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Caliban Sounds in association with One Little Independent Records are delighted to present a 180g heavy weight double vinyl, in a gatefold sleeve; Penny Rimbaud's 'Acts of Love' (1984) accompanied by Mikado Koko's 'Songs To Our Other Selves' (2022). It's presented with the 'Acts of Love' 32-page booklet and 'Songs To Our Other Selves' insert. The latter available on vinyl for the first time, these collector's items are limited to only 1000 copies.
In the mid-1960s, Penny Rimbaud started work on a series of Zen-like haikus which five years later were to become 'Acts of Love - Fifty Poems To My Other Self'. Inspired by Rimbaud's efforts, Gee Vaucher set about creating a series of artworks to illustrate the poems which were then presented in a 12" box of the kind sometimes used for record releases. The instructions inside suggested that you make your own music, a pre-DIY action, MYOM. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, UK.
Having in 1977 co-founded the anarchist band Crass, by 1984 Rimbaud felt he needed to explain both the political and personal roots of what increasingly was being seen by press and public alike as the band's "violent anger". However, in this respect Rimbaud had always concurred with Che Guevara who had stated that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love". What better, then, than to return to 'Acts of Love', to be presented this time as a 12" vinyl. Rimbaud would compose the music to feature Eve Libertine on vocals and Paul Ellis on keyboards. Meanwhile, Vaucher set about creating a new set of illustrations to accompany the poems.
Launched in 1985, Paul Du Noyer, then with the NME, wrote that 'Acts of Love' is "hauntingly beautiful in places, the style and vocals bear out Rimbaud's reverence for early English church music". Meanwhile, writing for the Sunday Telegraph, Peter Clayton stated "A high female voice combining choirboy purity with adult knowingness; the music, mostly from synthesisers cleverly used, beautiful in a somewhat ecclesiastical way. A painstaking creation of a different kind of music, which is, in part, sublimely beautiful"'. Fait accompli, anger turned of love.
In 2021, avant-garde musician and artist, Mikado Koko, being a keen admirer of Libertine's vocals, and having a great fondness for 'Acts of Love', contacted Rimbaud with the idea of creating cut-ups of twenty tracks from the album to create a sister release entitled 'Songs To Our Other Selves'. Mikado had featured on the Crass Remix project, 'Normal Never Was', with her radical remix of Libertine's rendition of Rimbaud's 'Reality Asylum'. When finally he heard the result, he was overjoyed and the album was released in 2022 on Caliban Sounds. Sean Worrall wrote in The Organ, "Mikado Koko has taken Penny Rimbaud's album 'Acts of Love', originally a fifty track album of short poems on love, and cut it up, deconstructed it, reconstructed it, pulled it apart and put it all back together (a lot more than just remixed it) to make a twenty track album of her own. 'Songs To Our Other Selves' is an entirely new album, that we're told that, and rightly so, we should view as a continuation of the original. What we have here are bites, stabs, thrusts of Crass-like noise, art, the art of noise. It is hard-boiled, it is challenging, it might be madness or maybe maddening, the whole thing is glorious actually. Those bites of words, the cut and paste deconstruction, the thrust, words caught, the art of collage, the real art of glorious noise, painting with sound".
The decision to release the two albums together demonstrates the mutual respect that Rimbaud and Mikado hold for each other.
Track listing
'Acts Of Love'
'Songs To Our Other Selves'
