eric sleichim

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A Portrait of Eric Sleichim by musicologist Yves Knockaert

One way of better understanding Eric Sleichim is to look at the people who have inspired him over the course of his musical career. The journey begins with Marcel Duchamp. The saxophone quartet in which Sleichim has played since 1988 is called ‘Bl!ndman’, a somewhat peculiar way of writing ‘Blindman’. The exclamation mark is a contrived reference to the group ‘Maximalist!’, also written with an exclamation mark, of which Sleichim was one of the four founders. The exclamation mark thus refers to the obvious link between the two ensembles, as if ‘Bl!indman’ would never have come to be if ‘Maximalist!’ hadn’t existed first. The Blind Man was the name of the magazine founded by Duchamp in New York in 1917. The name immediately sets the tone: Sleichim seeks out the unusual, sometimes even the perverse or controversial. At the same time, he initially sought to create something analogous to what Duchamp had intended to achieve with his ‘blind man’. I like to interpret the Dadaistic idea of a blind guide leading visitors through an art exhibition as a guide who learns to see along with his tour group or a guide who learns how his visitors look at the objects and can ‘steer’ them when necessary. Sleichim is not the guide; he is the artist to whom the guide and his group are listening. But Sleichim never raised himself to the level of artist: he took on the entire Bl!ndman project for himself, which involves much more than composing and playing the saxophone. He plots the course that Bl!indman will follow. In doing so he actually becomes the deaf guide, who after twenty years in the business still understands perfectly well that the audience for new music will not appear out of thin air, certainly not in droves, and that he must keep searching for new ways of captivating his audience. It’s not so much Duchamp’s absurdist side that is important to Sleichim, though he is remarkably good at putting things into perspective, as Duchamp’s critical side: continually question yourself, seek out the unknown, find new possibilities and keep reinventing yourself. As a result, Bl!ndman will never reach the end of its journey and is rightfully written with an exclamation mark, denoting the alertness of the search. Poortenbos [Forest of Doors], many doors or possibilities and a big forest to get lost in, was the title of a twelve-part suite from 1989, made up of saxophone solos, duos, trios and quartets, in three movements and nine doors.

When it comes to the plastic arts, Sleichim was from an early stage fascinated by Joseph Beuys. Beuys became part of his own art works. He lived in his installations in the museum or while they were in an exhibition. Sleichim is no different, in part because he is the first to perform his music and in part because for him the physical presence and physical contact with the instrument is also an essential element of music. Five Movements for Beuys was the Bl!ndman Quartet’s first public performance and was inspired by Beuys’ performance Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt’ [How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare]. Undeniably, Bl!ndman or the blind guide could easily be made part of Beuys’ performance: the title itself could be called ‘blind’ – even slightly absurd or impossible.

Another influence was Buster Keaton. The early films for which Sleichim wrote music on several occasions in the 1990s were not blind, but mute or silent. Here too he did not choose the obvious and direct humour of many silent films, but rather the somewhat mournful figure of Buster Keaton, who was funny in spite of himself and who, against his will, wound up in increasingly absurd situations. In addition to Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr., Sleichim also wrote music to accompany the Japanese avant-garde film Kurutta Ippeiji by Teinosuke Kinugasa, whose title translates as A Page of Madness. Also important to Sleichim’s preferred theme is the ‘poetic horror film’ La Chute de la Maison Usher by Jean Epstein. This film is generally considered to be the absolute masterpiece of its genre and is a loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, filled out with elements from the writer’s other stories. A not unimportant detail is that Luis Buñuel was the assistant director for this production. Would it surprise anyone to hear that a central point in the plot of this film is the painting of a portrait? The painting in the film comes from Poe’s story The Oval Portrait, in which a man paints a portrait of his beautiful young wife. The painting is perfect, but as it progresses it draws the life from her. She dies as her husband paints the last stroke. It immediately makes one think of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

And then, suddenly, came Bach. The Bl!ndman CD released in 2000, of Bach music played by the saxophone quartet, was a truly and completely unexpected surprise. In his music, Sleichim had always avoided transcriptions. But, being a recent instrument, the saxophone has no choice but to play many transcriptions of old pieces. Sleichim had been much more interested in presenting the instrument’s physical power and in experimenting with its range of sound possibilities, for which he used very inventive methods of muting and muffling the instrument, where breathing techniques and diverse styles of playing were infinitely refined, and made the most of every possible percussive and susurrant noise made by its keys. New high-tech and electronic capabilities allowed unprecedented saxophone noises to explode into space. Sleichim also intensely explored the instrument’s technological aspects and use of space. In doing so, however, he never forgot the essential, aesthetically pure nature of the saxophone’s acoustic sound. At each of their rehearsals, the quartet had played Bach’s chorales in order to achieve a blended timbre, accuracy of attack and, especially, perfect precision when playing and simultaneously listening to one another. Never intended to be used as a transcription, it was a four-part piece from the Chorbuch, but played on saxophone rather than sung. Before their performances, the quartet had the habit of playing a Bach chorale to test the acoustics in the space. Once, during the sound check for a concert in a church, the organizer asked them if they would play the chorale during the concert. In this way the audience heard Bach, followed by mediaeval music and Renaissance polyphony and, soon thereafter, also by a series of canons that Mozart had once written as an exercise.

