17/01/26 - 14/02/26
E.E. Vonna-Michell - Henri Chopin
To Ray the Rays
A proposal by Tris Vonna-Michell
Preview days: 17/01/26 - 18/01/26
At TINA, as part of Condo, London

Jan Mot participates in Condo London 2026, invited by TINA, with the presentation of To Ray the Rays, a film by E.E. Vonna-Michell in collaboration with Henri Chopin. The exhibition is a proposal by Tris Vonna-Michell and represents the British premiere of this experimental film from 1986-1987. On the artist E.E. Vonna-Michell, please read the following text by Marc Matter, previously published in Jan Mot Newspaper nr 130 (January 2022).

 

The experimental media alchemy of E.E. Vonna-Michell and Balsam Flex.

 “Fills the Room of Your Choice. A sniffing apparatus for the head, KHAASHA-200 will replace the anxious odors of the world with the single, stable scent of your desire! This elegant piece of jewelry made of gold or silver holds the source of the smell you want to smell - by inclination.”

This advertisement for an unusual and somewhat novel accessory can be found on a leaflet dating from the mid 1980s for “series 3” of the UK-based Balsam Flex publishing project (see image). Run by E.E. Vonna-Michell (1950-2020) from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, Balsam Flex remains a true enigma amongst small press publishers, even in the already baffling field of artist’s publications produced in a DIY manner (or, more appropriate in most cases: DIT as in do-it-together, a term introduced to me by artist, musician and writer Chris Mann). Releasing experimental art and poetry works (foremost sound poetry) that expanded the notion of poetry, as well as documenting performances that happened mainly in and around London, the activities of this publishing project can be associated with the ‘British Poetry Revival’. It ought to be recognized as a rather singular practice though, due to its utilization, and oftentimes misuse, of media and technology and a highly idiosyncratic approach.

The publications of Balsam Flex consisted mainly of sound works on audio cassettes (according to E.E. Vonna-Michell far over a hundred titles in a print-run of up to a few hundred copies), a few small, self-made books and other printed matter, as well as some video and original editions. Some of the releases were rather peculiar: for example, one original edition (You are the only one missing by Jiri Perez, presumably a pseudonym) is described as a “mannikin audio recorder – self-performing”; one audio cassette release seemed to be unplayable, foreshadowing so-called ‘anti-records’ by artists and noise musicians; another one’s content differs each time it was played back due to a deliberate unstable mechanical constellation of the inner-life of the cassette.

I had great luck to visit E.E. Vonna-Michell in his London studio in early 2017 to talk about his projects and the publishing experiences with Balsam Flex, an encounter made possible by the mediation of his son Tris who I met and became friends with due to our shared interest in experimental spoken word, concrete and sound poetry. The meeting was one of the most impressive encounters I ever had. After years of trying to organize a meeting, I was curious and excited. He turned out to be welcoming and open to my interest in his work. He talked about his current projects that were not declared as art and placed incognito in public places such as trains, as well as other projects executed in anonymity and hard to grasp in its audaciousness and complexity. Never applying for grants and reluctant to declare himself an artist, he rather earned his money doing printing and duplication jobs for colleagues and later consulting for various companies using his expertise in media technology.

E.E. Vonna-Michell had an odd kind of humour and dry wit but being of utmost seriousness concerning matters of artistic research, practice and reflection. In addition to that, his approach to media technologies and its utilization in the arts was extremely insight-driven and well-informed—a true and deeply involved ‘artist-engineer’ who added, subtracted, dismantled and reassembled materials (C.f. “Collage, Montage and Related Terms: Their Literal and Figurative Use in and Application to Techniques and Forms in Various Arts” by Ulrich Weissenstein) in new and yet unknown ways, creating works that comprise the process of its making in itself. After my visit I immediately took notes of our conversation and the term ‘media-alchemist’ popped up in my mind: somebody who searches and finds alternative ways to handle technical media to achieve aesthetic results which had yet to evolve. As cliché it might sound, he seemed to me as somebody taking deep trips into unknown and unchartered territories.

