felt he needed to explain both the political and personal roots of what increasingly was being seen by press and public alike as the band’s “violent anger”.  However, in this respect Rimbaud had always concurred with Che Guevara who had stated that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”. What better, then, than to return to ‘Acts of Love’, to be presented this time as a 12” vinyl.  Rimbaud would compose the music to feature Eve Libertine on vocals and Paul Ellis on keyboards. Meanwhile, Vaucher set about creating a new set of illustrations to accompany the poems.

Launched in 1985, Paul Du Noyer, then with the NME, wrote that ‘Acts of Love’ is “hauntingly beautiful in places, the style and vocals bear out Rimbaud’s reverence for early English church music”. Meanwhile, writing for the Sunday Telegraph, Peter Clayton stated “A high female voice combining choirboy purity with adult knowingness; the music, mostly from synthesisers cleverly used, beautiful in a somewhat ecclesiastical way. A painstaking creation of a different kind of music, which is, in part, sublimely beautiful”’. Fait accompli, anger turned of love.

In 2021, avant-garde musician and artist, Mikado Koko, being a keen admirer of Libertine’s vocals, and having a great fondness for ‘Acts of Love’, contacted Rimbaud with the idea of creating cut-ups of twenty tracks from the album to create a sister release entitled ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’.  Mikado had featured on the Crass Remix project, ‘Normal Never Was’, with her radical remix of Libertine’s rendition of Rimbaud’s ‘Reality Asylum’. When finally he heard the result, he was overjoyed and the album was released in 2022 on Caliban Sounds. Sean Worrall wrote in The Organ, “Mikado Koko has taken Penny Rimbaud’s album ‘Acts of Love’, originally a fifty track album of short poems on love, and cut it up, deconstructed it, reconstructed it, pulled it apart and put it all back together (a lot more than just remixed it) to make a twenty track album of her own. ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ is an entirely new album, that we’re told that, and rightly so, we should view as a continuation of the original. What we have here are bites, stabs, thrusts of Crass-like noise, art, the art of noise. It is hard-boiled, it is challenging, it might be madness or maybe maddening, the whole thing is glorious actually. Those bites of words, the cut and paste deconstruction, the thrust, words caught, the art of collage, the real art of glorious noise, painting with sound”.

The decision to release the two albums together demonstrates the mutual respect that Rimbaud and Mikado hold for each other.

Track listing

‘Acts Of Love’

1. When You Woke This Morning
2. I Would Sleep
3. It Is No Time Since The Open Sky
4. My Mind Tumbles In A Fountain Of Sound
5. Hold My Eyes
6. Into Tunnels I Run
7. Who Frets Tonight To See Me Tomorrow
8. The Walks In Muddy Soils
9. I Sing
10. The Dusk Of My Hours Await
11. Veiled By Evening Gloom
12. I Say Goodbye To You
13. I Have Walked Enough
14. Yesterday I Laughed With You
15. Empty Heads
16. Can You Hear Me This Windy Night
17. Where Have We Smiled Like This Before
18. Whilst Walking, I Have Often Passed You
19. Those Hours Are Distant Shadows
20. In The Cell That Is Ours There Is No Pity
21. The Blinking Of An Eye
22. In My Attachment To Infinity I Have No Definition
23. One Foot Before the Other I Walk
24. I Walk With No Knowledge of Myself
25. The Illusion Of Past Realities
26. Wait, I Shall See You Through This Illusion
27. Soft Grass, Green Grass, Better Not Stand Here
28. Now I Walk
29. There Was A Window Through Which I Watched A Cherry Grow
30. The Warm Patch Where Once My Body Lay
31. The Naked Brow Frets In the Cold
32. Hilltops
33. The Season Has Us Confused
34. A Stone Is Margined By Its Own Shadow
35. This Morning There Is Shelter, My Journey Is Fast
36. I’m Glad the Sun Has Awoken Me Again
37. It’s You Who Makes The World Around You
38. You Ask For The World
39. The Beautiful Eyes Of The Warrior
40. The Fox Runs To The East
41. The Wind Changes Direction
42. A Thousand Separate Winds Blow
43. The Changing Seasons
44. The Tree Bends In The Wind
45. How Fortunate
46. Running We Breathe Deeply
47. The Horseless Rider Dreams of Sleep
48. Crossing The Road, I Am Unaware Of The Cars
49. A Man Sat In The Snow Beneath The Mighty Oak
50. Your Clumsy Head
51. Interlude
52. Outtake/Remix Song 1
53. Outtake/Remix Song 3
54. Outtake/Remix Song 9
55. Outtake/Remix Song 12
56. Outtake/Remix Song 14
57. Outtake/Remix Song 17
58. Outtake/Remix Song 18
59. Outtake/Remix Song 22
60. Outtake/Remix Song 26
61. Outtake/Remix Song 29
62. Outtake/Remix Song 30
63. Outtake/Remix Song 31
64. It’s Only You
65. Outtake/Remix Song 37
66. Outtake/Remix Song 41
67. Outtake/Remix Song 43
68. Outtake/Remix Song 45
69. Outtake/Remix Song 42
70. It’s Only You
71. First Woman (A Poem By Eve Libertine)

‘Songs To Our Other Selves’

1. Track 01
2. Track 02
3. Track 03
4. Track 04
5. Track 05
6. Track 06
7. Track 07
8. Track 08
9. Track 09
10. Track 10
11. Track 11
12. Track 12
13. Track 13
14. Track 14
15. Track 15
16. Track 16
17. Track 17
18. Track 18
19. Track 19
20. Track 20