Michel Henritzi – Flowers of romance

Listening to Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” I get a sudden striking flash of Michel Henritzi at work. To me Michel is first and foremost a working man, be it in Dustbreeders the Metz originating so called “noise” outfit, or in his collabs with a wide and varied range of Japanese comrades such as Tetuzi Akiyama, Fukuoka Rinji and of course Junko, always retaining his name as the anchor point of a free man.

Freed from the salaried workers yoke, the worker can claim his own name, Michel Henritzi, and paint the world and its ugly oppressive separation morphing into the future of an indescribable liberation. It takes time to do so and the work unravels here over 2 full sides recorded in a live situation. Against the “abat faim” (Guy Debord in “the Encyclopedia of Nuisances”) of canned music the work of Michel Henritzi creates a lived in situation that, in praxis, embodies the grinding destruction of exploitation and the struggle against it.

Michel Henritzi works as Penelope hunched over his tool, a lapsteel, protected by his workers cap which is also a military attribute. When the work is done is it now made possible to be done again, always different, unlike mass produced commodities it is the work of a sole man working within the frame of a disjointed society, trying to weave it back together.

This evolving repetition against decay reminds me in turn of “MMMM (My Metal Machine Music)” the work of another Japan enthusiast, Magic Aum Gigi, French member of Acid Mother’s Temple. Perhaps also because of both works’ inscription in the history of rebel music by their title’s reference to previous masterpieces by Lou Reed and, here, Public Image Limited, instilling their irrepressible venom in your contemporary listening experience. An intertextual dialogue is established.

But Michel Henritzi is also a writer, he is also a label owner (publishing Keiji Haino’s “C’est parfait” endoctriné tu tombes la tête la première, etc) and he is also non exhaustively described: A worker, a scholar, etc. In “Aesthetics of resistance” Peter Weiss describes artistic research in action and how it is possible (and crucial to a revolutionary mind) to revisit the great works of humanity in view of the oppression that produced them. It is my fantasy and honor to present Michel Henritzi’s work, “Flowers of romance”, as part of this rich tapestry of class struggle.

Michel Henritzi – Flowers of romance