Combining the dynamic spoken word of Lydia Lunch and the dark humour and unnerving musicality of Joseph Keckler, Tales of Lust & Madness will bring two of New York’s most notorious performers together in Castlemaine next month for an intimate evening of provocative musical poetry.
Lydia Lunch’s fierce energy and rapid-fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature. Whether she’s attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, she remains passionate, confrontational and bold.
“We’ve all been victimised by someone or another, but we all need to strive beyond that victimisation and find the power within ourselves to go beyond, whatever your own personal trauma is,” Lunch told the Express.
“I guess I realised at a very early age, that even though I had personal trauma, the global trauma, the historical trauma is so much greater, so that gave me the power to first start speaking about trauma and the imbalance of power in a personal and then a political way.
“Of course, I’m coming to talk more about lusty revenge in Castlemaine….although that is kind of political.”
Lunch’s decades-long career is now the subject of a feature-length documentary Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over featuring at the Theatre Royal in March, followed by a Q&A with Lunch, who has released too many musical projects to tally, been on tour for decades, published dozens of articles andhalf a dozen books.
“(Director) Beth was able to squeeze a lot in. I mean how do you squeeze in 43 years, at the time, of creation in 70 minutes, but basically she focused on the philosophy of what I do,” Lunch said.
“She’s the only one I would’ve trusted to do this. I’ve worked with her before and I knew that she knows me very well and what my intentions are.”
A rabid collaborator, Lunch has famously worked with the likes of Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten and now with the incomparable Joseph Keckler, who is performing alongside Lunch for his first Australian tour.
Keckler is a singular artist who performs in a genre of his own design, which fuses operatic vocals and contemporary subject matter into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. He has been described by the New York Times as a “major vocal talent… with a range that shatters the boundaries… a trickster’s dark humour, and a formidable musical and literary erudition”.
He made his off-Broadway debut in Preludes in 2015, portraying the opera singer and longtime friend to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Feodor Chaliapin, and his first collection of writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published in 2018. In 2019 he premiered two works, Train With No Midnight at NYC’s Prototype Festival and Let Me Die (a “greatest hits of death scenes from classic opera” – The Wall Street Journal) with Opera Philadelphia, and toured the U.S. as the national support act for rock band Sleater-Kinney.
“Sometimes people assume I was a conservatory person who defected, which is a sort of romantic narrative, but that’s not really the case,” Keckler told the Express.
“I came up as a visual artist and was writing and starting to do performance and I also trained as a singer under the famous opera singer, George Shirley, who was the first black tenor at the Met, and a number of unsung bohemians, independently, so I was really encouraged to go into that world.
“I consider myself as a writer and a singer in an unbounded way and to be constantly re-configuring these elements in a way that feels intuitive but hopefully intentional,” he said.
“The operatic thing is a gesture, a pairing that I’m creating of this conversational narrative, that’s autobiographical and experienced and then the operatic element.”
Keckler said he and Lunch began doing shows together a couple of years ago and he related to, admired and was inspired by her refusal to be pigeon holed in any way.
“Lydia embraces multiplicity and that may be a musical, artistic, social, sexual multiplicity,” Keckler said.
“And Joseph shares the same things,” Lunch said.
“What’s interesting is we kind of make this bizarre balance, because well, he’s so charismatic, so charming and so smooth and comforting, and I make people, some people, uncomfortable. Although, some people take great comfort in the brutality of my poetry and what I’m trying to say for them.
“We both concentrate on the shadow parts of ourselves, just express them differently,” she said.
“He’s the valve and I’m the hammer.”
Tales of Lust & Madness will be performed live at the Theatre Royal on Sunday, March 17 at 3.30pm, followed by a screening of The War is Never Over (with Q&A). For tickets, visit: www.theatreroyalcastlemaine.com.au/music.
