Antonin Artaud's shadow looms large over just about every art form you'd care to mention, and maybe even a few you'd have to make up. His Theatre of Cruelty influenced many of the underground performance troupes of the sixties, and reverberations from his small corpus of works inspired whole art movements. In 1947 Artaud was commissioned to record a piece for French radio which would become his final work. Scheduled for broadcast in early 1948, the recording was pulled at the last minute due to its scatological, vicious and obscene pronouncements. Today the recording is widely available on the internet and in various disposable formats.

In March of 2020 Dutch vocal improvisor Jaap Blonk recorded his own version of To Have Done with the Judgement of God, as an acknowledgement of Artaud's influence on his work. Blonk took a few liberties with his version, performing the work in an English translation and adding his own sounds and a bit of improvisation to the re-working. So, what does this re-creation sound like? Blonk's electronics add a bit of queasy unbalance to the oddly prescient text, and where the original sounds completely alien to someone who doesn't speak French, this new take is unveiled and completely clear. The improvisations that pop up are interesting in their own right, adding a modern sheen to a tarnished string of charms, as well as adding to the oddness of the endeavor. They seem to me completely in the spirit of Artaud, if a tad less demonstrative. If you have any interest in Artaud, this disc may aid in understanding his work. I urge you to seek out the original first, however, and remember that it was performed and recorded over 70 years ago. That it can still unsettle is a testament to the power of Artaud's madness.