“DARKENING LIGNE CLAIRE” is a collective and collection of ideas manifest in a succinct yet ambiguous work of multi-media art.
In March 2018 Archaeological Records commissioned Christophe Szpajdel to desing it’s logo.
The project “Darkening Ligne Claire” is born from this relationship.
This project took on a collective dimension with involvement of the musicians Andrew Liles (Current 93, Nurse With Wound) and Maniac (ex Mayhem), who turned the seven diptychs into a seven-disc album – each ideal soundtrack for one of the seven pairs of photos.
This approach transformed the exhibition, once off the walls, into a photographic album, and Archaeological Records has edited the union of the two in a work of art that bears the title of the same name, “Darkening Ligne Claire”: a wooden casing (the size of 38 cm x 38 cm x 7 cm) that contains the seven diptychs and the seven discs.
As written on the silk printed inlay, in the “Darkening Ligne Claire” box set: “We delved into Christophe Szpajdel’s photographic archive and we selected a series of images that could evoke notions of the DARKENING LIGNE CLAIRE. We chose and printed – in a 24 cm x 30 cm format – fourteen shots in order to build seven diptychs, and then we named the art, borrowing the titles from Christophe Szpajdel’s past creations: I – EMPEROR, II – ENTHRONED, III – FLAGELLUM DEI, IIII – SLAUGHTER MESSIAH, IIIII – SOULBURN, IIIIII – WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, IIIIIII – NOCTUARY.
This visual selection inspired Andrew Liles and Sven Fuzz Kristiansen to create music, to blur sound, to stretch and shrink time. Andrew Liles manifested the “Darkening Ligne Claire” concept by manipulating Maniac’s narration of the titles above; using only the sound of Maniac’s voice through various digital and analogue processes, seven tracks, each seven minutes long, were created.
Each track was then lathe cut on a single sided transparent vinyl 10” leaving the blank side of the disc on which to engrave the logo.
After the production of these seven “meta”-heavy metal tracks, Christophe Szpajdel drew a logo for the Liles/Maniac duo, “Darkening Ligne Claire“ was complete.
Five copies of the “DARKENING LIGNE CLAIRE” box have been produced. One for Christophe Spzpajdel: the Designer, one for Andrew Liles: the Composer, one for Sven Fuzz Kristiansen: the Singer, one for Archaeological Records: the Curator. One for sale.
