Ira Cohen / majoon traveller cut up / 08:40 / 1965 - 2001  |
Ira Cohen reads from the Majoon Traveller cut up text created in Tangier around 1965 in collaboration with Mel Clay. This was a high voltage experiment carried out in Ira's house in Dar Baroud. Original recording by Loren Standlee was made in 1968 at the Universal Mutant Repertory Echo Chamber in downtown New York. Final assemblage by Tim Barnes at Quakebasket on Spring Street in January 2001 with an extra music track featuring the Kotche-Barnes Duo recorded by Jeremy Lemos. Ephemerality is Eternal. Born on February the 3rd, 1935, Ira Cohen is a world-travelling poet, photographer, filmmaker, shaman and self-described "literary hustler" who has been turning out work in all these fields for over twenty years. His mylar photos were printed in Life and Avant-Garde in the sixties. The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, his wildly psychedelic film odyssey, an underground classic. In 1961 he took a Yugoslavian freighter to Tangier where he lived for 4 years and published Gnaoua, a magazine devoted to exorcism introducing the work of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse and other members of the interzone mob. He also produced Jilala, a mythic recording of trance music by a sect of dervishes, which was recorded by Paul Bowles. Cohen writes poetry which reflects an incisive mind and cinematic eye, a surreal imagination, a relentless sense of humor and a religious obsession with eroticism and death. He lives and works in NYC. www.magic.be/Akashic/Ira.html www.theiracohenakashicproject.com |