Many Balsam Flex audio releases resemble what has latter been called ‘noise music’ or ‘industrial’; remarkable in this context, The Art of Flight by Allen Fisher has been realized in the sound studio of Coum Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle, a transgressive performance and music collective that coined the term ‘industrial’. Other releases can be associated with post-fluxus aesthetics by its commitment to ephemeral and mundane everyday situations, while occasionally displaying outlandish methods of production in handling materials, bodies, voices, spaces and media technologies.

Will Montgomery, a literary scholar, wrote one of the very few essays about Balsam Flex to date (another being the brief article by Julian Cowley in the music magazine Wire #297 in 2008) in which he divides the audio releases of the label into three main categories (“Balsam Flex: Cassette Culture and Poetry”; in Modernist Legacies. Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today. Edited by Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith 2015): “The first embraces recordings of a number of improvisatory, often collaborative performances—material by Bang, Crash, Wallop, or the duo of [E.E.] Vonna-Michell and [Lawrence] Upton, for example; the second is solo material by Vonna-Michell and those in his immediate circle; the third is independent of the Balsam Flex ‘aesthetic’—readings and sound poetry by poets including [Henri] Chopin, [Bob] Cobbing, François Dufrêne, Peter Finch and Ken Edwards. Lesser known figures such as Alice Blommor left little or no trace.” (p. 134) Some of the artist names in the Balsam Flex catalogue presumably being pseudonyms—like Yurine Burns, Rudi Schlemmer-Topf, Dyane Citroen, Neko Nekosen, Jiri Perez, Iida Kajino, John & Mary Outchan, and Tumla Nitnelav (which is the name of E.E. Vonna-Michell’s wife written backwards)—these works are most likely by E.E. Vonna-Michell himself or produced in collaboration with friends or family.

Some of the releases feature proto-glitch aesthetics by making use of technical glitches and errors normally being suppressed as unwanted noise or flawed sound, a practice that later became popular in experimental electronic music during the 1990s as ‘glitch’. One extreme example of this is Touch by the probably pseudonymous Iida Kajino, in which an interrupted string of electrical hum can be heard, disrupted by on-and-off noises that seem to originate from touching (hence the title) a jack plug of an audio cable which is normally supposed to be ‘touched’ only by its matching socket. Another work in this vein, foreshadowing experimental musical practices that later came to popularity, is Canopy in Green in which the sound of a needle running through an empty run-out groove of a vinyl record plays a dominant role: the rumble of the vinyl itself and its stubbornly repetitive clicks (produced by the opening of the run-out groove) displays the materiality of another sound medium: the sound of vinyl released on an audio cassette. Utilizing these noises as compositional material in a as-found manner by merely recording the end of a vinyl record which contains no proper ‘sound’ but just the normally unwanted noise turns it into music of a sort.

An example of challenging intentionality and originality, more precisely broadening the form and use of ‘scores’, is the audio cassette Orange Wipes, produced and instantaneously composed in an agile performance, as described on the leaflet accompanying the cassette: “this recording contains the third transcript of the orange wipes transcribed on October 12, 1979 by mounting five mono record heads, in the left and right hands and feet dancing over and over some 900 feet of one inch 16^th century dance recordings braided to size a very small area.” As a special feature which links technological settings of the audio cassette medium to meaning making is the fact that it could only be listened to once: “please note: due to the nature of this cassette, any attempts to fast forward or rewind may result in irreparable damage.” The instantaneous composition and production of this work can also be understood as a special form of translation or transcription, in which specific movements of a body in space are transferred into music. The outcome is a wild, vivid and dense sound piece, realized in a surprisingly clear and crispy sound.

Other experimental setups, although apparently not successful, included writing a long poetic text on 1.200 feet of audio tape and then removing the electromagnetic sound information not protected by the writing, proposing a form of shaping erasure; in a way comparable to so-called blackout poetry in which portions of a given text are blackened or crossed out so that new texts emerge (an early example being ‘Paris, mai 1924’ by Man Ray) but transferred to the time-based medium of sound. For this kind of experiments, E.E. Vonna-Michell often found ways to get material, sometimes seemingly custom-made, from big tech-companies like Sony.

