Henry Flynt
Marcus Boon
(Originally published in The Wire, 212.)
"Is it OK to talk about what we think about this civilization?" asks 61 year old hillbilly minimalist fiddler and philosopher Henry Flynt, in his broad southern accent, as we drink coffee in a restaurant in New York's Soho, where he lives. "It's the aftermath of a
wreck. It's just in a condition of destruction. I'm trying to think of a more polite word than putrefaction. Everything that is organic is dead and decomposing, and everything that's not organic is twisted and fused."
For forty years, to almost complete indifference, Flynt has waged his own multi-front struggle against this culture, a struggle which has encompassed everything from music, dance and painting, to "concept art", a term which he coined in 1961, a broad range of philosophical treatises on everything from mathematics, to psychedelics, to utopian politics, and even an envisioned 1975 commune called the Genius Liberation Project.
After decades of gathering dust, some of his key musical works are finally available. A 2 CD set New American Ethnic Music Volume 1, issued earlier this year by Baltimore musician and impresario John Berndt on his Recorded Records, collects two of the extraordinary drone and violin HESE (Hallucinogenic Ecstatic Sound Environment) pieces he developed with, Swedish composer, musician and mathematician, Catherine Christer Hennix in the late 1970s. Then there's the recent Ampersand release Graduation, a set of avant-country recordings from the late-1970s, in which he places country on an infinite plateau that constantly surprises, while remaining as American as a cross-country road trip. Awaiting release are unique overdubbed violin pieces from the 1960s, like "Hoedown", and recordings of his blazing cosmic rockabilly and freeform psychedelic guitar and drum collaborations with Hennix under the name Dharma Warriors, made in the years before Flynt quit making music in 1984.
Asked whether he's a recluse, Flynt responds: "not at all. In fact, how strange. I've been screaming for attention for 40 years. I have a long list of attempts to become a public figure. It just keeps failing over and over!"
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