Bryan Lewis Saunders with Razen and Classwar Karaoke Friends

Stream of Unconscious Volume 2

(Stand-Up Tragedy)
Visual and spoken-word artist Bryan Lewis Saunders, from Johnson City, Tenn., is known for his visceral, brutally frank and often disturbing outpourings, of which there seems to be an endless supply.  For example, 16 years ago, he began to create at least one unique self-portrait every single day—a routine he intends to keep until death, having made more than 8,000 of them so far.  He’s so good at it, one might say he could do it in his sleep.
Actually, he does create art in his sleep—he tape-records his dreams and sleep talking, coming up with bizarre stories.  It’s kind of like the “automatic writing” method of surrealists such as André Breton in the early 20th century, but instead of merely tapping into the subconscious, Saunders is on a different level by harnessing the unconscious.
Saunders’s latest audio work is an ambitious project entitled Stream of Unconscious (Narrative Mode); when completed, it will consist of twelve cassettes, each side of which serves as a separate chapter with a collaboration with a different avant-garde sound artist or group.  The second volume features “The Confessor” with the Belgian group Razen and “I Pickle All Enemies” with the experimental music collective Classwar Karaoke Friends.
Saunders’s stories are sometimes impenetrable ramblings, mentioning burgers with secret names or using odd lines like “Pigs are always hungry so juicify them.”  At other times, he manages to tell semi-comprehensible stories of impersonating lawyers or a “torture and pickling process.” Razen uses exotic instrumentation from faraway lands, such as the lute-like bouzouki, obscure wind instruments, a variety of percussion, and the santur, a type of hammered dulcimer.  Classwar Karaoke Friends takes a technologically minded approach, slicing and dicing and manipulating Saunders’s speech and providing electronic molestations and low, foreboding rumbles. If there’s one word to describe Saunders’s monologues, it would be “unsettling,” and the soundtracks complement the disorienting mood.  While Razen places the listener in foreign, unfamiliar lands, Classwar Karaoke Friends puts him in a state of uneasiness.
Ernie Paik