Some of the audio cassettes released by Balsam Flex were produced in a studio or at odd locations like an operating carwash (Carwash Interview with Allen Fisher) including all the surrounding noises as part of the work, resonating with-post-Cagean aesthetics of abolishing the demarcation between useful and useless material. Other releases were recorded live on-site at performances and happenings, occasionally exercising a kind of in-situ publishing by recording a given performance and subsequently duplicating it onto audio cassettes to make it available to the public by the end of the event. During my visit in his studio, Vonna-Michell revealed that sometimes the audience would have been served food after a performance to gain time for the duplication of the cassettes.

In an interview with Ken Edwards recorded in 1981, E.E. Vonna-Michell talks about his fascination with cooking, resonating with artistic methods of disintegration processes and transformations: “the way things used to change. You’d see a package of something dry and later it came out wet… things became cakes, never understood! How a thing became a cake like that. I remember now seeing a cardboard box with all the dry stuff in it, three hours later we had this big cake. […] Puddings were mysterious, jelly… all that business, fascinating.” Besides transformation and disintegration, long-durational processes were of high interest. Regarding a performance, one demurely plain leaflet announces A Weekend by E.E. Vonna-Michell: “48 hours / to begin at 8pm on july 14 / ending at 10pm on july 16 / to take place in / around / Lower Green Farm-Kent. There will be a 2 hour interval on July 15 from 3 to 5pm.”

Some of the lyric output by E.E. Vonna-Michell published on paper as small books or in magazines (like Spanner #19, a split-release with Allen Fisher’s Speech Poetry) is concerned with similar problems as his audio works: one ‘book’ was conceived in the form of a physical object that would go into a process of degeneration depicted in the self-explanatory title 2 ply washing up for more than 10 months. Other print publications were concerned with repetition and combinatorial concepts: Segments. Back is based on variations on the word ‘back’ in highly repetitive patterns: “seen back / sense back / skid back / seem back / seize back / slip back.” Concerned with the materiality of language, it is also a writing that is dependent on the sound shape of language, rich of assonances and idiosyncratic rhymes. Another work, a visual poem of unknown date, squeezes together a variety of the German word ‘Schnitt’ (cut) with all possible prefixes so that a field of words emerges that typographically overlap each other (see picture). His book Falkenhagen (Dreit Editions) on the other hand displays excessive overwriting. It is a reworking of the terrorist laws introduced in 1974, using appropriated text and applying a specific process to it: “more than one text written on the same page, typed onto the same page. […] a writing manipulation. […] It’s writing over itself and again itself. First thing is written. Then it’s rewritten. Then it’s rewritten. It’s just responding to itself.” In regard to another of his books, he concludes that it is “writing that works against itself” (interview with Ken Edwards). E.E. Vonna-Michell regarded those processes including appropriation, transformation and erasure as ‘performances’, the production of a book like the one mentioned above being the performance itself, so he didn’t see the need to perform it over again. The same goes for much of his audio and film works, in which material was exposed to a certain, pre-defined process. The results would then be released on audio cassettes or shown as films on various occasions.

A collaborator of high importance for E.E. Vonna-Michell was Henri Chopin, who contributed a collection of his audiopoems entitled oh to the Balsam Flex catalogue. Chopin, a publisher of experimental poetry himself (OU review and edition), was a key figure in the European postwar avantgarde and a tireless connector of artists and scenes from the early 1960s on. Together with Chopin, E.E. Vonna-Michell realized some forceful works of ‘expanded media’ combining language, noise, sound, moving images, visuals and space. Time-based and degradation processes, deconstruction or creative (mis-) employment of media, as well as new forms of (graphic) scores were of high relevance in the collaborations with Chopin.

Regarding E.E. Vonna-Michell’s work as a publisher as well as his own approaches, the term ‘experimental’ has to be acknowledged literally in the sense of conceptual formulations with an open outcome, rather than a mere label for otherwise unclassifiable work. Much of the Balsam Flex publishing output, and especially that of E.E. Vonna-Michell, is hidden behind more accessible works of the era. Works which foreshadow the art, sound and music of today, and interconnect historic strata.

 

Marc Matter, January 2022

 

17/01/26 - 14/02/26
E.E. Vonna-Michell - Henri Chopin
To Ray the Rays
A proposal by Tris Vonna-Michell
Condo preview days: 17/01/26 - 18/01/26
Hosted by TINA
First Floor
191 Wardour Street
London W1F 8ZE

 

Condo London 2026