In the era of digital circulation, accessing music has become more inclusive and at the same time more exclusive than ever before. On one hand, almost total availability at the touch of a button has tended to result in devaluating music as a product; on the other hand it has led to a steep increase in demand for the »special product« and the value of owning it. Individual labels react to this situation by trying to mutate into players on the online market, with all the corresponding difficulties. Others seize the opportunity, after years of repression by the music industry’s laws, to finally take into their own hands distribution and contact with their customers. Still others have decided to extremely limit their releases in the fashion of art editions, or to give them a special design. Whether this shortage aspect, along with the increasingly short-term margins of availability and increasingly selective points of sale can really contribute to a more widespread appreciation of music remains to be seen. Undeniably, the practice of labels like Editions Mego¹ and numerous comparable businesses will for many years be caught between the poles of what is for the most part arbitrary consumption at a relatively low threshold, and an increasingly exclusive hobby, a downright existential duty to acquire certain types of music.

Jean-Pierre Turmel, who owns the label Sordide Sentimental,² has been pursuing the route of the artistic, intellectual edition of music (and other related products) for 30 years now. Founded in 1978 with Yves von Bontee in the French city of Rouen, this exquisite business made a name for itself early on with elaborately designed singles by groups like Throbbing Gristle or Joy Division. The publications in A4 format, made up of paintings, collages, essays and more, have long been available on the Internet, along with the music of course. At the same time, the original editions, limited to 1,560, are being sold today for 1,000 euros and more. For Turmel, it was important from the start to operate Sordide as a »non-profit-oriented organization for the development of unconventional music,«³ in order to allow for the utmost transparency concerning its involvement in market and commercial processes.

With his romantic philosophical essays, such as »Education Sentimental« (on Throbbing Gristle) or »Light and Blindness« (on Joy Division), Turmel tried to convey this transparency not via a prosaic authenticity discourse or revealing plain language, but rather quite the opposite: the essays’ subjective, speculative approach repeatedly falls back on explicitly mystical components in an effort to do justice to the ritual and self-divesting dimension of a kind of music that is first and foremost absorbed from its ecstatic side.⁴ At the time, Turmel’s conceptualizations were often dismissed as »hard to understand« or »pretentious silliness from France,«⁵ but today they sound as if someone were trying for one last time to evoke the grand transcendental moment of the music, the »breakthrough to the other side« that forever turns familiar relations upside down. Especially the inevitably mundane, all reterritorialization or profane digitization, as we would call it today.

Apart from singles presented in a theory-laden manner – pieces that are much sought-after today, by Tuxedomoon, Monte Cazazza or the Bizarros – Sordide has increasingly diversified its offerings, for instance in the direction of fanzines (»Isolation Intellectuelle,« also with a musical supplement), until, one after another, the new media CD, CD-ROM und finally DVDs were added. Throbbing Gristle’s successor group, Psychic TV, has a sort of honorary position in the product line: the program ranges from the opulently made single »Roman P.« (1984), which includes an essay in which Turmel describes the difference between the subliminal and the sublime, to live concert recordings and videos from the 1980s, to Genesis P. Orridge’s (under the name Thee Majesty) analysis of the fetishes of photo artist Pierre Molinier. The label also distinguishes itself by processing rare historic moments, for instance a 1978 The Red Krayola concert in Paris that shows the group as a duo at the awkward moment between late psychedelic and early post-punk.

Sordide Sentimental’s releases may still be intentionally limited – hardly more than three products are released per year, and between 1996 and 2002 there was a longer period of silence. At the same time, this distinguishes and increases, at least ex negativo, the value of the individual pieces, helping them to stand out from the mainstream of wide Internet availability. Mean and dirty (»sordide«), even if this is clearly an understatement, against the »stealthy standardization and asepsis of the masses.«⁶

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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