Figures from the art and film worlds continue to fascinate Eric Sleichim today. Over time, he has come to work increasingly in the theatre world. Initially, this work was intended primarily for the dance scene, including everything that followed in the wake of the music the Maximalist! group had done for Rosas. In the past ten years, however, Sleichim has been much more involved in purely theatrical productions, working together with a list of people whose names denote quality: Josse De Pauw, Guy Cassiers, Jan Fabre and, outside Belgium, Heiner Goebbels and Helmut Oehring (The latter’s parents were deaf. He grew up using sign language and only learned to speak in a host family at the age of four).

In 2003, Eric Sleichim wrote the music for Jan Fabre’s video-installation The Angel of Death. Once again, the subject was a controversial artist: Andy Warhol. The main emphasis in this piece was on Warhol’s homosexual nature, told from the perspective of man versus woman versus hermaphrodite. The same theme returns in the music-theatre production Men in Tribulation, which Muziektheater Transparant commissioned Sleichim to write and for which Fabre wrote the script. This time, the story is based on the theatrical writings and experiences of Antonin Artaud: the male versus the female versus the neutral or neutered. Sleichim emphasises Artaud’s subversive character and how in the end he was striving to become ‘sexless’. Another strongly contrasting element about Arnaud was his fascination with Balinese theatre. This was his first contact with abstract theatre containing only symbols and fixed codes and it strongly opposed his ideas on the ‘théâtre de la cruauté’, in which crudity (cru) and cruelty (cruel) represented directness and expressive overstatement. He believed that the emotions on stage should no longer be acted, but should be ‘real’. Eric Sleichim is obsessed with the same idea: how is it possible to go from portraying emotions to actually creating an emotion on stage through his music? What’s more, how is it possible to grip his listeners, to grasp them, to almost use force against them through his truly physical and mental stance (rather than performance) on stage? How, in order to do this, it is necessary to conquer the space surrounding your audience, pushing and shoving the artistic idea into the cracks between the listeners. This can be achieved by setting up speakers in and around the audience, by guiding the movement of sound throughout the space and by dispersing the musicians throughout the audience; ideas that Sleichim has further elaborated in his piece Gestimmtseit.

In Gestimmtseit (2004), Sleichim remains faithful to his subject. As with Warhol, the confrontation this time is with Pier Paolo Pasolini, homosexual, subversive and often shocking in his films. Pasolini was also a poet, and the text used for this piece shows us a young man looking into a mirror and trying to come to terms with his budding sexuality (or more precisely, homosexuality). Sleichim’s goal is not only to allow the audience to voyeuristically look into the mirror along with the young Pasolini; he also wants to lock them into the same room with him. The members of the string quartet grope their way through complete darkness, looking for their seats on the stage or in the room. The four saxophonists are seated throughout the audience. Suddenly, sounds burst out from all directions, unpredictable and indefinable and electronically distorted to the point of being unrecognizable. Sleichim calls them ‘perverted sounds’. The title of the piece has a similar feel: it is a slip of the pen made by Pasolini, who probably meant to write Gestimmtheit but instead created a non-existent word. Yet again, an element that lies outside the realm of what exists: an emotional element which remains unknown because it does not exist. In Intra-Muros, his new music-theatre production for Muziektheater Transparant, Sleichim has explored Pasolini’s character even more intensively.

Starting in 2005, Sleichim will be Transparant’s resident composer and will be creating a number of music-theatre productions for them. Transparant is also supporting a number of projects in which Sleichim is involved, such as Jan Fabre’s L’histoire des larmes.

Few musicians display such consistency, purpose and unity in their work as Eric Sleichim. On one level, it seems simple: he tells a story (postmodern) based on characters that fascinate him. On another level, it’s extremely direct: he grasps his saxophone and plays it with an ethereally beautiful purity, rhythmically rocking and pulsing, experimenting with any manner of unconventional sounds. This directness is not only due to the fact that the composer plays his own music; it is also due to the way he physically approaches the instrument, the absolute union between the composer-performer and his saxophone. On yet another level there is the never-ending quest, in which Eric Sleichim himself remains obscured: does he reveal something of himself? Is he looking for himself? How does he relate to the characters who fascinate and impassion him, and who themselves are so passionate and fascinating? He pushes and forces his way into his audience’s or listener’s heads, which is where they each must find his or her own answer.

Yves Knockaert