Philippe Cohen Solal and Mike Lindsay have worked together to create a phenomenal concept album – OUTSIDER – a musical and visual extrapolation of Henry Darger’s work, his obsession with the weather, his tormented Christian faith, deceptively naive paintings and lyrics to songs, that were never before set to music. The record has been 5 years in the making and is the brainchild of Philippe Cohen Solal, the million-selling artist, producer and composer who co-founded Gotan Project. Solal has been given exclusive, unprecedented access to Henry Darger’s estate comprising lyrics, poems and visual art and has brought together an epic collaboration with Mike Lindsay from acid folk group Tunng, Hannah Peel and the vocals of Adam Glover. The record is available here.
The album Outsider is inspired by Henry Darger, can you talk about your first experiences and interactions with Darger’s art and what it was that particularly drew you to his work? Were there any works in particular that you found inspiring?
I discovered Henry Darger’s work in 2003 at the New York Folk Art Museum but it was in 2006, after leaving the first Darger exhibition in Paris, the desire was born to make a musical project inspired by his work. His universe, seemingly naive but also sometimes strange or violent, brings together “art brut” and epic literature. This self-taught artist created out of necessity and not to be loved or recognised. He is often seen today as a 20th century Van Gogh.
For the record you had unprecedented access to his estate – what was that experience like and how hard has it been to differentiate, if at all, between your work and his?
By incredible chance, it was the day after my visit to the New York Folk Art that I met Kiyoko Lerner, Darger’s landlord and the owner of his work, in Chicago. A great friendship and mutual trust was born from this, which allowed me to develop this project and to have access to the works and the unpublished lyrics written by Darger, never before put to music. The biggest challenge was to try to musically recreate what one could feel by watching his works. To take artistic liberties without betraying Darger.
How did you start the process for the record of translating his work into music, particularly given the volume of his work? What was the initial impetus behind the project?
With my friend Mike Lindsay, we shared some lyrics written by Darger over 50 years ago and we each composed the music. Then we met in his studio in London to record and produce the songs together. Hannah Peel, an amazing musician, who had their studio next door came to play a few instruments (trombone, piano, etc…), did the string and brass arrangements and all of the female vocals that you hear on the album. Lastly, the singer Adam Glover beautifully embodied Darger’s lyrics, just as Hannah’s voice became that of the Vivian Girls, the famous heroines of his saga, “The Realms of the Unreal”, which was more than 15,000 pages long.
The record has been five years in the making, how are you feeling about the release after so much build up? What has the overall process been like now you can reflect on it?
It’s like the completion of a long exploration journey in a fantasy world, populated by brave children, cruel adults and hybrid creatures. A sort of unknown “Lord of the Rings”… Anyway, Tolkien and Darger were both born in 1892 and died in 1973. For OUTSIDER, it took us a year to record this album between London and LA, but 5 years to find a way to visually accompany it and above all to poetically tell the story of this man and his work. It’s a project that combines music, visual art and storytelling.
Can you talk about ‘Bring Them In’ and the process of translating Darger’s watercolour panoramas to this extraordinary music and video?
“Bring them in” is entirely made in animations by Gabriel Jacquel, a talented director-animator from the north of France. The inspiration comes directly from a diptych painted by Darger, but everything has been recreated in a fairly traditional way, just as Disney or Miyazaki did – but with much less budget. Most importantly, Gabriel had to “unlearn” how to draw to get closer to Darger’s style, who was not a great drawer, but above all a brilliant colourist.
Darger obviously worked over 50 years ago, but his work seems so relevant to now, how much did that idea strike you in creating this record?
Darger was a pioneer in the art of visual and literary sampling. To create his works he “sampled” the images that he had cut out of magazines and fashion catalogues. Similarly for his lyrics, he took church hymns to adapt them to his story. “The Realms of the Unreal” speaks about a huge war between the world of children and that of adults, and the struggle between innocence and cynicism. I sometimes see us as those naïve children whom the autocrats shamelessly try to dominate with power and money. But what strikes me the most is that today, through social media, we show the smallest details of our lives to the whole world, while this man spent his whole life in a tiny room to create immense work, without ever showing it to anyone. Art for art.
