Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim Whatley rebuttoning his shirt has someone enjoyed such an intimate relationship with their dentist as the one Marianna Maruyama relates here, as the writer and artist who presently resides in The Hague joins forces with the producer Hessel Veldman, whose primary role in the Dutch home-taping network of the eighties was explored a few years ago by Stroom on the compilation album Eigen Boezem.
With a penchant for collaboration Maruyama – whose work spans performance art, sound and sculpture as well as writing – moved twelve years ago to the Netherlands from Japan, but it is her time in Tokyo that she dwells on during the course of ‘Viktorija’ after first poring over the layout and character of a dentist’s office, which reminds her of a diagram of the mouth while its central treatment room shares a floor plan with a nearby gynaecologist’s office, at least according to the observations of a friend.
‘No one wants to think about dentistry as being a practice of touch’ she laments, adding that ‘in the name of professionalism all aspects of the sensuous are denied’. Yet to her recollection a visit to her dentist’s office could be an intimate and restorative and perhaps even a loving occasion, as in dialogue with her friend through phone, text and the medium of poetry Maruyama recalls:
We share stories of my sensitive dentist. About how I came to him emotionally emptied and untouched, starved for touch, in great need of tenderness, and how he put his hands in my mouth for a long time and helped me as a stranger. He eased my pain and caused some too.
She proceeds to list the various jobs which she once passed through in Tokyo, from general book handling to lipstick testing and serving as an English teacher or tour guide, then wine tasting and landscape painting or accompanying people to restaurants, karaoke and onsen, including within the confines of the list the no doubt onerous role of daughter-in-law before she strikes upon what seems like the most affective of all these roles, as she remembers providing the female voice for an automated water cooler. All the while on ‘Viktorija’ the production of Hessel Veldman whips like a vague and unsolicited wind or maybe even with the muted clamour of a dental suction device, on a track which gestures towards sensuousness without gleeking as Maruyama speaks sedately with barely a trace of saliva.
‘Viktorija’ is the second track from Salt, a collaboration between Maruyama and Veldman on the Belgian label Stroom which resolutely succeeds in everything off-kilter, from the gamelan chimes and fourth world reeds of Anton Friisgaard to the pensive Michelangelo Antonioni-inspired dreamscapes of Pablo’s Eye to the window gazers and garden wanderers of wist or the crackling and diaristic missives of Noa Kurzweil and Levi Lanser as Voice Actor.
The project foregrounds Maruyama’s softspoken word, which has the lulling yet sterile quality of a medicinal artificial intelligence. The clearest comparison might be to Julianne Moore’s housewife in Todd Haynes’s cult psychological drama Safe, who beset by breathing difficulties and a general sense of malaise explains early in the film before her symptoms worsen ‘Basically, there’s nothing really to worry about aside from being a little run down’.
Yet as Maruyama plays it straight over Veldman’s furtive and sometimes menacing soundscapes, her voice and its details also evoke the self-help astrologies of Cassandra Jenkins and some of the best spoken word albums of recent years, like the staggered reveries and pinched memories of To Call Out Into The Night which the Liverpudlian artist Roy Claire Potter recited over sustained pulses and waifish melodies as Park Jiha adapted traditional Korean instrumentation on the yanggeum, saenghwang and piri or Fiction of the Physical which compiled some of the key seventies and eighties works of the pioneering ‘human loop’ practitioner Ellen Zweig.
The effect on Salt is not necessarily to be drawn into the minutiae of Maruyama’s life even as her subject matter revolves around incidental events and ephemera, nor do we emerge with some sense of inner resolve much less spiritual enlightenment. Instead as Salt with its low tones and brackish water or seascapes both encourages and entails a commitment to deep listening, we gain a heightened awareness of the given moment even as Maruyama elides the possibility of the next few seconds through the pangs and labours of more distant pasts.
Hessel Veldman – who played guitars and synthesizers as part of the eighties improvisational group Gorgonzola Legs and worked intensively with other artists like the Fluxus practitioner and Dutch underground figure Willem de Ridder – released all sorts of music especially via his private cassette label Exart, from sound poetry, field recordings and radio plays to drone and dark ambient music, trance and improvisational jazz, new wave and avant-pop, synthetic funk and psychedelia. Most closely he is associated with a kind of freeform industrial music with mottled undercurrents.
Here on Salt his barely-there productions which lurch out of the dark like the sub-bass sirens of a nuclear facility or rickety vessels out at sea perfectly accompany Maruyama’s intuitions, where every presence is suffused with a ghostly or spectral absence and apparent mundanities are rendered with a kind of plaster cast voluptuousness, sometimes skirting the surreal.
Her words read like palimpsests as a tactile and tranquil quality redolent of passages from the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of Ulysses (where James Joyce for instance renders the advantages of shaving by night as ‘A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin’) spreads out against a sonic backdrop which might be equally at home in a horror film. Yet the effect is meditative and introspective rather than theatrical or harrowing, as the four episodes of Salt with a brief introduction by way of ‘Softly, at first’ steadily work to draw the listener in. Setting the scene for their album, Maruyama says:
When it travels, the voice is a double agent, a trickster, or a dubious guru, but when it pauses for a recording, it’s historical, capturing a mood or an emotion for all time. I didn’t expect that I would hardly recognise the people who made Salt – myself and Hessel Veldman – a year and a half after recording it, but this is where I find myself now.
Salt embodies this splintering of the self, where five years might amount to nothing and pass by in the blink of a moment but one’s voice and something essential about their character might leave the house for a coffee or in this case for a dentist’s appointment and return never to be quite the same again.
After the throbbing and bobbing ‘Feeling Four’ – the closest Salt comes to an existential crisis as Maruyama ponders a sailboat in the harbour and wonders ‘How will it be to say we will live here and our lives will take place in these rooms, and every day we will climb these stairs, and lock and unlock these doors, and look out these windows and close these curtains on those nights, and watch the sky from that angle, and wash our bodies in that room’, summarising the album as well as anything when she repeats the line ‘this boat feels like a cork in the sea’ – on ‘Are You Satisfied’ she repeats a kind of mantra:
Walk, slow down, give solitude, stay in one place, listen. Always be ready to start over and at the same time don’t give up too quickly. Shyness is just another way of protecting your pride.
as the recognition of shyness gives way to a choppy drone. And on the album closer ‘Not Knowing’ over a few starry-eyed keys she continues to flirt deliberately and suggestively with the humdrum, despite the talk of cocaine use in bathroom stalls and the juxtaposition of Las Vegas with the vagus nerve, offering a few extra-terrestrial observances and settling in the fidgety nook between going out and finding love or ceding agency and simply letting love find.
There is a sense of irony too as she describes some interloper who might mimic our own response to Salt should we scan the album seeking beauty or narrative only to find both short at hand, repeating a line from ‘Viktorija’ and affirming that ‘When I let him read my poems he said they were more like thoughts. I think they can be both’. As the synths continue to sparkle ‘Not Knowing’ scarcely drifts, with Maruyama content to merely linger, at once in stasis and completely untethered as she says ‘It took me a lot to get here’ and celebrates tacitly the fact of having arrived.
