This week’s release of Her Space Holiday‘s 10-track, self-titled album marks the end of the one-man musical project that Marc Bianchi started back in 1996. Fittingly, HSH’s final album is also the first on the Austin-based Bianchi’s No More Good Ideas label. While he has some live dates set to support the LP, the genre-defying musician mostly plans for the album to be the closing statement from HSH, who over the past decade and a half has also remixed tracks by the likes of R.E.M., Bright Eyes, Elastica and the Faint. Bianchi can now add MAGNET guest editor to his already-impressive resume, as that’s what he’ll be doing all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Bianchi: When I was in Barcelona a few years back, my friend put on the documentary In The Realms Of The Unreal. As she drifted off to sleep, I began inching closer and closer toward the screen. I was mesmerized by Henry Darger’s story. He had such a ferocious need to escape the bitterness of this world: creating painting after painting, writing page after page. Sometimes directly placing himself in the heroic battles between the Vivian Girls and the Glandelinians. Every piece a testament to the wisdom and naivety of a lost child trying to find his way in a grown up world.
What was so profound to me was that here was a man who created this incredibly large body of work, including a novel that’s said to be more than 15,000 pages long. Yet, he had no desire to share it with anyone. The work itself was his reward. It seemed to be his salvation and perhaps his penance for some weight he quietly carried around with him. It wasn’t until after his death that anyone realized what was going in that tiny apartment.
In The Realms Of The Unreal really made me question my own “artistic” motivations. Is the only true form of art that in which there is no audience in mind? Can it only be you, your materials and your God? I guess that is up to the individual to decide. But for me, Darger’s work and the question it poses in my mind still sends a shiver down my spine to this day.
Video after the jump.
