Drawn to the art of marginal living, between his first spurts on the conga and bongo drums as a backup musician for Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Anger and Tiny Tim and his more elaborate experiments of the late sixties, where he constructed kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye and devised performances with the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti, for seven years the artist Charlemagne Palestine served as the carillonneur of the Episcopalian Saint Thomas Church in Midtown Manhattan. Taking a uniquely clangorous approach to the unwieldy instrument, which traces back to the Low Countries and consists of at least twenty-three bronze-cast bells which are struck with clappers attached to the wooden batons of an oversized keyboard, Palestine loved the view from the lofty heights of the Saint Thomas bell tower, at some remove yet with broad access to the whole of the city, and it was there that he began to cultivate his distinctive brand of drone music replete with its partial tones and dizzying repetitions, describing the movements of the carillon as like ‘playing the entire building’.
Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish parents, in his youth he trained as a cantor and listened to klezmer bands, the first flush of a lifelong predilection for tethering spiritual refrains to the trance-like states of his secularism. Living in Manhattan in the sixties, Palestine studied under the poet Jerome Rothenberg, who published the collection of spiritual writings Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, and the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, whose raga stylings and focus on the precise phrasing of notes would exert a profound influence on musicians like Terry Riley, Jon Hassell and Don Cherry. Palestine found himself at the confluence of the Downtown scene, inaugurated in the loft of a Chambers Street apartment by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, which soon surfeited its roots in sustained tones and minimalism, and the loft jazz scene which sprung up almost overnight as a spiritual continuation of the free jazz ethos which had been nourished by the likes of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. In the eighties he founded the Ethnology Cinema Project, which was dedicated to the documentation of disappearing traditional cultures from all over the world, and at documenta 8 he exhibited Godbear, a massive devotional sculpture of a three-headed teddy.
In early November, Charlemagne Palestine was the honoree of the sixth annual benefit gala by Blank Forms, the New York City-based nonprofit which focuses on the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, where he was joined onstage by the Irish musician Áine O’Dwyer. To accompany the festivities, for the first side of his latest record on Blank Forms the visionary artist and self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ hunkers down under the high ceilings of his home studio in Belgium, returning to the carillon for an ode to his ‘divinities’, the thousands of plush toys which he has amassed and often performed or exhibited alongside stretching back some six decades. The flip side of the album issues for the first time on vinyl the inaugural Blank Forms cassette, a cathartic street recording of the maximalist composer’s 2018 eulogy for Tony Conrad, the drone music and structural film pioneer and Palestine’s longtime friend, which he performed above the hubbub of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue on the venerable bells of Saint Thomas.
